I know it exists. I just don’t want to go there.
There’s a lot of music out there, and there aren’t too many people who have the time or the inclination to make an effort to listen to all of it, even if completing such a Herculean task was a remote possibility.
We all employ some sort of editing or weeding out process.
Personally, from the first time I heard Led Zeppelin I I was inclined to write them off based on the fact that much of what I heard on the album seemed to bear an uncanny resemblance to things I knew and loved from the first Jeff Beck album.
That was well before allegations about things that were appropriated from various American blues men.
So I never bothered. My loss? Could well be.
Am I worried about it? Not in the slightest.
The reader may well feel the same way towards artists I hold in high esteem. That’s cool. It’s a free country.
In much the same way, from the first time I started reading about the Sex Pistols there was something there that triggered the Hype alarm bells in my brain. Must have had something to do with the presence and poses of Malcolm McLaren. I’ll have my teenage rebellion with a touch less svengali, thank you very much, and if that means you’re going to label me a fuddy duddy and sweep my opinions to one side, that’s fine with me.
The Eagles, after a couple of interesting albums seemed to turn themselves inside out and disappear up their own fundamental orifice in a cloud of what may well have been cocaine-fuelled ego battles. That’s the way it looked from where I was at the time. Not that I was paying much attention.