Also, for some reason, this jars a stoney/cynical notion from undergrad daze, to wit: What do you think would happen if you were to raise a child making sure at every turn that they never ever intake any disney entertainment?

One person’s important music history is another’s meh.

+1 me.

Even the “heard of them/haven’t heard them guy” seems to be saying that he uses that line a lot, not that he hears it. Myself, I use it whenever appropriate, than follow it with something along the lines of “What’s good?” or “Where should I start?”

Anyways, I feel that I’m reasonably good about back catalogs, though it’s intimidating. The back catalog is so huge. That’s where I’m doing my exploration now and it seems as if every album found necessitates the purchase of five more albums.

What I’m really embarrassed about is my lack of depth w/r/t Classical music. I know fewer than a dozen pieces. Laaaame.

1) I don’t watch TV

2) When I do, it’s only PBS

3) I only watch Fox News or MSNBC

4) I only listen to NPR

5) I only listen to Sean Hannity and Michael Savage

6) Opie and Anthony rule and all other radio sucks

7) I don’t listen to music after (insert year here, usually sometime after their Jr. year of college)

8) (Insert band here) is the only good band there is

9) There are no good (insert genre here)

10) Who cares what bloggers think? They sit in their (pajamas/underwear) and don’t have real jobs

The other day I was driving and I heard a commercial that started as such:

“Life gives you complicated questions like ‘What is the square root of an isosceles triangle?’”

I nearly lose my shit when I hear things like this. I mentioned it to a fellow mathie of mine and he had this to say:

“Math is the only thing that you are allowed to be stupid about. If you can’t pronounce a ten letter word then people think you’re an idiot but you say you can’t understand fractions and everyone just laughs and say ‘Ya, math is hard!’”

It’s just as annoying as what you mention in this post.

But at the same time, people who begin to like music in their formative years- which seem to be late high school and college now- are never going to be willing to admit that kind of weakness or ignorance. Because it is easy to keep up with new things- leak blogs here, forums there. What’s hard is finding the time to go back into the past and investigate things that didn’t saturate the public consciousness. The picture accompanying this post is relevant to me, as I had never heard of Galaxie 500 past the one line in Exile in Guyville until I heard someone play a song of theirs I wound up liking. It’s not that I consider myself too lazy, it’s just that somehow I ended up being too lazy without even thinking too hard about it.

@GhostOfDuane: That phrase/cliche is the immediate moment when I stop reading an OkCupid profile (unless it’s part of a larger trainwreck I plan to share with my friends). It implies the exact opposite of nearly everything I look for or find relatable in a human being. The only people who can say “I like everything but blank ____” with any authority are too well informed to say such a thing.