bwahahahahah! I totally deserved this response!

So we love and admire your passion for your music. But when you act as if it's the only sensible opinion...

I should have/could have put WAY more context around my comment. I was driving him and some friends home from a dance last night, and I had given him control of the music. After several... pop songs(I don't know what else to call them)? I had him play a sonic youth song.

And while I'll never step toe to toe with you in a "who knows more about music" battle... I will defend myself by saying - I wanted to open their minds just a little bit to something more complex than a 4-4 bass line with some howling variation of "girl I miss you" lyric slapped on top of it. Look - Sonic Youth isn't "the best band ever". And while I enjoyed TNG's Bowie-infused-Pixies-lovefest this morning... they're not "the best band ever". The Sonic Youth song I had my kid play just happens to be one of my favorites.

I suppose that for me, music comes down to a few things...

Context - I love a few songs more than what they might earn on some scale of musical awesomeness - because I heard them or listened to them at some cosmic crossroads of my life.

Content - Maybe it's the lyrics, maybe it's the melody, maybe it's the harmonies... Something that makes this song stand out from that song. Something that breaks with convention. Something that nails convention right in the middle of the forehead so hard that convention reassesses what convention is. Something in the content is just.. "it"

Technical proficiency - I will admit to being a little snobby sometimes - but not all the time. I like to know that the artists are the actual artists. I like to celebrate that a musician can actually make an amazing sound an instrument. I like knowing that an artist isn't the face in front of some hard working studio musician.

oh... and I totally own a Patrick O'hearn CD.... hilarious.

And on the one hand it was kinda cool when all of a sudden the whole damn school started listening to Nirvana... but on the other hand it was a drag because now we were going to have to explain ad nauseum why we liked it better before the drunk jocks had shit on the same label as us. Why we enjoyed NIN when it was up above it, but now that it's mostly theme songs for date rape we're down in it.

poetry right here.