Unpopular Musical Preferences and Opinions

[ewok20t3]

I stole the basis of this topic from another website I visit, but I thought it made for an interesting thread. What are some unpopular musical preferences and opinions you have?

Here's some of mine:

-I think hardcore is the most passionate art-form there is. It doesn't require the most skill or the best lyricist or the greatest singer, but it does require all out passion if it's done right.
-My favorite Coldplay album is X&Y. I'm a sucker for ambient guitar tones.
-I don't think Breaking Benjamin are THAT bad.
-I get really annoyed with the minutes of silence that come before the "Hidden Track". (I wouldn't think this would be an unpopular opinion, but it must be because the silence still pops up on many new albums.)
-I wish musical genre's were even more specific. I have OCD and I need categorization.

...more to come later, I'm sure.

[bloop]

Gee, I don't know.  I'm sure there are people here who could tell me.  Eh, I'll try.

Adore is the best Smashing Pumpkins album; Zeitgeist is their worst (ok, that last one is actually a pretty popular opinion).
"Pretentious" is a word weak critics use to describe often very real ambition.

-I don't think Breaking Benjamin are THAT bad.

This is a pretty good one.  They are, perhaps, unfairly lumped in with radio-ready butt-rockers.  I had to listen to a couple things to figure out who they are, and I realized that I don't instantly switch my radio to something cool when they come on.

[ewok20t3]

Adore is the best Smashing Pumpkins album.

That's definitely an unpopular one. I love that album, "Crestfallen" is the most underrated Pumpkins song they ever recorded, if you ask me. I don't think I could say it's my favorite album by them, though. I'd have to go back and listen to all their albums again before I could chose a favorite.

[bloop]

Siamese Dream is generally the go-to choice.  It's a classic, sure, and I love it to death, but it's a relatively immature effort.  "Life's a bummer when you're a hummer".  OK, man.

[murlough23]

-I think hardcore is the most passionate art-form there is. It doesn't require the most skill or the best lyricist or the greatest singer, but it does require all out passion if it's done right.

I don't know that there's a singular consensus on what genre of music the general public finds most passionate, or whether they care about passion in the first place. Basically, this is just one of those subjective things that informs genre preferences. I'm sure Josh could dig up some incredibly sparse folk music recorded on a four-track in someone's backwoods cabin in Mississippi that he finds passionate precisely because of its sparseness, which is just about the antithesis of the music you find passionate. Me, I find it passionate when people go all manic with the percussion. I think everybody's opinion on this is probably an unpopular one.

-My favorite Coldplay album is X&Y. I'm a sucker for ambient guitar tones.

OK, you win the unpopular opinion award there.

-I get really annoyed with the minutes of silence that come before the "Hidden Track". (I wouldn't think this would be an unpopular opinion, but it must be because the silence still pops up on many new albums.)

I agree with this. I don't know why artists still do this in the day and age of mp3s and iTunes. There's no real benefit to hiding stuff that away any more - people can see the unusual track length before they even start the song, so the fact that there's an extra song tucked away at the end generally isn't much of a surprise. Also, what often ends up here is an outtake or some other sort of goofing around, rather than a solid song worthy of the album that the artist simply chose to leave unlabeled. So it's something that's worth hearing once, and then every other time, you'll most likely skip it. (Nowadays the convention when it's a valid song in its own right is usually to put it as its own separate, unlabeled track. There might be a few extra seconds of silence separating the album proper from the bonus track or epilogue, but it usually doesn't go on for minutes.)

Hidden tracks annoy me even more now that I have an iPod. If a song with a hidden track after several minutes of silence comes up on shuffle when I'm driving, I either have to wait out the silence or fiddle with the iPod at a stop light to skip to the next track once the song proper has ended (which then doesn't up the play count, which bugs my OCD side). I've actually started tagging songs with hidden tracks so that iPod recognizes the end of the actual song as a stopping point (you can give it a value in mm:ss to start or stop at). If I care enough about the hidden song, I'll actually use a WAV editor to create two separate tracks from one, and tag them properly. Unfortunately this requires the renaming of all files after the song that gets split, in the case of two songs on one track earlier in the album (see Viva la Vida), so this can sometimes take a lot of effort.

I've also done the reverse: Concatenating two tracks into one when they are actually a continuous piece of music on the CD (Relient K's latest does this many times). I can understand isolating an intro as a separate track so that someone can cut to the chase, as it were, but making an outro a separate track when the song proper would end abruptly without it makes no sense to me. Are we that impatient? It just makes things jarring on shuffle.

To summarize: Individual songs should be isolated on individual tracks. The rules may become more arbitrary when songs fall well outside the typical compositional rules in terms of their length and relation to surrounding pieces of music (see Dream Theater's "Six Degrees" suite, which is actually quite nicely divided into 8 sections that can sort of stand alone), but if you're making 3 or 4-minute pop/rock songs, then please don't screw with me by making the track listing all messy.

-I wish musical genre's were even more specific. I have OCD and I need categorization.

I hear ya. I still don't know how to tag Bjork, or the latest Derek Webb. No matter what I tag an album, it's not descriptive of the entire album, but tagging individual songs differently is way too much work. Having a unique genre that only applies to one artist or album in my collection seems ludicrous, so I often fall back on generic descriptors such as "Indie Rock" or "Experimental", but that only serves to confuse iTunes when I mess around with the genius mode. Hate to break it to you, Apple, but Grizzly Bear doesn't sound a thing like The New Pornographers.

Some of my own unpopular preferences:

I like it when bands get all lively with Celtic/bluegrass/folksy type instrumentation. Banjos, fiddles, whistles, etc. The mainstream seems to frown upon such instrumentation, as if it's only for backwoods hicks or something.

I'm a sucker for the combination of electronic programming and energetic rock music. Combine live drums and programmed drums in the right way, and I go nuts. To a lot of folks (or at least a lot of music junkies), programmed = overproduced.

Partially due to the above, I think Pop is U2's best album.

I listen to a fair number of Top 40-type acts like Matchbox Twenty (which are unpopular with the music critic crowd), but actually pay attention to the lyrics (a practice which seems to be unpopular with the general public), and champion the ones who I think write good songs, regardless of how middle-of-the-road their chosen genre may be.

I have an obnoxious habit of expecting albums to "flow" with a certain "momentum". A sudden transition from fast to slow too early in an album can be a mood-killer for me. I'm more lenient with albums that present themselves as slow-burners from the get-go, though I don't tend to play those as often.

Unorthodox time signatures drive me wild. In a good way.

[murlough23]

"Pretentious" is a word weak critics use to describe often very real ambition.

+1

I try to only use this word when I feel like something grandiose is being aimed for that isn't being achieved (especially when it comes to lyrical attempts to sum things up very broadly and write an anthem for all of mankind. Really. Just write your own experiences/imagination and leave the LCD to the middle-of-the-roaders). Simply having ambitions is not a bad thing in and of itself.

[bloop]

I do not care for genre tagging at all.  I mean, I don't even get why I need it.  If it was automatically added to the tags, I don't bother to change it even if I know it to be wrong.  If it's not there, even better.

I like messing with people as much as I like sharing my music with someone else who genuinely enjoys it.

[murlough23]

I do not care for genre tagging at all.  I mean, I don't even get why I need it.  If it was automatically added to the tags, I don't bother to change it even if I know it to be wrong.  If it's not there, even better.

I have my iTunes library at work shared with co-workers on the network, and at home, my wife can access it. It's helpful for them to get some sort of idea what something is if they're gonna get curious. Usually they don't, but you never know.

One thing I won't do is tag Christian music specifically as Christian, since I find the boundary for that to be quite nebulous. If a group specifically set out to make a worship album, I might tag it as such, but otherwise, it gets tagged by its actual musical genre. It drives me up the wall when I put a hard rock CD or whatever by a Christian band into the computer and it comes up tagged as "Gospel".

I like messing with people as much as I like sharing my music with someone else who genuinely enjoys it.

This explains a lot of your Pub uploads over the years.

[NinjaRob17]

I like it when bands get all lively with Celtic/bluegrass/folksy type instrumentation. Banjos, fiddles, whistles, etc. The mainstream seems to frown upon such instrumentation, as if it's only for backwoods hicks or something.

I love it when bands do this, too. Actually, I just like those instruments in general.

[bloop]

Yeah, but I am really disappointed when I recommend something to someone, thinking they'll really dig it, and it bombs with them.  If I think something will be challenging, or is an acquired taste I'll admit as much.  I don't rickroll with noise (Rick Astley, though, is another story).

[murlough23]

I love it when bands do this, too. Actually, I just like those instruments in general.

The downside to this is that I can get annoyed when bands have those instruments but keep 'em in the background (see Casting Crowns and some of David Crowder's earlier material), or when they never do anything lively with 'em. Though I can name some wonderfully lovely folk albums that explore the softer side of these instruments (The River Empires comes to mind, as sprawling and bizarre as their album is), but for the most part, why have a fiddle if you're never gonna tear it up?

[bloop]

Opeth is fantastic music for sleeping.  A lot of metal is for me.

[murlough23]

Yeah, but I am really disappointed when I recommend something to someone, thinking they'll really dig it, and it bombs with them.

I think that's true for most of us.

If I think something will be challenging, or is an acquired taste I'll admit as much.

Fair enough. Though "challenging" to you is on a whole different level than what is challenging to many of us.

I don't rickroll with noise (Rick Astley, though, is another story).

I wonder if anyone here would admit to actually liking that Astley song. (Truth be told, I've never heard it beyond the first few seconds. I know I was tricked into going there with the expectation that the song would irritate me.)

[ewok20t3]

I do not care for genre tagging at all.  I mean, I don't even get why I need it.  If it was automatically added to the tags, I don't bother to change it even if I know it to be wrong.  If it's not there, even better.

I was under the impression that most people have a similar view (which is why I included it in my post, obviously). I think it's perfectly understandable that most people feel that way. I'm not trying to box any artists in to one genre or anything, I just really wish every combination of genre's had it's own genre name.

I don't know that there's a singular consensus on what genre of music the general public finds most passionate, or whether they care about passion in the first place. Basically, this is just one of those subjective things that informs genre preferences. I'm sure Josh could dig up some incredibly sparse folk music recorded on a four-track in someone's backwoods cabin in Mississippi that he finds passionate precisely because of its sparseness, which is just about the antithesis of the music you find passionate. Me, I find it passionate when people go all manic with the percussion. I think everybody's opinion on this is probably an unpopular one.

You're probably right. I just feel like hardcore gets a bad rap overall. F***ed Up and Converge are the only true hardcore bands (it's debatable whether they're "true hardcore bands") that seem to get any love from the critics or bigger music publications and websites. Please excuse my constant promotion of the genre. At least those publications seems to be warming up to metal, maybe hardcore is next.

Hidden tracks annoy me even more now that I have an iPod. If a song with a hidden track after several minutes of silence comes up on shuffle when I'm driving, I either have to wait out the silence or fiddle with the iPod at a stop light to skip to the next track once the song proper has ended (which then doesn't up the play count, which bugs my OCD side).

To summarize: Individual songs should be isolated on individual tracks. The rules may become more arbitrary when songs fall well outside the typical compositional rules in terms of their length and relation to surrounding pieces of music (see Dream Theater's "Six Degrees" suite, which is actually quite nicely divided into 8 sections that can sort of stand alone), but if you're making 3 or 4-minute pop/rock songs, then please don't screw with me by making the track listing all messy.

Absolutely agree.

Partially due to the above, I think Pop is U2's best album.

I don't even know if I've gotten around to listen to that whole album yet, but I'm not going to get my hopes up that I'll like it more than The Joshua Tree or I'll probably come away extremely disappointed, haha. I'm actually really curious to give this one a listen now. I'll put it on my playlist tomorrow.

[ewok20t3]

Opeth is fantastic music for sleeping.  A lot of metal is for me.

Is this one of those times when you like messing with people, or is this true?

[murlough23]

I was under the impression that most people have a similar view (which is why I included it in my post, obviously). I think it's perfectly understandable that most people feel that way. I'm not trying to box any artists in to one genre or anything, I just really wish every combination of genre's had it's own genre name.

In a day and age where bands are continually rejecting and trying to outrun genre tags that are commonly given to them, I wouldn't get my hopes up.

Please excuse my constant promotion of the genre.

It's fine. Just understand that I'll take most of those recommendations as not really being up my alley. There is the occasional "hard" album (I won't even begin to guess where it's appropriate to add "core", I'm just talking about dudes who like to play really loud and scream/shout a lot) that I find myself enjoying, but it's usually a noticeable melodic component to it , because I am a sucker for a catchy melody, and I know that's like anathema to true hardcore music or something.

I don't even know if I've gotten around to listen to that whole album yet, but I'm not going to get my hopes up that I'll like it more than The Joshua Tree or I'll probably come away extremely disappointed, haha. I'm actually really curious to give this one a listen now. I'll put it on my playlist tomorrow.

Definitely don't expect that. U2 fans who even appreciate Pop at all seem to be few and far between (and I have to credit Josh for helping me mine some of the goodness in that record when I was still a bit unsure about it). I'm the only person I've met to date who actually prefers it to all of their others. The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby are popular choices for a very good reason, and are close runners-up on my personal list. Honestly, part of the psychology behind my choice of Pop might be because U2 is such a massively popular band and the other two albums I mentioned are such obvious choices, that I might put Pop a smidgen above as my way of seeing something in the band that most people don't. But I do have a certain taste for irony, and there's a part of me that is amused by how much of their audience just didn't get what they were aiming for with that record. While couched in bitter disillusion, I find that record to really ring true in terms of what happens when commercialism is substituted for faith.

Basically, even if you hate Pop, as long as you can grasp the general idea of where they're coming from, I'll be happy with that.

[bloop]

I wonder if anyone here would admit to actually liking that Astley song.

*raises hand*.  He has a pretty good voice.  Ironically enough, I don't think you'd hate it.

Here's an AMG track review

Is this one of those times when you like messing with people, or is this true?

I'm being completely serious, but I don't play the metal very loud when I sleep to it.  Background metal, which may be blasphemy in itself.

[ewok20t3]

because I am a sucker for a catchy melody, and I know that's like anathema to true hardcore music or something.

Believe it or not, my favorite sub-genre of hardcore is called "melodic hardcore".  In most cases the guitar parts carry the melody. Unfortunately most people can't get past the vocals to enjoy the beautiful guitar melodies going on in the background.

I understand where you're coming from, though. Honestly, I always thought I would grow out of my love for hardcore music, but it seems the older I get the more I relate to it and the more I fall in love with it. I'm not trying to convert anyone into a hardcore lover. I love music and I love people that love music. I come here because you all are the only people I'm aware of who seem to be as passionate about music as I am. I don't care if you guys love the same kind of music as me or not, as long as you love God and music, we have a whole lot in common! (But if you become hardcore lovers along the way I certainly won't complain  )

Basically, even if you hate Pop, as long as you can grasp the general idea of where they're coming from, I'll be happy with that.

I'll definitely give it a shot.

[murlough23]

Believe it or not, my favorite sub-genre of hardcore is called "melodic hardcore".  In most cases the guitar parts carry the melody. Unfortunately most people can't get past the vocals to enjoy the beautiful guitar melodies going on in the background.

I generally have a hard time with bands where the bulk of the vocals are screamed or shouted. It's because I love to sing along to stuff. (Oddly, this does not bug me with purely instrumental music, or lyrics sung in a foreign language.) Unfortunately my opinion of hard music will vary drastically based on the vocalist. (The subtle changes in Schuylar Croom's voice between He Is Legend's I Am Hollywood and subsequent albums are why I love the former and hate the latter. I loved the balance between singing and screaming on IAH, I thought he navigated most of those songs superbly, and I never could get into the others.)

One thing I never could get used to is when "hard" vocalists would scream along to something very slow, even, and measured. Screaming sounds to me like something you do when you're excited and/or pissed off, so to have it be so even and calculated just sounds hella awkward to me. I've learned to make some exceptions for a few favorite Thrice songs, but those usually have a really strong melodic component to make up for it ("The Flame Deluge" being one example).

[ewok20t3]

One thing I never could get used to is when "hard" vocalists would scream along to something very slow, even, and measured. Screaming sounds to me like something you do when you're excited and/or pissed off, so to have it be so even and calculated just sounds hella awkward to me.

I see where you're coming from.

My favorite hardcore bands will often scream over slow parts, but when they're screaming things such as "Like a child with his hands to his father I come uncovered,
I'm in need of you more than ever", it's more like an intense worship experience to me. I don't like many of the pissed off hardcore bands, I like the passionate hardcore bands who use lyrics similar to the line above.

Have you heard Thrice's album, The Artist In The Ambulance? It's more of a post-hardcore album, but it has alot of the qualities to it that I love about hardcore music.

[murlough23]

Have you heard Thrice's album, The Artist In The Ambulance? It's more of a post-hardcore album, but it has alot of the qualities to it that I love about hardcore music.

Yeah. It's pretty good, though I prefer their later stuff. I noticed that my favorite songs on The Artist tended to be the more melodic ones like "Stare at the Sun" and "All that's Left". When there's more brute force and less melody, I can have difficulties telling songs apart.