Cool. I haven’t been a huge fan of Eminem, but I’ll admit my main exposure is just two songs.
I can’t do it either. If I’m going to take the time to listen to music, I want it to be something I like. I’ve had more than enough exposure to hillbilly music to know that I hate it.
And that’s before we get to the ludicrous song and album titles. I can’t help but laugh out loud at things like “Fecal Matter Splatter” or “Drowned In Dick At The Downs Syndrome Special Convention”…
That’s a specific subgenre, and not everyone is fond of it.
Just for interest’s sake, I’m going to throw out Al Ghanor by Golem. It’s a song that’s more in line with what you’re expecting, but it’s extremely well written, and that makes a difference.
Generally speaking, I’m assuming that those who haven’t participated in the thread aren’t interested in the challenge. So there’s no need to post to announce you aren’t interested.
I hate that too, because they usually change the beauty of the melody.
mmm
I’d do it (just not contemporary jazz.)
I like eminem, and occasionally stumble across Detroit stations playing rap, some of which sounds pretty good. I’d give rap music a try if someone (hello, Maggie the Ocelot 
) would post some good examples!
For opera haters, look for some of the old recordings of the Threepenny Opera with Lotte Lenya. They’re on youtube, great stuff.
Thanks for this, will work through your suggestions later.
I’ve been a fan of heavy metal since Black Sabbath emerged when I was a school boy. However Thrash Metal al la Motorhead and Death Metal etc eluded me as pleasurable.
Am struggling to think of a genre I don’t like but yes, I guess the brassy Spanish/Mexican music simply feels not-me. So might try that too.
Ok - hip-hop and rap, house etc is not my generation and largely switch off. Admittedly there are good tracks and its interesting to note that successful rap is now blending into straight out pop music.
I’ve put up a bat signal for Asimovian.
Anyone interested in checking out rap should listen to some Aesop Rock. Check out None Shall Pass in particular.
A lot of Eminem’s early music was produced by Dr. Dre, so I might recommend “The Chronic” and “Chronic 2001” as starters. I’d also suggest finding a best of 2Pac compilation of some sort. I think Kanye West’s “Late Registration” is worth a listen, as well.
Depending on your opinion of those and other ideas you get, it may be easier to direct you further. I’m finding it really hard to think of a small enough sample of rap that would still be considered representative enough to fit the point of this thread.
I’m committing to try to listen to modern classical music. I’m doing this by listening to Q2, it’s a music by living composers stream on the WQXR app. I’ve always considered recent classical music to be something to suffer through during the first work on a concert program. I have this image of some 25 year old with a goatee writing a themed piece about his impressions of 9/11.
None of the songs I linked starts the way you say, yet they are all death metal or black metal songs.
I appreciate you taking the time to listen to them; I hope that you were able to find some things you liked amongst them all.
It wouldn’t ever occur to me to think “damn, now I’ll show them the light and they’ll LOVE this music”. Instead, all I’ll try and do is show some familiar ground amongst the new territory so that the exploration isn’t a painful, jarring experience but rather a transitive one. Building a new musical vocabulary takes lots of time, but often a hook can grab a person’s interest so they focus more on the familiar catchy part and less on the new scary part, until that also becomes familiar.
It’s my intent to share both my experience and my knowledge, in the hope that new things can be heard within what seems to be chaos or ugliness. The desert is as beautiful as the mountains, it’s just a different kind of beauty.
Okay, I had to think about this for awhile, and I decided that there really isn’t going to be anything I could link to that wouldn’t seem like just screechy screeching to you.
What I can do is try and explain something about the music that Yoko Ono was making.
Kabuki theatre is a centuries-old tradition in Japan. Within kabuki, there is a style of singing called hetai. Hetai is a very particular form of singing often used to tell stories and involves deliberately straining one’s voice, usually to convey deep emotion or provide emphasis. Another common aspect of hetai is a sort of chanting delivery, which makes the straining stand out quite a bit more, IMO. Ms. Ono grew up with kabuki and hetai and so to her these were familiar forms.
Ms. Ono also spent quite a bit of her time in NYC palling around with other artists, particularly musicians like Ornette Coleman, John Cage, and La Monte Young. She was right in the middle of one of the largest explosions in the jazz and rock worlds by being in NYC from the late 1950s thru the 1960s; it was literally the musical equivalent of the rise of Dada, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expression (the move to what we now call Modern Art).
Thus, her music had many roots in improvisation, in groove, in the use of drone notes and in the melding of the styles she grew up with and the styles she now found herself immersed in. “Why” and “Why Not” are perhaps the most brilliant of her hetai songs, as they successfully married hetai singing with a rock groove that is largely improvised as the song progresses. They are also the songs that most people are apt to describe as “that goddamn awful woman drowning a cat”. 
One thing that made these songs interesting to a lot of people at the time is that ethnic music from around the world was not easily experienced back then. You couldn’t walk into Spec’s and grab an album of didgeridoo music and an album of Tuvan throat singing like you can now. The chance to experience and hear far-off influences in a context that was familiar, like Ms. Ono presented, was an amazing opportunity, and her commitment to the presentation was stellar. Her backing band was a supremely talented bunch (John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Ornette Coleman, Klaus Voorman and others) as well and they held the same firm grasp of what they were presenting.
Ms. Ono didn’t limit herself to only this type of music tho. Sisters, O Sisters was one of the first attempts to marry reggae with popular rock music and is still seen today as an iconic feminist anthem.
And just because I’m a goofball and because I don’t get enough chances to show this to folks, check out the Yoko Ono-infatuated band Tater Totz and their cover of Who Has Seen The Wind? done to the tune of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, featuring The Germs Pat Fear (later a member of Nirvana) on vocals.
Anyway, I hope that explanation is enough to show that Ms. Ono wasn’t just screeching away with no purpose or design and is enough to show that what she did, as unpleasant as many people find it, was in fact quite groundbreaking and deliberate.
So I’m curious, Snowboarder Bo: if you had to pick a genre to participate in this challenge, what would you do?
I think the closest I can come is the sort of music that would be played on an oldies station. But I understand that a large part of the reason why people appreciate that is nostalgia, and that’s just not happening for me.
Coincidentally, an opportunity just arose which will let me try out the OP’s idea. A friend whose nascent country music singing-songwriting career I want to support will be playing a concert soon at a local venue that I think he might have trouble filling (he’s talented, just not yet well known). So, I plan to go the show – the WHOLE show – and intently listen to, and presumably come to appreciate in some fashion, a genre of music I truly dislike.
I’ll report afterward how it went!
I’m kinda/sorta being led down this path. Our housemates rarely watch TV, so they’re always fiddling around with the music stations at the upper end of the cable TV band (I think it’s called “Music Choice” or something like that). They have nearly every genre you can think of there.
Right now they’re very much into the new-agey “soundscape” music which is the kind of music that’s on if you’re getting a therapeutic massage or a facial. Think Enya or Yanni, for example.
It’s not bad music but it’s forgettable. It has no discernible melody. It meanders like a brook or stream with no end in sight. It also makes me fall asleep if I listen to it long enough, which isn’t the greatest thing if you’re trying to do something else while it’s on.
I can’t wait until they switch to something like zydeco!
This. Pretty much exactly this.
I have pretty wide tastes and there’s very few genres of music that I’ve heard that I dislike across the board. That said, don’t tend to like jazz. I’m up for trying to figure out how to at least appreciate it this year.
I’m in. Any song suggestions from the melisma maidens that won’t drill directly into my brain pan? (Christina, Mariah, Beyoncé, Celine, Whitney, etc.)