Can't stand fill-in-the-blank music?

[becca]

Probably because Fleetwood Mac encompassed such a wide variety of styles it might be more noticable among it's fans, but I've always had an inability to understand the sometimes very narrow interest type of music fan. I am so much a musical omnivore who gets really into discovering and understanding music new to me while others might have tweleve varients of the same 45 or CD for the slight differences, or eighty live tapes of a San Francisco based group doing the same dozen and a half songs over and over, and usually those people respond to some other entire area of music with an "I can't stand that". Often it's country music and rap music people say this about, it used to always be jazz before rap came along, and for awhile it was disco. Is there something wrong with me? I really think that sometimes... how can I be digging on some old Dolly Parton or even Cowboy Copas stuff one day, the more obscure rarities of european psychedelic rock another, and enjoying the opera singing The Priests on tv with Mareid O'Brennan of Clannad the next? My Jamaican and African vinyl andCD collection is sizable and deep I think, my Japanese pop and early Blues ones at least presentable. I enjoy much folk of all periods, exotic percussion, hawaiian guitar, South American traditional, all modes of dance including the reviled disco/funk.

In other ways in my life I've been a reactionary against specialisation, which is probably why I'm something of a failure on paper I suppose. Jill of all gets Jack from today's society. A bit of computer programming, hands-on horticulture, commercial artist, a stint as a fiction editor, delivery person, sign painter, retail clerk. But how do you pick one thing, one style of music or artist and stick to just that? It would be like cheesecake everyday, and eventually I'd get sick of even that. Life seems too short to fit it all in that is available. I'm the same with books; non-fiction, sf, romance, war and westerns even! I'm the opposite of the person with every Dr. Who and Star Trek book but will have read a couple of them.

I don't know, maybe people are really filfilled and happy closing the door on all of this and all of that to focus on one narrow field of vision, but usually the most successful creative people, the very people indeed the closed-off focus on, are like me. They don't for example watch only U.S. action-movies and go on to make near-exact copies of them, they are the people who bring many influences and experiences to bear and result in such mutli-faceted and fully developed art. 'To bear', hee, Bears are omnivores, I think people are supposed to be.

There is a world of music and sound from many places and times more available than at any other time in human history, suspend the urge to dismiss and try to see it through the creator's point-of-view, to figure it out, to feel the moods. It's called growth and it is very fulfilling! My 'collection' will never be complete but I am hungrier for music than I have ever been. I wish I could live a thousand years and try to hear it all! How can anybody settle for just '50s style doo-wop when there is Capetown jive, and Andean flutes, and Norweigan strings, and middle-eastern tablas?

If you 'hate' some kind of music to me it sounds more like 'I hate music', I just don't get that. Discrimination is a natural trait mind you, but it's usually a mistake to broadly write-off entire groups of music the same as it is with people. I won't say you might be missing something, if you do that I absolutely know that you are. Your identity is not going to be obliterated by letting it all in, you can still extol the virtues of John's bass lines or Lyndsey's magic fingers, but putting down something else to make it bigger doesn't work at all.