What was the first music you ever hated?

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was made very queasy by green day as a kid-- insisted BJA's voice "sounds like mosquito repellent smells"?-- but was also fascinated i think

Which is to say that I didn't have the same experience as a lot of young teen or tween males with BSB or NSync and stuff because I was attracted to them

yeah i'm p sure i had a crush on JT? some confusing memories from the time. ended up getting sublimated into something apparently

One of the other kids in the class, one day, in an ingratiating move, took me aside in the cloakroom and said, in a hushed tone, "just so you know, I kinda like opera sometimes", and even at 9 my mind was hissing "the Bach Double isn't opera you idiot"

lmao, novel quality imo

I'm sure I've mentioned this somewhere but for me this was Graceland, thanks to my parents playing it over and over on cassette on long road trips. Still can't bear to listen to any of it.

lol @ this being exactly the same explanation given by every millennial who loves graceland

anyway i think my answer is leonard cohen? seemed like some kind of prank. love leonard cohen obv.

I keep thinking Brian Jonestown Assacre when people type BJA

quite a bit older, but I hated garage (or more specifically the chart pop version) when I was a student. Just didn't understand why it was good: flimsy skittering mid-paced beats I found hard to dance to; stupid lyrics that seemed only to speak of rough nights out spending money on expensive drinks etc. And the people I knew who were into it were just dicks.

sort of feel bad about that early assessment because I kind of get it now, having heard it away from WKD-encrusted dance floors, but I still really don't like things in the vein of 'Re-ewind','Neighbourhood' and others

I hated "Moondance" when I was a kid, it seemed like such a "dad" song, like something my gym teacher would listen to. Now I love it, of course. In fact, I've come around to most everything I hated as a kid. I guess love is stronger than hate.

Except Journey. I hated them then, I hate them now. So, maybe Journey is stronger than love.

"You Light Up My Life"

― Guayaquil (eephus!)

YES. I had to sing this in a 4th grade choir performance, so I heard it over 100x during the rehearsal process. When I found out years later the song's about God that somehow added insult to injury.

speaking of god: kumbaya and how great thou art

Embarrassingly, it was Sly & The Family Stone “Family Affair”, which was shortly followed by The Move “California Man”. I thought they were sloppy, ugly and incompetent.

I also hated "family singalong" folk tunes, like "On Top of Old Smokey" and "Molly Malone." And no I NEVER sangalong.

As a kid, there was a lot of music that did nothing for me, but I didn't hate it. I remember TV specials wheeling out Billy Joel or Bruce Springsteen and I'd just be bored. There were songs that were massively overplayed, like "U Can't Touch This", that got annoying just by their omnipresence. I suppose I hated "Witchy Woman" and "Take it Easy" when I heard that hits album at 16 or so. And I still hate them.

This is sort of an adjacent question to the main one, but when did certain songs start to be overplayed? The first time I remember thinking, "maybe this song is being played too much" was with "Feels So Good" by Chuck Mangione in 1978... and then later that same year, "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor. I didn't mind either of those songs, although I eventually tired of "Feels So Good" because it had an extended afterlife, being played in hair salons, doctors' waiting rooms etc. ad nauseam, plus it had a forced cheerfulness to it.

Wow, didn't expect the first answer here to be one of the best songs ever. Though the explanation makes sense. Curious what I would've thought about "Sweet Love" as a kid, can imagine storing it alongside "Careless Whisper" and "Baker Street" (sophistication itself!) as "the music I'll listen to when old" (and being mostly right).

I don't really remember disliking anything until middle/high school, when I started to connect music to bad things in life (homophobia, social anxiety, George W Bush) so that most popular things, however quaint in hindsight, felt horrible and oppressive. Then there was that obligatory teenage phase where I was suddenly dismissive of artists I'd previously loved and would subsequently love again. Remember being all negative about MBV and The Aislers Set, for a brief period.

Cinderella. high pitched shrieky vocals scared me as a kid cos I thought they were demons

In 1982 Charlene's single "I've Never Been To Me" topped the Aus charts for 6 weeks. Aged 12, it provoked such a visceral hatred in me that I felt I'd been betrayed by the charts, and it took a while to realise that I didn't have to like the top ten uncritically.

One thing I remember hating a lot was REM, specifically Losing My Religion. Just sounded so dull, monotone and adult. Seemed to define the adult contemporary sound that bored the shit out of me at that age. It was everywhere too, so its popularity seemed to increase that prejudice in my mind.

I now like REM, but still LMR seems quite suspiciously poor, on a musical level to me, even though I now appreciate its drama.

not my first, but i do recall hating stipe's voice, particularly as rendered on 'to the one i left be-hiiiieeend'

XXP, re Charlene: best spoken section section EVAH, though!

what about:

HEE HAW

i've been crowdsourcing this

N!N!N! the spoken section was the roiling kernel of my hatred, especially because it said "make love", I mean GROSS!

Haha. Yep.

I'm struggling to remember much I've truly hated. The best I can offer is Kiss. I probably did *say* I hated them as a 5 y/o, possibly just to be contrary. (They were super-huge in Aus, circa 1980.) Or maybe I just found Gene Simmons genuinely unsettling at that age.

Yeah Kiss were legit terrifying as a kid, and the kids who liked them seemed like they were in a secret cult or something. Not like ABBA where everyone went nuts for them.

At uni I had to endure a lot of bad student nights, simply because it was what people did: Cheesy tunes nights, karaoke nights, Ibiza trance nights, 'indie' nights where they would play three Limp Bizkit songs in a row etc...

I grew to hate 'Mustang Sally' (the Commitments version) and 'Brown Eyed Girl'. What were these terrible songs with shite lyrics that everyone seemed to enjoy and know the words to? I still think they're terrible.

I've never seen The Commitments but there's something about that sweaty, parpy 80s/90s blues-revival sound that I can't stand.

And 'Brown-Eyed Girl'? What's remarkable or interesting about having brown eyes? May as well call it 'Girl With Ears'. And the 'sha-la-la-la' chorus, don't get me started.

I heard something off Astral Weeks the other day which wasn't terrible, so maybe I should check it out but that song stopped me ever checking out anything else by Van Morrison. That said, if all I'd ever heard by Joni Mitchell was 'Big Yellow Taxi', I wouldn't have ever bothered with her either.

Thinking about it, perhaps one of the reasons I never really got the deal with Amy Winehouse is because her music makes me think of Mustang Sally

brown eyed girl has the lyric about having sex in the green grass behind the stadium. to me this doesn't even seem partially hidden from public view and is kind of a shocking lyric.

i picture, like, shea stadium.

I associate that song very deeply with nerd summer camp dances. A bunch of hated songs were 'canon' at those dances: "Brown Eyed Girl," "It's the End of the World As We Know it," "American Pie," etc.

I will be completely honest in saying that I kind of hate Brown Eyed Girl, but that American Pie has...sigh...a deep emotional effect on me.

yeah, i agree with that. when i was a kid "american pie" and "hotel california" were very lyrically mysterious to me. i wanted to understand the metaphors.

so i'll always have a soft spot for them. brown eyed girl is not lyrically mysterious.

astral weeks is something i always wanted to like more than i do. i like the lester bangs essay on it.

Music you prefer to read about than listen to is probably another thread! Is there a thread on that subject lurking in the archives?

Oh yeah, Joni Mitchell can fuck off too

(Everything I Do) I Do It for You by Bryan Adams. One summer in middle school I was grounded for a month because I had snuck out of the house and spray-painted the neighborhood. (EID)IDIFY seemed like it was on the radio twice an hour and for some reason there was some different song I was desperately trying to catch and record. There had been music before that I had made fun of, because you're supposed to make fun of Milli Vanilli or Warrant. Sure, Ice Ice Baby was stupid, but Bryan Adams was my first experience with actually feeling rage at a song's existence.

Maybe not "hate" but I remember hearing Phil Collins' "Groovy Kind Of Love" while waiting for my mom to get her hair cut at age 11 or so and thinking "wow, I'm pretty sure this is a bad song".

Groovy Kind of Love was one that my friends and I would definitely clown on in elementary school.

Everything I Do was so tedious. It and 'I Would Do Anything For Love' seemed to dominate the landscape for an eternity in the early 90s and both songs felt never ending

Yeah, the Meatloaf song was irritating because it meant that MTV was going to be completely useless for the next 10 minutes.

"Poptimism" really a function of the decline of the monoculture huh

big man on scampus (Noodle Vague) at 8:11 17 Nov. 20

i can't musically explain that but there are particular late 60s chord choices that have a similar unconscious psychic effects yeah

imo "brown eyed girl" is a good song with good lyrics

"california dreamin'"'s chord changes sounded positively evil to me so i have always loved it

Black Sabbath should’ve covered it in their prime.

As a kid I hated every song where Garfunkel sang lead and kinda still do-- esp Scarborough Fair and Bridge

They made us sing a lot of cringey boomer stuff in elementary school chorus. One of the first ones I can recall being utterly revolted by was "Crocodile Rock." I had naively, unapologetically enjoyed some *terrible* music as a child (Hootie and the Blowfish, for example). But "Crocodile Rock" was one of the first times I can recall feeling like "WTF is this bullshit." I felt *embarrassed* singing it.

I'm sure I've mentioned this somewhere but for me this was Graceland, thanks to my parents playing it over and over on cassette on long road trips. Still can't bear to listen to any of it.

Same. See also Bruce Hornsby and the Range, The Way It Is for the same reason.

The songs I hated as a kid were the idiosyncratic ones that didn't fit my limited idea of what a good song should be, like "West End Girls" having a singer with an unusual voice. I often ended up liking those songs later on for those same idiosyncrasies

oh also The Buckinghams - "(Hey Baby) They're Playing Our Song".

And 'Brown-Eyed Girl'? What's remarkable or interesting about having brown eyes? May as well call it 'Girl With Ears'.

^funny!

margaritaville

You myyyyyy--aaiiiyyy......girl with ears

They made us sing a lot of cringey boomer stuff in elementary school chorus. One of the first ones I can recall being utterly revolted by was "Crocodile Rock." I had naively, unapologetically enjoyed some *terrible* music as a child (Hootie and the Blowfish, for example). But "Crocodile Rock" was one of the first times I can recall feeling like "WTF is this bullshit." I felt *embarrassed* singing it.

― american primitive stylophone (zchyrs), Thursday, November 19, 2020 6:48 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Now you know the reason why I know all of the lyrics to Billy Joel's "Allentown," Madonna's "La Isla Bonita," and John Parr's "Man in Motion." Our closeted middle-school chorus teacher made us sing all of these! It was...really something. I kind of wish there were videos available of our chorus concerts.

Also, at the end of 5th grade, two teachers were retiring, and our chorus teacher rewrote the lyrics to "Always Be My Baby" so that it became "Always Be My Teacher," and I start crying laughing thinking about singing "Oooh teacher cause you'll always be my teacher." Having a hard time even typing it lmao.

Probably some cheesy Eurodance a la 2 Unlimited which I quite like now.