It’s a well known fact that all music is better when played faster and louder, just like all music is better if it includes robot voices. From punk rock to opera to new age I listen to all my music at an ear shattering volume, always have. My kids tell me I’m going to lose my hearing to which I always reply: “What?” I figure at my age if I haven’t lost all my hearing by now it doesn’t really matter if I go partially deaf later. When I die I will either not care or get to listen to all the music I want to at an ear shattering volume.

My family hates my music. My wife used to share some of my interests but gradually has spurned almost everything I like. She moved on to the one music that almost nobody actually likes: Bluegrass. I hate banjos. I hate them in any kind of music not just Bluegrass but this probably is at least partially the reason I hate Bluegrass so much. For instance, I hate Bela Fleck. I wouldn’t care what he played, I’d hate it because it has banjos in it. I have extrapolated this to the generalization that nobody really likes Bluegrass music even though for some reason nobody will say so. I think it’s one of those things like asking a group of people where they want to go eat and nobody says anything even though they each have a place they really want to go. Somebody ends up picking somewhere that everyone else hates but nobody will say they don’t want to eat there because they think everyone else does. Does that make any sense? So people are afraid to say they hate Bluegrass because they don’t want to offend anyone even though they all really hate it.

I tried to give my children a good musical education with healthy doses of bands like The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Depeche Mode, The Toy Dolls as well as a side dose of classical music. It stuck for awhile. My oldest daughter still has tastes that are the closest to mine but I also find some of her music just noise and too avant-garde for my childish tastes. My middle daughter pretty much only listens to Asian pop music, K-Pop, J-Pop, etc. She’s in Japan now for study abroad so you can imagine she is in seventh heaven. My youngest daughter listens to Broadway musicals, Barbara Streisand, Judy Garland, you get the picture. I can stand these in small doses only. So you can see my comprehensive musical education had little to no effect on them, although my middle daughter once told me, “Nobody likes Bluegrass,” so some things were not completely ignored.

Faster and louder is the same way. Everyone really likes their music played faster and louder and with robot voices in it too, but are afraid to say it because they think everyone else will think they are stupid. If everybody would just ‘fess up, somebody take the first courageous step, then the music that gets played on the radio for instance would get a lot better when they started playing the music people really want to hear instead of say, singer-songwriter stuff.

So that’s why I’m here, to tell the truth in this blog. I have now taken that first courageous step. All you sheep can now feel safe jumping on my bandwagon and admitting what you really like.

I gotta go now and listen to some Teenage Bottlerocket.