Why You Hate Jazz (Or Hip-Hop, Or Country, Or Classical..): A Theory Of Musical Taste
The Saxophone was invented by Antoine-Joseph ‘Adolphe’ Sax in 1846, after risking death several times.
I mean, you can’t make this up:
At age 2, barely able to walk, he fell from the third floor, hit his head against a stone, and was believed dead.
At age 3 he drank a bowl of vitriolized water (I’m not a chemist, but that does not sound good…). Then later he swallowed a pin!
He survived other three different episodes of near-asphyxiation (small objects he tried to swallow. I start to see a pattern…)
Later in his childhood he was seriously burned in a gunpowder explosion; he fell on a cast iron pan and burned himself; he was hit on the head by a cobblestone then fell into a river and nearly drowned. (I don’t want to image the hypothetical life insurance bill…)
He he was the eldest of 11 children… of which only 4 survived to adulthood.
You can take the conclusions you want,
… but for me only one theory can explain all that.
You have to look beyond the obvious, for sure, but everything comes clear in the light of two more facts:
Dr. Germain Tobar and Dr. Fabio Costa just published a paper that explains how paradox-free time travel could be possible. (Seriously. It was published on Sep 21, 2020)
The hate that some people have for Jazz can transcend space, time, and the laws of Nature.
So our conclusion is simple, poignant and inescapable:
A bunch of incompetent jazz-hating time travelers are trying (were trying? will try?) to kill little Adolphe before he could invent the Sax!!
Ok, ok, no, I am not seriously saying that :) (<– obligatory disclaimer in these days on the Internet. You never know who’s going to take this seriously…)
But then again, if you ever met an anti-Jazz listener, you know what I’m talking about.
Come to think of it, maybe little Adolphe was simply caught in the cross-fire between time-travelin’ Jazz-haters and Jazz-snobs! Eureka, that must be it!!
Come to think of it, maybe little Adolphe was simply caught in the cross-fire between time-travelin’ Jazz-haters and Jazz-snobs! Eureka, that must be it!!
Jokes aside, why am I telling you all this?
Because I am always surprised how people can hate other music with such a passion.
And so - a long time ago - I asked myself: “why people have different musical tastes?”
I was never satisfied with the ‘there is no accounting for taste’ answer. This explanation always had an aftertaste of intellectual laziness to me.
The same goes for all the answers like: “everybody who does not listen to my kind of music does not really understand music”.
So I kept thinking about it for a long, long time.
Well, recently I came up with an answer. A “theory of musical tastes” if you want (I confess, I had help)
The results I am having os far with this theory are encouraging and the insights that you gain into musical tastes are - if I can say so myself - enlightening.
It also explains how you can change your musical tastes… and how to come back to your original tastes.
The theory also helps sticking it to all the snobs… which is a good plus in my book. But you will see that in the video.
I promise you, the answer is more solid than “time-traveling Jazz haters” :-)
And after this foray in history, science-fiction, and psychology…
… Let me remind you that the thing we do best here at Music Theory For Guitar dot com is explaining music theory in new and exciting ways that actually work and make you understand music in a PRACTICAL way.
I have two suggestions for you:
Do you want to learn how to improvise or write a lead over any chord progression? Check out the Master of the Modes guitar course
Are you more interested in songwriting/composition and want to master chords and harmony on your guitar? Then look no further than the Complete Chord Mastery guitar course
Did you find this video helpful? Do not miss the next Music Theory videos!
Subscribe to the MusicTheoryForGuitar YouTube channel by clicking the button below.