Nick Hornby on antisocial music
How is it possible to love or connect to music that is as omnipresent as carbon monoxide?
This may partly explain the teenage fondness for the profanities and antisocial attitudes of hip-hop: neither Starbucks nor The Body Shop nor the Hotel Minimalist wishes to assault their valued customers with obscene raps about Uzis and pussy set to beats that attempt to remove part of your skull, thus allowing contemporary youth to bond with their favorite artists in private. I was able to do that with Led Zeppelin because no one else was interested: you never heard "Dazed and Confused" on TV, or in department stores, or in pubs, or even on the radio very often; there was only one TV program dedicated to the music I liked in Britain. (Now there's probably a "Dazed and Confused" cable channel somewhere that plays the song twenty-four hours a day.) I was therefore able to foster the notion that Zeppelin was something special, a secret between me and my friends. Such is pop music's current tyranny that it must be almost impossible for kids to think that major artists are speaking directly and intimately to them -- how is that possible, when those same artists are speaking to everyone who buys peppermint foot lotion or eats at Pizza Hut? The simplest retort to this ubiquity is to listen to and learn to like music that is essentially dislikable, stuff that would bring the Starbucks compilation people to their knees begging for mercy.
Nick Hornby, Songbook