Serious question: how do you understand ABBA? Because I consider music listening a journey and songs that I dislike now might be my favorite ones in the future. But I really don’t know how it could lead me to like ABBA.
ABBA is one of the most iconic and beloved pop groups in history, whose songs are still enjoyed by a good chunk of the planet, 40+ years since they were first released. I'm not sure why it's baffling that you too could find something to enjoy about them, when so many people clearly have and still do.
No, it's perfectly reasonable to not like popular music. I was only responding to what I perceived to be amazement in your previous post that someone is claiming you might find a way to enjoy ABBA: I was claiming that, since a lot of people do enjoy it, it shouldn't be hard to imagine that you could find something to like one day.
Conversely, if you said you don't know how you could possibly enjoy, say, the Plastic Ono band (Yoko Ono's band), then it would be harder to suggest it's even possible (not to say that enjoying them, for anyone who does, is in any way wrong!).
My understanding is that they say "it seems pretty reasonable to think that ABBA is of good quality, given all that", and then "because it is good quality, then it doesn't seem completely implausible that you may end up liking it someday".
But again, you don't have to of course :-). But I agree that it feels more likely that you may end up enjoying quality music you don't like now than bad music you don't like now!
Is it ABBA in particular, or do you not like the style in general?
Because there is a difference between quality and preference. You can totally dislike the Mona Lisa, but in its style, it would be very hard to say that it is not high quality painting.
And that brings me to another point that I think goes against the philosophy of the featured article: music is acquired taste, if I can say. We generally don't like music we don't understand. Some styles are easier to get (maybe because the music is just easier, or because it's broadcasted everywhere you go), some are harder. I like a lot of different styles of music (from classical to metal through rap, pop and jazz, etc). But in each of those styles, I did not immediately like everything. Of course there is good and bad quality, that's one thing. But the other axis is what I could understand of the style.
In rap, I started with very melodic songs, and then I started to get the rhythm and flow, and then downright the culture and the meaning of what they would say. I still don't like everything, but vastly more than I used to.
In jazz, I liked big bands and "soft" stuff like this until I started studying jazz. I forced myself to listen to jazz styles I really did not enjoy, up to free jazz. I regularly listened to good quality songs (I had to trust my music professor about the quality, of course) in those styles for a few months. And after a while (and I can't say precisely when it happened), I started enjoying some of those, until I could enjoy songs in all of them. Again, I don't like everything, but by learning and getting used to new styles, I got to enjoy them as well.
Of course, in doing all that effort, I improved my musical expertise. So I am now more critical about quality, which I feel like I compensate by being more open to very different styles. By voluntarily staying ignorant, I doubt the author enjoys all styles of music. So maybe they don't ruin the low-quality music of the style they are used to, but on the other hand they miss the high quality music in all the styles they are not used to :-).
