If I lost you would I cry - Changing my mind on music

I used to get so mad about music, and just so very angry that the loud, intense and moody stuff I was into wasn't topping the charts.

When you're a teenager, music can feel like the most important thing in the world, and combined with all those adolescent hormones, there is always going to be some kind of audio obsession. 

I just always liked it big and loud, with the heaviest rap beats and the sharpest guitar riffs. But I came of musical age in the late eighties, and that was the era of soft and fluffy pop songs. The hardest thing you got was Michael Jackson's Bad posturing, and the only guitar bands that troubled the charts were full on hair metal.

I hated it so much, hated Phil Collins, and Sade, and the New Kids on the Block, and all of them.

It took me years to get over my own prejudices, and longer still to really see how fucking stupid it was,. Sometimes I hear those old songs on some golden oldie station playing at the supermarket, and I can't deny that it has got a funky beat. Even something I considered at the time to be the most annoying song in the world still brings joy to the world. 

And while singers like Whitney Houston and Tina Turner were obviously deadset legends - I always thought Tina was fucking magnificent in Beyond Thunderdome - their music was so ubiquitous in my corner of the world, in that space of time, that I hated it with everything I had. 

Why weren't people listening to Iron Maiden, for Eddie's sake?

As a mellower old fart, I can get past this adolescent stupidity, and see this music for the brilliance it is. There was a time in my life that if I heard Whitney's 'I Will Always Love You' one more rime, I would rip my ears off, and now it's a pleasantly bombastic ballad, while the memories of Tina Turner's music being ubiquitous before rugby league games that I can recognise River Deep Mountain High as one of the greatest songs in the history of forever.

I'm glad I grew out of that self-importance, and all that sneering, just gives me more to enjoy, and more to groove to around the local supermarket. It wasn't the music that changed. It was always great.