In my opinion, there is no such thing as bad music. Something I’ve noticed throughout my life is people love to get on each other’s nerves, myself included. One form to get on someone’s nerves is to question their taste in music. What is music in its most basic form? Let us ask google, google knows everything. According to google, the definition of music is “vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.” Let us dissect this definition friends. Let’s analyze the important bits. What stuck out to me was “to produce beauty of form” along with the “expression of emotion.” What I love about these two bits of the definition is that THEY ARE OPEN TO INTERPRETATION. If there is one point, I want to get across in this article is that MUSIC IS OPEN TO INTERPRETATION.
Okay, now I’m done being passive aggressive, and will now explain my opinion. I grew up thinking I liked the Beatles. Everyone else in my family loved the Beatles, and me being the youngest and the most impressionable, “liked” the Beatles as well. Want to hear a secret? I don’t like The Beatles. I don’t personally identify with their music. Do I think they make bad music? No, of course not, they made music that people still identify with today which is great. Since music is an expression of emotion, who’s to say whose emotions are wrong and bad? People make music based of life experiences that help shape who they are as a person. As people, we can’t say that that music is bad because you don’t feel the same way.
Another example, as an adolescent I thought Marilyn Manson was just a freak of nature, as terrible as that sounds. That he wasn’t even worth looking into, solely due to the way he looks, and shame on me for doing that. I didn’t even bother listening to his music because he just looked so damn crazy. Want to hear a secret? I’ve just been listening to him for the past two weeks, and I love the man now. Do I personally relate my life experiences to his? To a limited degree. But what I love more about the man is how he knows he looks crazy, and he rocks it.
The point I’m trying to make now is that we don’t listen to people that make us uncomfortable. Humans don’t want to step out of their comfort zone, I’ve been guilty of that for a very long time, but now that I’m listening to artists I never thought I would listen to, I feel like my perspective is widening and I love it. In conclusion, music is a form of creative expression, and there is no logical way in my opinion to say “hey your life experiences are wrong and I don’t like you for it.” I feel like that’s very narrow minded. Just because you can’t identify with the music, doesn’t mean it is bad music because bad music doesn’t exist in my opinion.
