"I love to hate you, I hate to love you"
Posted by backwards7 on 21 February 2008 - 5:22am.
The irrational hatred that I felt for Mika as I watched his performance on tonight's Brit Awards took me back to a time when I harboured similar hostile sentiments towards the Manic Street Preachers & Ooberman - two bands who I later became quite fanatical about.
Even though I find the idea that I might be a closeted Mika fan a rather appalling prospect, when you hate someone with that degree of passion, you must open yourself to the possibility that in actuality you really like them and just can't bring yourself to admit it.
I'm sure I am not the only person to have experienced a music-related identity crisis like this. Who else here has examples of artists that they initially hated, but eventually went on to love?
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The Smiths
When I was at school I hated them. Hated them. Someone offered me a ticket to see them at the Kilburn National (the show that became the 'Rank' live album) and I turned it down.
Later when I went to university, I kept seeing a guy with a quiff who used to walk around in the rain looking miserable whilst wearing his long overcoat with a badge of Morrissey on the lapel, and I thought to myself 'prat'.
Years later I met a young lady who absolutely loved them and listened again with an open mind... and it all made perfect sense. Hatred had turned to deep love.
Morrissey's solo records are mostly rubbish, however.
Declis McStello
I disliked him with snarling gusto all the way up to Get Happy!, then flipped and was a dedicated fan for many a year (roughly until he decided to dump James Burton and Jim Keltner for an experimental string quartet - oops).
i think most people
around here are potentially massive Coldplay fans....
Only once dosed with industrial strength anaesthetic
Oh sorry, Coldplay are industrial strength anaesthetic.
Does an entire genre count?
Country and, damnit, I can say it, western. As a 15 year old MM/NME acolyte I was drawn to the more outre areas of musics, and by golly, did the idea of The Flying Burrito Brothers sound cool or what?! Duly purchased the dble retrospective, "Close Up the Honky tonks". It was, I now admit, a challenging first listen, especially side 3, with its covers of Close up (as above), Sing me back home et al. However, whether stimulated because or despite the sneering of my chums, it soon became my favourite side. I now have even gone beyond my initial admitted like of country-but-not-western to including the whole shebang. Of course, like rock, folk, disco etc etc there is some unmitigated bollox, but there is some shite hot stuff there but for the sake of prejudice.
I'm more or less with you Retro
Many years ago I watched an edition of BBC2's Up Country because it was going to feature chart topping Matthews Southern Comfort. I watched with disbelief as each act seemed to be worse than the one preceding it. By the time MSC came on, introduced as a "bunch of psychedelic hippies", I loathed the genre with a vengeance. And the loathing stayed with me for many years until the GLW bought Mary Chapin Carpenter's Shooting Straight In The Dark (which she'd heard a track from on Mr Hepworth's much missed GLR programme). It was thin end of the wedge: I mellowed, I succumbed. Now I agree there's much in the way of bollocks within the genre but there is so much to be loved.