Bands/musicians you know you "should" like but you don't

[politicat]

35. With you on Boomer pop and really wanting something else on muzak.

I've got no love of my parents' collections. I just can't get there. Maybe it's over exposure (I got it from all directions -- the stoner aunt & uncle's Dead through metal, mother's Elvis-Beatles-country, father's classic rock) but most of it makes me want an ice pick to shove through my ear drums.

Not so much on the Xer music, though. Being an Xer, there's a lot that definitely pings Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap), but that 10% is some of the most interesting stuff because the evolution of instrumentation and the advent of cheaper computing and mixing meant a shift that hasn't happened since the invention of polyphony. Give me Reed, Anderson, Art of Noise, Elvis Costello, some synth pop, through industrial and electronic any day. (Not so much the Primus, though I can take it in short doses if I work from the extremely progressive jazz POV.) I also am very much appreciating the folk-punk trend and the acoustic electronic sidebar (reworking EBM, Industrial and future pop with either acoustic instruments or electronic replication of acoustics, which often means making dulcimers, harps, harpsichords, strings and double-reed winds do things they were never meant to do.) On behalf of my generation, I apologize for the Hair Bands. All I can say is we were really young and stupid.

And while I'm not big on the performance of much rap (I'm a little old and grew up where Tejano was the dominant underclass music), and the feminist in me has issues, I find the poetry of the lyrics to be fascinating, since this is the first point in history where non-aristocratic literature has become a dominant form of culture. There is a subset that runs parallel to Billy Bragg, The Men They Couldn't Hang, PIL, et al (the Socialist Brit-punk scene) in terms of class consciousness, economic justice and social justice that deserves more attention.