Broaden Your Horizon

This is a fun time of year for cynics.

For folks like me, we get to frown and gnash our teeth at all of the entertainment we love that is not recognized with awards. The movies, the music, the books, and everything else. We insist it isn’t fair, we decry a system that’s against the things we love, and we call for CHAAAANGE!

We hate the awards shows but need them to validate our interests and our passion all while insisting we hate those same shows.

THEN there are those that fold their arms and frown at everything that is new and different and out of their wheelhouse. The movies they’d never watch. The music they’ll never listen to. Books they don’t care to read.

To them the world is full of distasteful things that make their faces turn sour.

These are the people who hate the changing culture, who like what they like and that’s it.

These are the people who have no use for anything in popular culture.

And heck, we all have a little of that in us, the crusty old school punk attitude that refuses to change. We all like what we like and most of us tend to stay in our lanes.
We like rock, we like pop, we like rap, we like country.

We like horror, we like romance, we like drama.

We like what we like.

And the nature of popular culture is that tastes change.

What we like now may be the most popular thing in the world right now but times and tastes change. The world moves on. Rock was king once and no pop and hip-hop are with country music lingering around.

But everything changes.

Pop music changed from bubble gum songs about racing and girls to songs about love and loss to more contemporary themes like the question of what we are as a world.

Country music was homey and folksy and about love and loss too and more modern country is about partying and having fun, themes not too different than classic hair rock or modern hip hop.

At the core, most music is the same.

Telling similar stories with different tunes.

Movies too share their themes.

You can have a love story in a western and a horror film just as you can have tragedy in comedy and in musicals.

The commonalites between all of it are there if you look, it’s just different ways to tell those stories. And we don’t have to like them.
We don’t have to suddenly like folk music because it tells love stories and we can’t resist a love story.

You don’t have to love pop music if it’s socially conscious if you prefer your message to come from a punk song.

You can like what you like.

The problem is that we hold everything we don’t like with such disdain, as if it’s BAD, in all capitals, and our opinion is the correct one.

We’re right, the world is wrong.

I don’t follow Taylor Swift but it’s hard to begrudge someone that has made the music industry hers.

Same with Beyonce.

Not my thing but they tapped into something in the collective that resonates.

That doesn’t make what they do good OR bad, just popular.

And beyond that it’s up to critics and fans to tell us.

It’s not fair for me to say their work is ‘bad’ when I don’t follow that style of music. Just like I don’t wanna hear someone into country music talk smack on hip hop or a classical fan turning their nose up at death metal.
And all of this extends to movies.

There are AMAZING horror films and comedies that have great acting and timeless stories but which are still seen as little more than popcorn entertainment.

There is so much great entertainment out there and the more walls we put up the less we can see and hear and feel.

We are cheating ourselves of experience.

And I get it, it’s not easy, and it’s not going to happen all the time but you have to be open to the possibility to it. To hear a country song that can move you. To see a romantic comedy that makes you believe in love again. To realize that there’s a message in heavy metal. That there is heart in punk rock. To understand that musicals can tell a story with song and a period film can be funny.

None of this is to say awards show matter…or don’t. They are a means to recognize achievement but in that there is so much more that is left unseen and unheard and unread. What we can do is use awards to remind us that there is so much we haven’t experienced that maybe we should at least see what this stuff winning all of these accolades are about. We can’t just hunker down and fold our arms and refuse to grow and evolve our taste becasue there’s no future in that. The things we love will grow old and fade and we’ll only cheat ourselves of these new loves, no one else will be cheated.

I know what I like and love and once in a while I am still surprised, and that’s amazing. It doesn’t even mean that I am a new fan so much as an appreciator of something else. Just because I don’t love it doesn’t mean I have to hate it.

And that’s the point.

The only one that suffers from your refusal to open yourself to new things is you.

That’s just how it works.

…c…

I write books, go get yourself one.

The Haunted Bookstore