This is an issue I have been feeling pretty much since I first started listening to music.
I always thought that there was some objectively best piece of music, but I could never find it. I would ask everyone I could what their favorite song was, most of the time getting vague responses that weren't very confident, or getting really certain responses that I found just weird and not good sounding at all.
Then one day I found it.
If you care, the song is Soothsayer - Buckethead (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adV8-_hgL4g) and at the time it completely shook me. I could listen to it over and over and every single time it spoke to me more and more. I was really, really into fast guitar playing at the time so naturally the first thing that caught my attention was the solo, but even still, every single god damn second of the song hit me in all the right places.
So, naturally I decided I would proudly go start telling everyone I knew that I'd finally found it: the big one, the holy grail of all music.
People's reactions were not even close to what I expected. More than half of the people I'd tried showing it to either stopped listening within 2 minutes or actually asked me to change the song to something else. They just couldn't get into it, couldn't feel it.
I always just assumed it to be their loss, and continued listening to it all the time late at night alone in my room, analyzing it as hard as I possibly could.
Then way later (I mean literally years later) an interesting thing happened. I was hanging out with some friends and a couple people I had just met, all hotboxing a car together. We were all listening to some Biggie Smalls, when one of the people I'd just met suggested we start freestyling. I'd never even attempted it before, so unfortunately I sat in silence and observed as they played some beats and even songs with lyrics over top and just started rapping. It didn't matter if it made sense or even if they always kept the rhymes up, it was simply an incredibly fun activity to do whilst passing time smoking some pot.
There were a couple awkward moments where they tried to get me to start, and though I could slowly think of rhymes in my head, they simply couldn't come out of my mouth. So, being as I was a young aspiring producer I decided I'd play a couple songs I'd made to see if we could rap over them, after all I had
tried emulating some hip hop in some of my songs. The result was a catastrophic "failure".
My songs were intended to be listened to very careful, alone, probably at night. Outside of this context, they simply did not work.Embarrassed, I gave back the aux cord, and my friend played the song The Motto (you know, the Drake song that pretty much started YOLO back in the day). Obviously I'd heard the song too many times prior, but I'd never heard it in that specific context. Let me tell you something, in the context of four friends getting high in a car freestyling over other people's music, THAT SONG WORKED.
My point behind all of this incoherent rambling is this:
There are a great many different contexts for music to be presented in. What works incredibly well in one context will likely not work in another. The biggest reason why people tend to "not understand how people could like" a certain song is because they do not understand the context in which that song works.
You might not like hip-hop that overglorifies the use of drugs, oversexualizes women, and forcefully shoves the idea of an alpha male mindset, but what if you
were that complete tool who really only wants music that makes them feel good and that says what their mind is thinking? They're listening for a different context than someone like you or I who wants to overanalyze the shit out of it and squeeze every amount of deeper meaning we can get.
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