The importance of the music you hate

Someone once asked how it all started for me. "What was that one song that made you want to be a musician?" or "Why is it that all you ever seem to talk about is music?" OK, to be fair, 'someone' is a little less accurate than 'just about everyone who knows me.' \nI blame my dad. Growing up I remember listening to the radio on road trips with the standard issue (for anyone my age, these albums were required to be played by parents while in the car for any time exceeding an hour): CSN&Y, Eagles and Chicago, all compilations, and the ultimate, "The Big Chill" soundtrack. Occasionally Paul Simon, Antonio Vivaldi (he may be formulaic, but the red priest still rocks!) or the Four Tops would slip into the line-up. Not a bad start, even as obvious as these choices seem, but they weren't what made me love music. It would take something much more powerful than that.\nThe music I love seems to come directly from listening to the radio in the early '90s and hating just about every second of it. At about 11 years old I was struggling to find music to love. For most adults that doesn't mean much, but for someone that age, it's a cry for help to say "the radio sucks!" \nThe whole "grunge/alternative" movement of the '90s was so transparent that any 13- year-old should've been able to see through it. This one in particular reveled in saying "you're all fake…except the ones who are willing to admit it!" to the flannel covered, pseudo-depressed suburbanite mannequins that filled my junior high and high school. There may have been some good bands here and there, but as soon as any term for a musical style becomes a term used to describe a fashion, you know you're in trouble. Anyway, the best "alternative" music had been made in the '80s, when it really was the alternative. The '90s was merely the corporate version of that.\nRight before starting high school I developed a deep respect for Stevie Ray Vaughan, realizing that the music of the past, Texas shuffle blues in this case, was only dead to those who chose not to hear it evolve. A year or two later I had gotten a job washing dishes at the busiest restaurant in town. It wasn't until I bought an Elvin Bishop album that I realized the connection. If a crappy job was good enough inspiration for Elvin to play the blues then why not me? From there, I found a number of other great, overlooked blues bands that added sophistication and flavor to the music. And to think, I probably would've missed out on Luther Allison or Paul Butterfield because it was in style to feel hopeless. \nAs the '90s progressed, a bad situation got worse. Good rock music was hardly accessible anymore. At least R.E.M. had the decency to make Automatic for the People in the midst of the Nirvana craze. The latter half of the decade was so blatantly inoffensive and afraid of risks that I almost wanted to hear the Gin Blossoms and Soul Asylum on the radio again. The best bands weren't really good ones anymore, but merely those willing to be innovative.\nExperimenting with drugs seemed expensive and lacked creativity, so I experimented with music. I figured that since I loved blues, I should at least try the white version of it. So I found out that Earnest Tubb and Johnny Cash and country were cool after all, even if I was secretly waiting for Shania Twain to experience a Milli Vanilli type incident. I wondered what the opposite of whining about nothing into a microphone would sound like and came across John Coltrane and other great jazz artists. A friend told me country music was stupid because it was just a bunch of songs about your truck or your dog or your woman dying, so I took it as a challenge and came across Steve Earle. Madonna thought it was a good idea that she re-hash the story of Buddy Holly's death, so I bought more Marshall Crenshaw to update his music.\nFor me to find the good music, I had to wade through the murk of talentless nihilism that dominated the early '90s. But if I hadn't hated so much of what was out there, I never would've thought to look in all those odd places to find so much of what I like today. So, I guess it's true that you can't like everything. If you find the right artist, style doesn't matter. If you dismiss something because of the label, you're listening to music for the wrong reasons anyway. I think Duke Ellington pretty much hit it on the head saying, "There are only two kinds of music: good and bad"