When I was a teenager, I made a cassette tape of songs I wanted to listen to but didn’t want to admit I owned. Recording off the radio or borrowing albums from friends, I compiled a collection of bouncy pop ditties and wrote out the title in red ink: “Music I Don’t Listen To (Really).” I’m not sure under what circumstances I expected to be caught listening to that tape, or who that really was intended to convince. But I understood that, as I devoted myself to mainlining the back catalogs of edgy guitar bands like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, there was something powerfully uncool about this other stuff.
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