Good art, it is said, elicits a powerful response from the observer. However, the converse need not necessarily be true: that something which elicits a powerful response qualifies as good art. After all, my response to rap music is quite powerful - powerfully negative. I can tolerate it in small doses, but tolerate is all the ground I'm willing to cede on the subject; I would never call it "good art". I'm not one of those who holds that rap isn't art at all - it is, in its way. I don't like it, but I am forced to admit that, at the most basic level, it is as valid as is the music to which I listen. I'm sure a hip-hop aficionado would find the Divine Comedy (to name a band of which I am especially fond at the moment) as objectionable as I find rap.
But at least I can pinpoint, with a tolerable degree of accuracy, what it is I don’t like about rap. And I can guess, again with a tolerable degree of accuracy, what fans find so attractive about it. I don’t agree, but at least I get it. And I get why they don't like the music I like.
What really irritates me is boring music. Watching them perform on a rerun of the Daily Show this evening, the example that leaps to mind is the Arcade Fire. Here is a band that is not in any particular way obnoxious. On the hand, they're not in any particular way memorable either. I wouldn't necessarily object to listening to THE SUBURBS; but at the other end of that hour, it makes no impression. I come out feeling, well, nothing really. It doesn't move me at all, even in the negative sense of having provided the necessary contrast to the music I enjoy. I can't find anything to actively dislike, but I cannot fathom why anybody would love this band. And then friends talk about the Arcade Fire as if they were the greatest thing to happen to rock music since the Beatles, and my only response is, "Huh?"
Another example is Death Cab for Cutie. I'll Follow You into the Dark excepted, I cannot call to mind a single Death Cab song, despite multiple listens. I want to get it, I really do. And after having given the band numerous chances to impress me, to figure out what people like about them so much, it all - just - sounds - the same! To hear my friends rave about a band and to fail completely to hear the attraction is, in its way, far more frustrating than to hear the attraction and to reject it. As Warren Zevon once put it, "I'd rather feel bad than not feel anything at all."
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