L ike Nicolas Slonimsky, editor of the Lexicon of Musical Invec-tive, I have long been a collector of musical abuse, but I shouldmake it clear at the beginning of this chapter that I am not going to answer my question-what is bad music?—directly.1 I did think about this: rather than prepare a chapter, I could compile a list of bad records, a guide to dreadful songs. I decided not to for two reasons. First, what intrigues me is not music I don’t like (and other people might) but music I do like (and other people don’t).2 Day-to-day bad music is music that my family and friends beg me to take off or turn down, to stop playing because it is so ugly or dull or incompetent.3 Second, there is no point in labelling something as bad music except in a context in which someone else thinks it’s good, for whatever reason. The label “bad music,” that is to say, is only interesting as part of an argument. There is no purpose (and it would be no fun) to discuss music which everyone agrees is bad (a tape of me singing in the shower, for example). And this is not an argument we can have blind. I can’t, in other words, persuade someone that the music they like is bad (and this is the most common setting for the use of the concept) unless I know their tastes, the way they make sense of their listening pleasures (which is not to say that the arguments here are just a matter of taste).
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