Why music is sometimes good but also sometimes bad.

Sorry for the stupid title, couldn't think of anything better.

People who know me well will know that I have odd tastes in music. Here are the things that I will openly admit to liking at the moment:

• Dan Le Sac Vs. Scroobius Pip
  
• Tom Rosenthal
  
• Metallica (Specifically, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Dunun Dunun Daa!)
  
• Josh Woodward
  
• Newton Faulkner
  

This is just to name a few. However, there are other things that I will usually pretend not to like but secretly enjoy (incidentally, these are also the bands that certain people would hit me for liking):

• James Blunt (Shut up)
  
• Linkin Park ('s why I still wear that really old t-shirt)
  
• The Flaming Lips
  
• The Darkness (What the fuck.)
  
• Jamie T
  

Now, if you still have enough respect for me to read the rest of this post, I am going to explain why I like these artists. The reason is not because they are shoved down my throat repeatedly, or have been in the past, but because they represent variety and individuality – each one of these artists has or had something about them that was different. In some cases different enough to have whole groups of people build a sense of identity around them. Perhaps this is not the case with James Blunt, who I like because he drove a tank (Vroom) and because he plays piano music and sings with a silly high voice, but it is more obvious with Linkin Park and the Flaming Lips, both of which were the pretty much definitive of their respective genres. A really extreme example of this is Metallica in the first list, who for a long time pretty much defined metal – their pervasion into teenage culture is incredible; there are still people who wear outfits with "Metallica" plastered on their outfits, many of whom don't even know the music at all!

This also explains why there are so many artists that I really hate. There's no definitive R&B artist, for example, just lots of indistinguishable ones, all of whom are marketed excessively and thrown at us from all angles, leaving extreme bouts of nausea and disorientation (in my case, at least). I really hate that song called "Soldier Boy", because it embodies repetition. The hook of the song is "BOOO dabawabadie" (There are probably words there that I cannot hear), and this hook is repeated hundreds of times so as to become irreversibly embedded in the memory of the listener, luring them in past the point of no return! On the plus side, it's a great money maker for the record companies, who, lets face it, have so much of their music stolen that they are positively impoverished!