What was the first music you ever hated?

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.

The big choral number i remember them have everyone (I don't think i was in the choir.... if there was a smaller one) do in elementary school was "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda". I didn't hate it per se, but it was certainly robbed of its power more than a little with the monotone of a big group of 7 year olds.

This is weird, isn't it? Everything in Newfoundland is a war memorial.

Y'know what, fuck that song.

in a follow up to my earlier post.
this is the track that to this day still makes me recoil in pain.
was on the radio all the time, and then mum got the album and played it incessantly.
i absolutely fucking hate it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfsgXJQ0ebU

I don't think I really hated any music before I started loving a type of music. That type of music was metal/grunge, and I had a good two or three years of hating anything I considered antithetical to it - see my above post.

I see now of course that metal and pounding Eurodance do have some things in common.

I see now of course that metal and pounding Eurodance do have some things in common.

mark e, yeah, that's pretty bad. And I really love a lot of Windham Hill cornball shit.

I can't think of anything that I viscerally hated as a kid. I had a phase around the age of 8 where I pretty much only liked showtunes and Andrew Lloyd Weber, and felt a weird embarrassment about anything that I heard on the radio or TV. I think pop and rock felt high-pressure in some way, and that I'd be putting myself on the line if I admitted to liking any of it.

most of my teenage ire was directed at otherwise harmless alternative bands I didn't like that got played on Post-Modern MTV, because sitting through them was wasting precious time... I had to fight to be able to stay up to watch it every damn night and once you boiled away all the useless ads and Kevin Seal nattering you only got to see about five videos. eventually I got wise and learned how to program the VCR.

There are several things I can think of from before I was ten:

-corny MOR country on my Mom's radio like Don Gibson and Mac Davis

-"cute" Christmas songs like Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (I liked most actual carols)

-a horrible lugubrious musical rendition of the Lord's Prayer that was played in my elementary school every day over the intercom while all the kids stood

The common thread here is enforced repetition. I hate to overlisten to a piece of music when I've had my fill.

The common thread here is enforced repetition.

absolutely

a horrible lugubrious musical rendition of the Lord's Prayer that was played in my elementary school every day over the intercom while all the kids stood

Resisting the temptation to embed Cliff Richard's "The Millennium Prayer", no-one needs that

My prime overexposure/hate years, just starting to listen to a lot of radio, were 1975-1981. I hated Frampton's "Do You Feel Like We Do," all disco (which I've since repented of, long live disco), the Boston-Kansas-Foreigner-Styx-Triumph-Toto-Journey monolith, Barry Manilow, and most of all, Supertramp. I will never not hate Supertramp.