How I hate those who say, “I like all music except rap and country.”

Do you know how much music that is? And how extremely varied those genres are?

One of my favorite lines from any song ever recorded is from a rap song – The Game’s “Start from Scratch” specifically.

It is:

“You dead when that green line go flat
If you could start your life from scratch you couldn’t change that”

I like that line because reminds me of both the inevitability of death and all the dangerous, ill-advised things I’ve done in my life — how often I’ve tested fate and mostly by chance and some skill came out on top; of how I am still alive, though it could’ve easily gone the other way so very many times.

For that matter, two of my favorite songs are country songs. The first is Susan Tedeschi’s version of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.” The other is Patty Griffin’s version of John Hiatt’s “Take it Down.” I’m a Southerner, so I understand that song down to my very bones.

One of the primary tests if I will like someone or not is if I ask them what music they enjoy and they reply with the stock phrase, “I like all music except rap and country.” It’s possible that I might like them, but it’s statistically speaking not too likely.