Meanwhile, I mean every word of this (it's adapted from an e-mail to a friend):

Since about age 11 (before which I just absorbed things from the various Top 40 and "urban" radio stations and my parents' baby-boomer record collection), my aesthetic has been mainly punk/metal/folk/classical, with some excursions into jazz and electronica and hip-hop and classic rock and indie rock and all that other stuff. The older I get, though the more bored I become with the limitations of all those rigid classifications. It all bleeds together, doesn't it? All I wanna do is listen to as much music as possible and not have to feel guilty about what I'm NOT listening to or what I'm listening to too much of. Like I've said, it's all music, and if you make music, you might be living on the other side of the world under a completely different set of circumstances, but you share something with every single other person making music on God's green earth -- you wanna make music, and music's timeless and universal and no matter how complicated it can get it REALLY BOILS DOWN TO A PRETTY SIMPLE CONCEPT. So even if you think they're "good" or "bad," the distance separating Nuggets and the Ohm box and Samba Soul '70 and Now That's What I Call Music is not all that great. So I'm all about challenging the "rockist" orthodoxy that keeps people scared of embracing other forms, but at the same time it bothers me that some of the more vocal parties of the anti-orthodoxy have so many biases of their own, and the whole pretense that they're "educating" people about weaning themselves away from ___ and instead appreciating ___ has a weird, NPR-ish, swallow-your-medicine-junior, intellectually schoolmarmish tinge to it that puts me off.