Have you ever taken against a musician or band and had a change of heart?

[WarpCanada]

So I just wanted to tell an interesting personal story. I grew up in Canada, and RUSH is easily one of the most important bands to ever come out of Canada,  certainly, up there with The Guess Who, The Tragically Hip.

For some reason, early on in life, I decided I don't like Rush. Now I hadn't actually spent much time listening to them. If I'm honest, there was one song on the radio that got played a lot and Geddy Lee's vocal in the track annoyed me, as did the lyric. 

Never once in my whole life from the first time I heard Rush as a teenager, to the age of 50, did I ever listen to a whole RUSH album.  Now RUSH's band existence is over, and I'm finding myself in these latter days at a loss to explain my hostility to RUSH. In fact now I listen to them, and I think, these guys are great.  Musically great.  I like Geddy Lee as a vocalist and songwriter and he's a hell of a bass player.  And Alex Lifeson is great. And the late great Neil Peart was a titan in the history of drums. Also he was a great guy.

Realizing that I have cast aspersions for decades at some very nice human beings.  I have been wrong, my whole life. Rush is fantastic.     I still think Nickelback is trash, mind you.

Has this ever happened to you? Ever woke up one day and said, right then, I'm an idiot. What was I thinking?

[Greeny (No longer active)]

I hated Pink Floyd as a teenager. How wrong I was.

[cuthbert]

I hated the Beach Boys with a passion from my early teens until my late 20s. After being introduced to 'Pet Sounds' by a friend, I bought that LP (from the bargain bin, at the time) and my appreciation for their entire catalog has only grown since then.

Brian Wilson is a genius, and his brothers Dennis and Carl were also brilliant. I still hate Mike Love though. 

[T.C. Elliott]

I absolutely hated Nirvana when the radio would play "Teen Spirit" for what seemed like 12 hours out of every 24. After the unplugged album came out I started listening to them and.. well, I still don't much care for Teen Spirit. But I can't say I'm not a fan.

[Ferryman_1957]

I hated loads of bands and many music styles from age 20 to about 30. That was because I went punk, and then post-punk, at age 20. I was playing in bands and trying to seriously make it, so was very much following fashion. And the fashion was to sneer at prog bands like Rush, heavy metal bands, bloated old-man bands like ELP and Floyd, and pretty much everyone that didn't fall into the "fashionable" categories of the time. So I never listened to any Rush when they first came out.

It's only in the last 15 - 20 years as I rediscovered playing music and coming on to Songcrafters that I have opened up my ears to a lot of different musical styles. So I rediscovered my love of prog (which I listened to in my teens) and have appreciated Rush and others (like Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree). I've also listened to, and enjoyed, lots of stuff that I never have in the past.

I still don't like anything Genesis did after Peter Gabriel left, but that is deep rooted in my teenage psyche and will never change......    

[bruno]

I hated loads of bands and many music styles from age 20 to about 30. That was because I went punk, and then post-punk, at age 20. I was playing in bands and trying to seriously make it, so was very much following fashion. And the fashion was to sneer at prog bands like Rush, heavy metal bands, bloated old-man bands like ELP and Floyd, and pretty much everyone that didn't fall into the "fashionable" categories of the time. So I never listened to any Rush when they first came out. 

I was the same but opposite when I was a teen, I hated anything non rock, including pop et al. If the cool kids liked it, it was instantly crap. I think that you feel it more intensely when you are young. I remember going on a weekend away at a drummers friend house, and we played all kinds of stuff. I realised that there was so much more to the music, when I tried to play it myself (e.g. the police and the jam), that made me change my mind. If you respect it, then you will give it a chance. Also music depends on mood, what is great one day is less so the next. Particular music brings invokes memories as well. I cannot list to Asia "Heat of the moment", without remembering my uni days. I remember listening to music back then and thinking that it is so fantastic, so good, it was overwhelming. As you get older you tend to loose that, which is a shame. You don't love it as much, conversely you don't hate it as much. I find these days its hard enough to listen to a great tune all the way through without wandering off. The crap stuff doesn't get the time of day. But I think that means I miss things that I would otherwise enjoy, my loss.

Long story short, I hated The Police, friggin love it now.

However, I am still annoyed how Ozzy became main stream. He was always the anti-hero for which I used to get a load of shit for, and only listened to by the minority. Now he's become a national treasure, everyone was an Sabbath fan, and that irks.
B

[Oldrottenhead]

I still don't like anything Genesis did after Peter Gabriel left, but that is deep rooted in my teenage psyche and will never change......    

Ditto.

Like a lot of the guys here, i was into prog rock till punk rock knocked me for six. At the time i absolutely detested ABBA. That changed when i heard a cover of "Knowing Me Knowing You" by a favourite band of mine called "Danny Wilson".  That song is still in my opinion one of the greatest ever written, but as a punk my ears wouldn't let me hear that at the time of it's release.
Here's the Danny Wilson version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wjXgykhiIg

[Mike_S]

Yeah so, thinking about it for a while. When I was a teenager my first true musical love (discounting my 10/12 year old self 's Adam and the Ants phase!) was Hard Rock/Metal. I was blown away on first hearing If You Want Blood - live album by AC/DC, Eliminator by ZZ Top, shortly followed by Iron Maiden and many other bands (I curiously allowed Big Country to exhist in my narrow musical vision).

This was always offset by the music my brother listened to, who I considered to be my arch musical enemy and anything he listened to was to be looked down upon. He loved people like Billy Joel, Joni Mitchell, etc. My chief hate in his record collection was Bruce Springsteen, who I hated with a passion. Over the years I have mellowed my outlook on Bruce and even find myself quite liking some of his stuff. A few years ago a mate invited me to see him in concert in Dublin and I can't deny it, he was fucking brilliant. Another band he listened to was Supertramp, who I also couldn't stand, but nowadays I think they are brilliant.

Good thread!

Mike

[StephenM]

Not sure why but for me there has always been just music...no genres... I remember growing up and mom had on George Shea (deep voice, christian hymns etc), that was all the kind of stuff she listened to...so i heard lots of it and some of it I liked alot....and then I would flip the radio and hear whatever i could find...Beatles etc... My oldest sister (God rest her soul) was 7 yrs older and listened to stacks of 45s.... Loving Spoonfuls, Gary Puckett, all that stuff... I loved it, every bit of it... I was about 10 or 11 and my friend down the road introduced me to Ruby (Kenny Rogers) and Ring of Fire (Johnny Cash)... I loved it... then I went to these teenagers house and in their basement they had drums, amps, guitars, and bass...they were playing something really different they called "Black Sabbath".... I thought that was awesome....
I sang alot at church growing up...and there were a few men who adored acoustic gospel music...some great stuff... I loved that too... and someone gave me a harmonica and i could play it the first time I picked it up...(guitar was not like that).... Some other friends were very "shielded" by their mom...but they found a wind up record player with a horn off the neecle as a speaker...they had 78s from the 30s that we listened to learned and sang....I loved it...and we would sing Maureen McGovern "There's got to be a morning after" a hundred times...
Then I moved from the country to the city (Syracuse, NY) and I found new radio and columbia house records and 8 track tapes... I listened to mostly everything, pop, rock everything... but as a late teenager, like 11th and 12th grade I hated disco... and it wasn't really the music I hated... I loved the BeeGees and all that...it was the "lifestyle"....the disco techue stuff... I just thought that was stupid and I couldn't do it.. so I avoided all those folks... and lets be real, it was a fad...at least the lifestyle...
When I was a junior in HS my dad (who I didn't grow up with but went to live with in 11th grade) was a member of Columbia house... he bought an 8track called "A Farewell to Kings" thinking it was a tribute to Elvis Pressley.... He didn't know it was a Rush album... anyway he played it...took it out...gave it to me... lol...you know what I did?  Because I didn't really know Rush and didn't really connect to them right away I taped over the holes and recorded over it...Pablo Cruise (who I adored at the time and still do)....OMG that is sacrilege to record over Rush but that is what I did... a few years later... I got a bit SToned at a party and a friend put on 2112....Rush and I was blown away and a fan ever since...
And Rush is a top 10 band for me now... at one time were #1... I just had to be ready for that...
I love Genesis post Peter Gabriel...but I didn't grow up with them.... I loved PF the first time I heard them and even more now.... and I still love Ruby and Ring of Fire and Black Sabbath...
There isn't much music I can't like at least a little of... and I love ABBA!

[WarpCanada]

Abba is another band I took against early on.  Abba (and anything I classed as Disco, or 70s music, odd since I was born in 1970) was "yucky" to 13 year old me (circa 1983).....  In university I met a friend and her sister who loved Abba and for whom the band was part of their shared experience as sisters growing up and suddenly, I liked Abba because of that association.

Then I saw the Australian films Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and Muriel's Wedding, which besides being cool movies, explore aspects of Australia's love for Abba.  In Muriel's Wedding it's a dorky awkward young woman coming from a dysfunctional rural family for whom Abba is a symbol of leaving behind the way she feels about herself and becoming someone beautiful, desirable, and happy, as she imagines it.   Of course that doesn't go well.  The other film is about gay/trans/cross-dressing people who are on the fringes of Australian society and who see Abba as a kind of emblem of queer pride.    It's an oddly moving and gracious film, and when it came out (ha ha came out) I was a much more conservative young person than I am today, and it moved me, quite a bit.