Can You Force Yourself To Like A Record Through Blunt-Force Repetition?

I was kind of joking about this on the 77 Tracks of 2013 poll thread, but the idea won't leave me alone.

Is it really possible, if you force yourself to listen to an album enough times, that you won't just "find something to appreciate about it" but actually genuinely come to love the music through sheer familiarity alone?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately (both inspired by that "how many listens" thread, and also the experience of having to listen to the latest albums by The Knife and Dawn Richard over and over to unlock their secrets) - it's something I had a lot more patience for in the pre-internet years, when music was harder to get hold of, so I would make more of an effort with rare things which had entailed difficulties to get hold of. But I'm also wondering how much of that was either naïveté and not knowing what "my tastes" were yet, or being more in thrall to The Canon, and thinking that there were records that I *had* to like?

But I am determined to do this now. I'm going to pick a record which is both outside my normal taste zone, and something I have already decided that I don't like on a cursory listen, and listen to it 22 times in a row (that works out about 3 times a day for the next week) and see if I can actually *force* myself to like it. Or if, by the end of the experiment, I really *really* hate it.

I am inviting any other brave and intrepid listeners to try this experiment, too. Pick an album you know you don't like, in a genre you're not into, listen to it 22 times in the next week, and report back what your feelings on the record are. (Definitely at the end of the experiment, but feel free to comment *during* the experiment as well.) Who's in?

The only question now is, what record should I pick? On the other thread, I said I'd do it with an Interpol record, but 1) I'm not sure indie-rock counts as a genre I "don't like" and 2) I'm not sure I can actually stomach listening to it 22 times in a row. The former makes me think I shouldn't do this, the latter makes me think I should.

But the other things I started to think about (Kanye? The new Daft Punk?) inspired me even less. (Technically I should like Daft Punk, I'm just uninspired to even hear the record, so I don't think that's a good idea.) So maybe I should go with my initial impulse.

(No one else is going to do this, are they?)

I thought blunt force repetition was a well accepted method of hit single indoctrination

i considered doing a sponsored non-stop mumford&sons marathon before, mb this is my time

I'd like to try this but I'm not sure I have the stick-to-itiveness‎ to see it through?
I've kind of done something similar involuntarily via the holding music at the call centre I work for, so far blunt-force repetition has not made me like Swim Until You Can't See Land by Frightened Rabbit.

If I was going to do it I think I'd pick something that some people on ilx rave about but seems unappealing me rather than bumford or whatever

I think if a group of us agree to do it together, then peer pressure (or at least not wanting to let the group down) will keep us at it, where dedication would normally flag.

I'm just interested in this, because it is a trope - that sheer repetition can "indoctrinate hit singles" or whatever. But in my own experience, there are songs which I have heard 500 times if I've heard them once, and I will still never, ever like them, even though I can sing along with every word. While, on the other hand, there are things I have changed my mind about after repeated exposure, I think what it took was either 1) there was something inherently appealing to me which I was resisting because of reputation or whatever or 2) a song being popular and played a lot during a particular time of my life which was happy and meaningful to me, therefore the song has taken on the resonance of association with that time.

But I want to test if this can be forced (my feeling is that it cannot. And that I will come back a week later, saying, wow, I now know all the reasons I *do* hate this record, with perfect clarity, but I don't hate this record any less.)

I believe it can be forced but only by a third party and somewhat subliminally with a sneaky context

Yes, I've seen this movie, too; Josie & the Pussycats is one of my favourite films of all time.

I've never seen this movie but I like the theme song to the cartoon.
Cartoon themes are a good example -- who hates them?

What is 'like' is the question? How do you know? Not sure I can do this this week due to commitments and work, but I'm very intrigued to try, perhaps with The Shape Of Jazz To Come.

Define "like" however you like! But really, the question is to see *how* you feel about a record (if you feel differently, or more keenly the same) on repeated listens.

It might work, but in my experience, learning to like a record in a style or genre that I'm initially not into often has more to do with familiarizing myself with context than with content. Morbid Angel sounded like a bunch of nonsense until I heard Gorguts and realized what real nonsense was - then Morbid Angel sounded great. Now Gorguts sounds great. I learn more by positioning unfamiliar sounds in relation to each other than by trying to take them on individually.

See, jmm, that's exactly part of the journey that I'd like people to document, if that's the journey they go on. OK, not exactly the same journey, but very related - how you go from hating a record to loving it. Because it's easier to go from hate to love - and this is something that Sick Mouthy just brought up on twitter, because "indifference or bafflement" was the angle he said he was going for - or is it? Indifference or bafflement can go to love just with familiarity, which is what repetition brings.

I'm pretty much guaranteed that every time I say, about a genre "Oh, well, I like this bit, but I will *never* like (that more extreme bit)" that a year down the road, the more extreme bit will be my Favourite! Thing! Ever! - this has been happening since I was 15, and swore with perfect certainty "Well, I love The Clash, but that extreme punk nihilism of the Sex Pistols, never, ever, will I be tempted by that in a million years, just not my kind of thing..."

So I guess that's why I should go with Interpol, because my reaction to them isn't hate, it's closer to indifference and bafflement and "I like lots of things around this, but I don't like this" but it's not through lack of familiarity, it's just not liking it.

I'm interested in this actually. I might join in. I've been pretty vociferous in my hatred for certain songs and albums so may try those, or just go for something I purely don't understand - last year's LP by The Knife for example. But do I have time to listen to that 22 times in a week?

Maybe listen to Interpol covers rather than actual record? Triangulate what it is other people like about it that doesn't actually appear sonically on the record itself

in the interest of science i think the record chosen shd be something that the listeners not only hate but wd feel embarrassment about liking - i don't see any challenge with familarising yrselves with something that you're ambivalent to, the real stretch wd be an artist or genre that you'd actively be ashamed of liking

admittedly for some people there mightn't be anything associated with those feelings of shame but

http://www.theonion.com/articles/not-very-good-album-takes-a-little-while-to-get-in,17425/

Yes, you do have to listen to it 22 times. That's 3 times a day for a week, but I guess you could stretch it out if you were time-pressed. The idea is to listen past the point of passing resistance, then listen more, to the point of utter immersion.

Embarrassment (or not) factor might work if you are embarrassed by some music. (I can't even think any more of what I would find embarrassing, if anything?) It would be somewhat amusing to see e.g. Lex wrestling with black metal or Algerian Goalie wrestling with girly synthpop but really that's just a cartoon. The idea is just to take a record you already KNOW you don't like, and see if you can bludgeon your ears into getting into it.

i think that's good, NV, that way you're the real barrier (unless there's a legitimate cause in the music itself for shame etc., which seems improbable) to the change

thinking back to the accommodations in my tastes that were hardest for me, there were stupid elements of embarrassment/shame behind them

i might be being cynical, it just seems easier to say "i got into this thing that's broadly acknowledged to be reasonably cool" than to really work on something that challenges your sense of yourself

The only shame I could potentially see myself facing would be over serious backtracking on something I had already established An Opinion on - e.g. if I took on a Taylor Swift record and loved it. But that's not the music, it's the associations. And I've got quite good at backtracking - hey I've even come to enjoy listening to Autechre!

yeah, but in many ways BB i don't think you are the perfect test subject for the experiment because your taste has always seemed to be pretty open in terms of, lets say, sonics, and more about being drawn to types of things than actively rejecting types of things? i could be wrong but that's how your taste comes across to me.

it's your experiment so you'd be the best judge of what would be a challenge to come to enjoy.

i guess i'm already thinking about a slightly different experiment to do with the way the things we like reinforce our sense of self as well as (hopefully) expanding it - and the way this sense of self ties in with a notional community to which we wanna appear cool

I don't know if I'd like burzum in any context but the furrowed brow hands cupped round headphones approach was probably a little bit prophylactic if the goal was to like it.

hey now girly pop? I liked the songs I heard by the band you were in. Plus I grew up listening to synthpop as a kid. I just dont have any nostalgia for the 80s really.

plus id lose any wrestling matches with girls into synthpop!

i posit the theory that in order to like a record - or to be able to say we like it with something approaching sincerity - we have to be able to assimilate extra-musical elements of it into our worldview, either by refining our worldview or re-categorizing the record

oh it took me well over a decade to like black metal btw. Used to hate it. does that count?

I'll tell you a record everyone says I should like but even after owning it 20 years i still dont like - Astral Weeks.

to flip it on its head - i reckon that lots of the rationale behind not-liking the things we don't like is extra-musical too

OK! You can listen to Astral Weeks 22 times in the next week, then. Perfect.

I'm considering one album that's pretty much in 'the canon' that I've never really liked, in fact I struggled to find anything appealing in it at all, and I've owned it for 20 years. The only shame involved would be admitting that I don't get a 'canonical' album. Does that count? And it's not "Astral Weeks".

I doubt I'll last 22 plays but I'll give it a go just for you.

Man, 'reinforcement of sense of self' is my whole life. I'm always trying to finalize my taste, assert unequivocally and for all time that this is what I like and I'm going to spend the next year listening to it exclusively and become the world's biggest expert or whatever. That never comes close to panning out, I'm invariably off on something new the next week.

OK, I get what you're saying, NV - lots of ppl seem to not like particular music because they don't want to be The Kind Of Person That Likes That Music. I completely understand that mindset, and certainly did hold it in my late 20s/early 30s before outgrowing it. That's one of the good things about being treated as a middle aged woman - since you are presumed to have no taste, you can therefore have *any* taste without embarrassment.

I chose Interpol originally for the specific reason that they're the kind of thing I should like according to demographics & peer pressure, but just don't. (Though maybe "gawd indie-rock image bands from NYC are so tedious" is another "Kind Of Person I Am" assertion in terms of abandoning the person I used to be?) But I think it's a genuine "I just don't like this" because all my friends liking them didn't get me to like them; them being hott didn't get me to like them; one of my favourite musicians joining the band didn't get me to like the. What will it take to get me to like them?

Other people can do the experiment for NV's reasons, or for whatever reasons.

For me repetition doesn't lull me into surrender; repetition enhances a record's strengths, reveals its weaknesses in greater relief (or MORE weaknesses), or gets me to listen to instrumental, melodic, or vocal nuances I missed the first time. Many singles I review get middling scores only to wind up on my top twenty charts because I was wrong the first time (it happens more often with singles than albums; these days I rarely change my mind about albums more than once a year). A recent example: radio got me singing along to OneRepublic's "Counting Stars"

Sorry, Rob, but you *do* have to say what the record is. ;)

bb what do you think of BMRC?

(Though you do not have to say what the record is until the very end, when you reveal whether your opinion has or hasn't changed?)

BMRC or Dandy Warhols are 2 bands I thought I should like when they came out but didnt (apart from that one awesome song dandy warhols did)

Black Metal Rotorcycle Club?

haha

you know who i meant

Barents Music Resource Centre? Didn't they sue Dead Kennedys?

well, sure. it's the only reason "trout mask replica" has fans.

willing to do this btw, although be warned, Heart 106.2 FM at a former workplace of mine did not make me enjoy the Black-Eyed Peas, James Blunt or Maroon 5 any more than I did at first, despite quite some persistence

I will let the august minds of ILM choose something they thing I'd ordinarily be v bigoted about

*think ffs

james blunt obv, I assume you've only heard the singles which in no way represent what he's capable of

can you force yourself to like a blunt through blunt-force repetition

No, that's not how it works. You have to choose something that you already know you don't like. I don't think it works if other people choose for you.

Oh. Cause I was imagining this human ear necklace to be kind of golden and blingy like the one Jonny Greenwood used to wear in the early days? Do you mean actual made-out-of-girlscouts human ears? Coz that's kinda unhygienic and you shouldn't do that around children, either IRL or telechildren.

these would be the ears of decidedly unhygienic zombies he has killed. I don't think he wore it IRL

Can you catch zombie-ism off a zombie ear?

But it did get me thinking about whether there'd be people who would want to protect these guys because of their celebrity status, and how soon that desire and celebrity would wear off as the zombie apocalypse continued

You only become zombified if a zombie bites or scratches you, or if you die, and then you reanimate as a zombie

You know I have the awfully funny feeling that someone did ask either Interpol or TSM (or some mix) which of them would survive in a zombie apocalypse. And the answer was very funny. But I cannot remember if this happened IRL or in a fanfic. I suspect it may actually have been IRL, oddly enough.

(I still think whatever infectious agent pesent in saliva or nail tissue would likely be in zombie blood therefore ears, and this is an unsafe thing to do.)

Are you looking forward to ending this exercise soon & not having to hear any more Kanye?

I can't seem to *stop* listening to Interpol now. This album is a fucking zombie virus.

I am definitely looking forward to not having the requirement of listening to Kanye on my "to-do list" every day. This album has definitely gone from painful to innocuous as the experiment progressed, much in the same way the survivors of the zombie apocalypse get accustomed to coldly stabbing and shooting zombies in the head.

"Anyway, I concluded that Kanye would not survive the zombie apocalypse for very long"

Yo, I'm gonna need a breakdown of the logic leading up to this conclusion. Thanks.

THERE'S ONLY ONE WAY TO FIND OUT!!!!

FITE FITE FITE POLL!!! POLL!!! POLL!!!!!!

Who Would Survive The Zombie Apocalypse?

Kanye - take 19 - I actually put this album on first thing this morning because there wasn't anything else I preferred to listen to.

My bandmate was mildly disturbed by my ability to recite some of the verses from this album.

He described Kanye's rapping as akin to "a little kid jumping up and down to try and see over a fence"

It's happening to you, it's happening to yoooouuuuuuuu!!! Even after the experiment is over, you will find yourself reaching for it, for comfort music. I bet you!

But yeah, lyrical indoctrination definitely. Someone was actually talking about that, on the "young ppl ask old folks how music fandom used to be pre internet" thread. Talking about how "kids today" don't even know the lyrics of their favourite records any more, but in the olden days, when we had to indoctrinate ourselves into liking music we'd dropped £15 on, we knew all the damned words because we listened to them so much, dammit! (I don't think this is true, FWIW, but it did strike me as funny, considering how much I now pop out Interpol lyrics in random situations now.)

Anyone who thinks kids today don't know the lyrics to their favorite songs has never been on Tumblr.

Well, yes. Exactly. (But then again, Tumblr is the source of some of the funniest 'RONG' lyrics this side of Song Meaning dot net.)

It's not that people don't repeated play things that they love. I think it's more that people no longer "waste time" with repeated plays of things they do not love.

I do not know if this is a loss or not. Wider vs Deeper is not a resolvable question.

when i bought a new album as a teen i normally set out to learn all the lyrics thru blunt force repetition. if there was no lyric sheet that meant transcribing them by ear, which i carefully wrote out in slightly ornate (for a clumsy 14 year-old boy) fountain pen ink. must've been some funny guesswork on some of the stuff i couldn't quite understand.

such was life before the internet. it was a simpler time. it was a better time.

Oh yeah, I used to have a whole exercise book that I kept to write down lyrics in. I found it recently while going through stuff at my Mum's house, and some of them were so very, very, almost comically RONG that it's hilarious, e.g. slang I did not understand.

When I was 16 and started playing guitar, I discovered that if you bought tab books, they were supposed to have the lyrics as recorded for Publishing Rights, so these were supposed to be more accurate. (Not always, unfortunately.)

(As an aside, I just started reading through JW's 8 billion herpes threads, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that Carlos D didn't actually *write* any of the basslines that I really like on the second album. Phew! I feel incredibly relieved about that.)

when we had to indoctrinate ourselves into liking music we'd dropped £15 on, we knew all the damned words because we listened to them so much, dammit!

I remember when I went away to University, I was able to take maybe a handful of cassettes with me. One of which was Frank Zappa's 'Roxy & Elsewhere', which I played the hell out of. The cassette inlay had the lyrics printed inside, so I had a head start, but I can still remember the lyrics nearly 25 years later.

Also, I have to say that repeated playing of that album possibly soured me on most other Zappa stuff. Maybe other people have experienced the same effect with other artists?

I know nothing about Zappa. Is that an atypical album, or more the idea that caning one particular album (or an album that requires caning in order to access) will spoil you for others?

No Kanye today, I guess. :-/

It's typical of his early 70s albums (it was recorded mid 1974). It has the funny songs, jazz stuff, and long guitar solos from that period. And it's still my favourite Zappa album. I just found it odd that I don't really listen to it much any more, when I still listen to 'Diamond Dogs', which I was repeatedly playing at around the same time. I'm guessing that the difference is that 'Roxy & Elsewhere' was the first Zappa album I really listened to, apart from some compilation stuff that I didn't pay much attention to, while 'Diamond Dogs' wasn't the first Bowie album I'd heard by a long way.
As an even more extreme example, I got into Jimi Hendrix at the age of 18, and listened to all the albums (including the ones released after his death that are no more than discarded or unfinished tracks). But after about a year I stopped listening to Hendrix pretty much entirely.

Oh my god the indoctrination is complete. My love for them has passed any distance or irony whatsoever. I am simply converted.

Sarahell, did you ever finish? I feel like we got to listen 19 and then you left us hanging. With zombies.

No matter the constituent material, whether it’s strings of syllables or strings of pitches, it seems that the brute force of repetition can work to musicalise sequences of sounds, triggering a profound shift in the way we hear them.

http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/why-we-love-repetition-in-music/

So this is a thing, apparently, because ~Science!~.

FINGERBANGING.

http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/25100000/Q-Magazine-September-2011-interpol-25100151-960-1280.jpg

*dies of irony or something*

(This isn't even a thread any more, this is just me talking to myself so whatever.)

haha. The fingerbang is just part of Interpol's essence, I suppose.

There's an interesting history in the different kinds of listening that appear when repetition via recordings is possible - Bartók only noticing that Hungarian folk music was fundamentally microtonal rather than just inconsistent when listening to his field recordings, Cage's theories on disorder only being an order beyond our perception, etc etc etc.

Trying desperately at the ILB FAP not to have to explain the mysterious ~appeal~ of Interpol to the male-fancying individuals of the species and making these vague hand-waving assertions about how they are a post-punk boyband who deliberately present themselves as objects for sexual consumption by women... nah, OK, it's not my imagination. Their entire musical technique is basically an advert for "how can we make girls want to fingerbang us" and by god, that guitar tone on The New succeeded.

Anyway. Yes. Repetition by recording vs repetition by ritual. Did the invention of recording fundamentally change the way we read repetition, or was that feature always there, just something that was piggybacked by the technology.

I'm sorry, I still can't think straight.

("not to have to explain the appeal of Interpol to male-fanciers, *to* males of the species" is more what I meant there. Good god my brain is addled.)

One if my lecturers told a story about buying a new age type CD that was just field recordings of a forest, and listening to it often enough that he began to recognise passages of rustling leaves. Said when he then went for an actual walk in a forest it was like free jazz cos he couldn't recognise any patterns.

yeah repetition absolutely creates patterns in seemingly patternless stuff, noise, field recordings, etc

i think this pattern "recognition" is a different thing to the learning-to-love posited in the original question here tho

Pattern recognition and formation and how it works with forming music and not-music is such an interesting question, though.

I know, from when I was a songwriter, that the principle way I would write songs was just through having random phrases or bits of words stick in my head and repeat, over and over again until they became musical. (There was a song I contributed to an ILX comp a while back, which, I swear to god, there was a child sat behind me on the bus who said "oranges, apples, she doesn't like bananas and she doesn't like pears" and over the course of the bus ride, that looped in my head, over and over like a thoughtworm, until by the time I got home, it was a complete song with arrangement and everything, just from this jangling, repeating looped nonsense phrase.) Anything repeated becomes musical; my former housemate and I used to sing along with car alarms back in New York, because everyone on our block had the same looped alarm pattern. (I can still sing it, too. EH! EH! EH! EH! EH! EH!)

(This has always made me wonder about the link between thoughtworms/OCD and creativity, especially musical expression, because any medication I've ever taken that was powerful enough to stop my OCD urges also killed my creativity stone dead. Because I think it is that ritualistic, looping quality which actually generates music from random sound and random speech.)

Yeah, that's not the same as forcing yourself to love a piece of music through sheer familiarity. But what that article posted above suggests (the Aeon one, not the fingerbanging one) is that sheer familiarity can drive aesthetic attractiveness. We may come to prefer things *because* they are familiar, and therefore safe.

Science says yes - http://www.joshuakennon.com/mental-model-mere-exposure-effect-or-the-familiarity-principle/

I know someone who just moves to the choruses of songs on Spotify, listens to those, and then moves on.

Daniel Kessler: That's really grinding to me. I feel like they're losing out. But that speaks to a greater thing about the ADD society we live in. I'm sure I don't listen to music as much as I used to, or if I do, I'll think "Oh, I'm going to do a 45-minute walk, I'll put on this record I'm religious about now." But I probably don't listen to records as much as I used to at home. And that's a shame. And even the patience to buy a record, at first, you don't really like it, or you're not sure about it. And four or five listens later, you're like, "This is my favourite record right now. Record of the year."

Those moments, I don't think people give that much of an opportunity without albums. If they don't like it, they flip through. And I feel like that's a shame. You can watch a film on a first viewing and say you didn't love it. But if you didn't get it at first doesn't mean you might not love it later. I can't tell you how many people said that about Turn On The Bright Lights when it came out. And I feel like if it came out five years or even three years later during the social media age, it would have been a different story. I know a lot of people who say, "I quite liked that record, But I didn't quite get it at first. And then later on I really, really liked it." But I don't think people would give it that opportunity now.

(Now really hoping Kessler didn't overhear me, talking about and having to explain this whole project at the aftershow. At least I didn't mention the fingerbanging. I swear to god I didn't mention the fingerbanging! Just Kanye.)

I hear music in two different contexts: individual tracks, and mixes

An individual piece I usually know in 5-10 seconds if i like it, music is mostly about sound and vibe for me - so its kind of like a photograph, if there isnt instant transportation, then i tend to pass, there are so many other records out there

But then mixes are different, a good dj makes records sound different, I can like records in a mix probably wouldnt have done otherwise because of the way they are mixed - hear them with different ears - and different tracks might reappear in other mixes so theyre not restricted to just the one static container with fixed order, but unexpected and fluid..so for me tracks can live as individual beings but also parts of many unknown fluid albums, perhaps a different life each time, repeated but different

The other thing ive ended up feeling is that listening to a new record because of the name on the sleeve (even/especially one i have other records by and like) is the feeling of a duty listen, or that i arrive with preconceptions and opinions before ive heard it - or the feeling of having to have an opinion. Ive been feeling the idea of letting things come to me more...organically? rather than me going to them

I'm interested in this actually. I might join in. I've been pretty vociferous in my hatred for certain songs and albums so may try those, or just go for something I purely don't understand - last year's LP by The Knife for example. But do I have time to listen to that 22 times in a week?

Listening to a *double* album 22 times in a week might be a bit much of an ask. Maybe if you did it with the single-disc version?

i've done this several (more) times btw
― this harmless group of nerds and the women that love them (forksclovetofu), Monday, January 27, 2014

I haven't read the thread but I'd say most bands that enter the public consciousness are generally competent and I can usually see the selling point. It's more the abundance of riches that allows me to be as selective as I want, while listening to as much music as I can, which automatically pushes out the rest.

If you scrap from existence everything I've ever liked, given enough time I am sure I can reconstruct a new taste. And so on and I am not sure if there is a parallel universe where the general quality of music is too low that I'd rather be horse-riding. At least, it's not easy to say if the bar is Chvrches, the yearly RYM top 10, 1000 GIECS, but I suppose there's one.

Warming up to a song happens plenty of times, but it's pretty clear it's not automatic. This would be disconcerting. The ability to say no, even if it's a vanilla "not for me" and you have no intense dislikes, is pretty fundamental to taste. Even if you factor in influences from friends, society, or the 70-year conspiracy from the industry to make us like things we don't really like.

I used to do this a lot in my late teens and 20's and while it works what you end up with is more a respectful admiration than full blown love, and that was fine when I wanted to become a music critic but in my 30's I'm too old for that shit.

Forks, which ones have worked for you? I haven't attempted this after my Animal Collective experiment.

I don't think this is the same necessarily, as it's an entire genre rather than "a record," but my first radio DJ job was a small town, very stodgy, easy listening format. At 19 I would have rather been rockin', but as my playlist ranged from Robert Goulet to The Carpenters I made the best of it and gradually began to appreciate much of it through repetition. I'm still not much for male crooners like Jerry Vale, but the instrumentals like The The Three Suns, and even the orchestral Percy Faith/101 Strings stuff I genuinely love. Turns out I was into the whole EZ revival decades ahead of the curve.

funny Animal Collective is the one band where this actually worked for me. they're one of my favorites now. didn't help that I started with all the wrong records though.

lately I've been pounding the two Black Country New Road albums trying to figure out why the hell RYM loves them so much but not really getting it. I think Daniel's point is a good one, once you reach a certain age you kinda run out of time for this. maybe fits into a broader discussion of how many albums one person really needs in their life.

There are albums I didn't like on first listen that I eventually grew to like, but that had little to do with listening to them over and over and more to do with me being older or otherwise changing tastes/listening habits. Of those records, though, I'm trying to think if there are any albums I hated that I grew to *love,* that I listen to a lot, and I'm not sure. There are some albums I've grown to like when they're playing but still don't love enough to play much.

Per Daniel_Rf this was definitely a part of my life up through my mid 20s, when i couldnt afford much music but it was still common for me to buy CDs and tapes without having heard them, and even if i didnt like them sheer inertia would mean that they would still spend months floating around inside my car, and when all the other CDs and tapes felt played-to-death i would put the duds on for variety's sake, and lo and behold i would often come to enjoy them through sheer familiarity & repetition. Nowadays though: lifes too short, fuck that.

I don’t think I’ve ever done this, really. Obviously, when I bought music as a kid if it wasn’t close to my taste I’d spend time with it to see if there was value - maybe 5-8 plays - but usually in those cases it wasn’t gonna happen and the tape or CD was just sold back to the store or given to a friend. And here I’m thinking about the ages of 12-22, that timeframe.

Today, I often know in less than a full play if a thing isn’t for me.

There’s also a middle ground where something has promise but (at the moment) I’m not interested enough to pursue it further, because of an assignment or other distraction. That stuff sometimes falls through the cracks.

I think we need to distinguish between giving something a chance and trying to force yourself to like something. Lots and lots of things that sounded kind of nothing special on first listen later revealed themselves to be full of unsuspected depths and became favorites, as much or more so than other things that appealed immediately. On the other hand, once you've given something a fair chance with enough listens, at different times of day, in different moods, etc, and it's still not clicking, I remain skeptical that you can really grow to love it. The one exception to that may be that you will sometimes grow to enjoy something because it reminds you of a certain time in your life when you heard it a lot, but I would maintain that the feeling of nostalgia is distinguishable from loving the music for its own sake.

There's a slightly different but related phenomenon, where there is something that you force yourself to *not* like because you think it's cheesy or too popular or dumb or whatever, but then after some period of time, usually after you've forgotten about it and then hear it again out of the blue after the passage of some time, maybe you stop fighting it and admit that you like it.

Forks, which ones have worked for you?

I think if I listen to anything long enough I will eventually love it or hate it (more often the latter). I don't really force myself to listen to stuff I don't like or am indifferent to, but this has happened a bunch with stuff friends or people I lived with listened to a lot.

Listening to Spotify with ads, still waiting on appreciating the vocal-fried "So you're listening to Spotify..." female announcer after a few hundred listens.

But that's just it: if you're going to derive any entertainment value out of an ad, it's almost certainly the first time you hear it. With movies or tv shows, the first viewing is almost always going to be most impactful.

But music works differently on the brain. There are definitely records where I know on first listen that I'm going to love it, but those are the exception. The peak is more like 50 listens, and usually the appreciation steadily deepens over that time. Granted, these have to be paced out, or I can easily burn out on it. So if this blunt force idea is possible, I think there's a window for it, and if it doesn't happen within that window, the record would just grow more and more annoying.

If you scrap from existence everything I've ever liked, given enough time I am sure I can reconstruct a new taste. And so on and I am not sure if there is a parallel universe where the general quality of music is too low that I'd rather be horse-riding.