Cognitive dissonance theory states that when people experience a great deal of trouble or pain attaining something, they tend to value it more than if they had no trouble attaining it.
This a thread for your stories and confessions about the music that you convinced yourself you liked... maybe you spent too much on a rare/import/collectible album, maybe you couldn't accept that your favorite band ever made a misstep, whatever. This is a safe space. No one is going to judge if you dropped $2 million for a wu tang album.
― enochroot, Monday, 13 July 2020 18:37 (three years ago) link
Some context, courtesy of the The Atlantic
One of Aronson’s most famous experiments showed that people who had to go through an unpleasant, embarrassing process in order to be admitted to a discussion group (designed to consist of boring, pompous participants) later reported liking that group far better than those who were allowed to join after putting in little or no effort. Going through hell and high water to attain something that turns out to be boring, vexatious, or a waste of time creates dissonance: I’m smart, so how did I end up in this stupid group? To reduce that dissonance, participants unconsciously focused on whatever might be good or interesting about the group and blinded themselves to its prominent negatives. The people who did not work hard to get into the group could more easily see the truth—how boring it was. Because they had very little investment in joining, they had very little dissonance to reduce.
― enochroot, Monday, 13 July 2020 18:38 (three years ago) link
the albums this make me think of are Underworld's A Hundred Days Off, They Might be Giants' The Spine, and Cake's Pressure Chief, three of my favorite bands in high school, all CDs I bought roughly when they were released and tried very hard to convince myself were just as good as the old stuff
I actually did wind up digging AHDO a lot later on in life. The Spine I think is probably TMBG's worst album. And Cake maybe weren't that great a band to begin with.
― frogbs, Monday, 13 July 2020 18:42 (three years ago) link
dubstep really was just a college phase :(
― unashamed and trash (Unctious), Monday, 13 July 2020 18:50 (three years ago) link
i like this thread idea and definitely have examples i can share
but there's something related, and much more deeply satisfying, which is when you go on a long an arduous journey to track something down, finally have a chance to own / hear it, and then almost immediately decide it's not for you and you can sell it (or delete the files) and move on with your life. it's SO relieving.
― budo jeru, Monday, 13 July 2020 18:52 (three years ago) link
Not quite the same thing, but
Bands you keep trying to like but can't get into
― pomenitul, Monday, 13 July 2020 18:58 (three years ago) link
Related, but cognitive dissonance is about convincing yourself that really are into it. It's only in hindsight that you'd be able to recognize it.
― enochroot, Monday, 13 July 2020 19:38 (three years ago) link
depends what the barrier is: mental / psychological or material.
if you have the luxury of being able to listen to a given piece of music again and again, then by definition you've been granted easy access to it. if there's a "struggle" to "get" the music, you're explicitly trying to overcome a bias; perhaps through sheer willpower and gritting of the teeth you can convince yourself you actually like the music, and perhaps you'd then pat yourself on the back for being so persistent and openminded in your tastes, but that's a different process i think than cognitive dissonance.
if something is only available as a rare expensive import and it takes you forever to track down, well. the tracking down itself might play a role in how you rate the music, but that's a different species of barrier to appreciation. i think this is the more interesting example because folks tend to be less aware of this bias and, especially when it becomes an integral mechanism of somebody's "taste" in music, is often the most insufferable. to me this most closely fits the definition of cognitive dissonance.
i guess there's a third kind of access / barrier, too, which is sociocultural. you see this sometimes with artists / academics who didn't grow up with family + network that gave them early access to XYZ "important music" or whatever. when people feel as if they've had to work hard to acquire the taste of a foreign, more favorably-perceived social class, they're often the fiercest gatekeepers and the most insistent that their refined tastes are in fact the correct tastes.
― budo jeru, Monday, 13 July 2020 19:53 (three years ago) link
I don't think I've ever had this as a music consumer! I had to spend $30 to hear Neu! for the first time in 1998-- bought an import CD, and it was worth it. Conversely, I always felt vaguely disappointed that Magnetic Fields CDs were always so expensive and so short, and looked at my friends who had copies of 69 Love Songs in a box set on their shelf with a measure of pity, knowing how much they'd paid for it.
That said, I've experienced this (a lot) in other instances. When it's time to buy nice canned tomatoes I always spring for the most expensive can, when it's time to buy sheet music I get the Henle Verlag edition when it's available. If I'm gonna spend hours making a ragu then I want the good tomatoes, and if I'm gonna spend hours learning Brahms then I want the best-looking music with the best fingerings
― wet pockets (flamboyant goon tie included), Monday, 13 July 2020 20:03 (three years ago) link
My first thought is the Stockhausen Verlag edition CDs I bought from Harold Moore's shop in the 90s for a pretty penny, just because it was almost impossible to hear things like Trans and Spiral, pre-internet.
― Maresn3st, Monday, 13 July 2020 20:31 (three years ago) link
Oh I spent money on Stockhausen original vinyl pressings, too. Maybe that.
― wet pockets (flamboyant goon tie included), Monday, 13 July 2020 20:34 (three years ago) link
IDK if this is better-suited to the other thread, but I felt so much relief when I realized the Taste Police weren't going to kick down my door when I gave up on trying to like the Velvet Underground
― american primitive stylophone (zchyrs), Monday, 13 July 2020 20:49 (three years ago) link
For me, this was extremely common before the Internet era. Back when CDs cost probably the equivalent of about £30 today, you got very good at convincing yourself that a mediocre album was better than it really was.
I think nowadays with streaming, the amount of attention and money you have to invest is so much lower, that the effect isn't as pronounced.
― mirostones, Tuesday, 14 July 2020 00:16 (three years ago) link
tons of early 2000s hiphop and indie rock.
too many examples; i don't even know where to begin.
― Totally different head. Totally. (Austin), Tuesday, 14 July 2020 01:04 (three years ago) link
This was definitely a high-school phenomenon for me, for a few reasons: it was pre-Napster, so, as other have said, you had to put down some real cash to hear new music. Also, your personality is still being formed, so I think you're willing to try harder at that age to like music that other people tell you you're supposed to like.
As a senior, I read a favorable review of Adrenaline O.D. in Spin or some place, so plunked down my allowance money on a cassette of "Cruising with Elvis in Bigfoot's UFO," which I worked pretty hard to convince myself was funny and subversive.
Also, as a british exchange student that year, I spent way too much effort on lukewarm indie bands (Senseless Things, Mega City Four), which had the added benefit of being exotic because my friends back home wouldn't know about them.
― enochroot, Tuesday, 14 July 2020 11:53 (three years ago) link