there are only a few things that get me more heated than music-shaming. “oh, why do you listen to [x], they’re shit?” in YOUR opinion. and that’s fine! i have a long list of bands or artists that i also think are absolute shit and sometimes i think if i personally have to sit through one more of their songs i’ll jump in a full bathtub with my favourite toaster but you are out of your fucking mind if you think i will shame ANYONE for listening to them or liking them themselves. music is wholly, wholly subjective. what one person can’t stand more than 15 seconds of can allow another person to ascend the sky on steps of fire or is a balm to a broken heart and that is fucking fine, you judgmental fucking asshat. judge people on how they treat animals and other people, not on what they fucking listen to. it’s just revolting behaviour.
He’d believed most of his life that you didn’t have to be cool to appreciate music, that it didn’t even matter if someone liked uncool music. That was one of the things that had driven him crazy about Kris Rolle and his bandmates, that youthful certainty that there was good music and bad music and that they knew which was which. “Bullshit,” he’d told them once. “A teenage girl creaming while she listens to some boy-band, a monk digging on the God he hears in Gregorian chants, or John fucking Coltrane himself climbing up into the sky on a staircase made of sixteenth notes, it’s all the same. If it takes you there, it’s good.”
— Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers