Not liking them Apples

Suzi recently confessed something to me.

Before I share it, let me warn you that if you don’t like it, you have to come through me, and I will defend her with fervor and zest.

So what’s Suzi’s apostasy?

“The problem with assigning pop culture as homework is that, try as some people might, there’s no set curriculum, no one set of things that everyone has to know to pass the test.“

— “At my age, I don’t do homework,” May 1, 2019

She listened to the new Fiona Apple album, and didn’t like it, even though (with the exception of a few dissenters) it is apparently the latest Best Album Ever.

At least she listened to it to not like it. Everything I read about it made it seem completely unappealing, so I haven’t listened to it at all.

I know, that probably makes us horrible people, but oh well.

Maybe the music snob mob will descend upon us with their pitchforks and clefs, but it would be like defending vanilla ice cream or mocking mint chocolate chip to the wrong person.

I’ve tried both, and it’s not pretty.

It’s not the greatest for expanding your repertoire, but at least when almost all the music you listen to is what you’ve downloaded, it’s very easy to divide music into Stuff You Like and Stuff You Don’t Like, and you never have to hear the latter.

But as we listen to Stay Home Radio on SiriusXM for roughly an hour each day, I’m discovering there’s a third category — Perfectly Acceptable Music.

They’re songs that are a little older, so you’re familiar with them from when they were on the radio. They were never your favorite, but you liked them well enough. They were certainly better than some of the other crap they insisted on playing … you know, whatever was that era’s version of Coldplay. (If you’re of the age where the crap they play on the radio is Coldplay, I’m sorry.)

But now, when someone plays Perfectly Acceptable Music, you say, “Wow, I haven’t heard Georgia Satellites in forever!”

By the way, if someone plays Fiona Apple’s “Criminal,” that would be cool, because that has always been Stuff I Like.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash.

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