What kind of music do you find most unappealing?
 

Just a little poll I wanted to post purely out of curiosity. It'd be interesting to see how the results are distributed among users on the site.

The question is:
If you had to pick one of the two general categories, which kind of qualities would you say has the most probability to put you off towards a given piece of music?:

a) Banality, contrivance, cliché or sentimentality (etc.)
b) Abstraction, dissonance, "cacophony" or abrasiveness (etc.)

edit: Or differently put; which one annoys you most, if at all? /edit

Feel free to explain your preference, but no there's no obligation to do so. The poll choices will be public.

I chose the first option (shocker).

When I looked at the thread title, I was thinking passionless music would be my answer. I guess that falls into the the first category since lack of passion and effort can push you towards cliches; there's a lot of abstract/dissonant music that fits that bill though. Familiarity is nice, but so are surprises, and the second category just has a greater amount of good music under it.

No NOTA so I can't vote.

True. I know of course the options don't represent everything that one could conceivably dislike in music, but it sort of represents two "camps" of music listeners, of which one thinks that "ugly" equals bad, or rather that the most supreme goal of music is to be conventionally beautiful.

A follow-up question to the users (like me) who choose the first option:
Would you agree that an experienced listener who has explored a wide range of music will generally tend to pick option a)?

.

;)

One thing to note is that I don't consider abstraction or dissonance to be negatives, but all of the words you used for the first category would be words I use to negatively describe music.

It wasn't clear enough. You're basically saying "Do you like boring uninspired music or creative experimental music". Obvious bias put into it.

It's more likely, but I don't think it's a general rule since exploring things doesn't mean enjoying, appreciating, or understanding them. Plus, there are still people who will explore and keep an open mind but at the same time don't want to remain exploring and have a niche that they stay comfortably in. So in short: kinda.

also true. It may be a somewhat loaded question, but I know that plenty of people would rather listen to something they were well aware was clichéd over something that "hurt their ears".

For future voters, keep in mind that I'm not thinking about something like distorted guitars or "heaviness" when I say abrasive, but full on chaos, atonality/pantonality or altogether rejection of recognizable pitches and such. Also, off-key singing and very loose/amateurish-sounding stuff like f.ex. The Shaggs could possibly also fit into category b).

edit: It's also worth noting that although the two categories are not mutually exclusive in all cases, I feel the overlap is fairly negligible. You could argue that one option having more apparently subjective terms will skew the poll in favor of the first option, but I honestly couldn't find any good objective descriptors to box in the kind of music I had in mind. Although few will probably admit to preferring "contrived" music, maybe they would if they absolutely couldn't stand the latter option...

I'm principally perturbed by pretty people performing a pastiche of popular puppet performances to placate the plebian peasantry.

The genre I find unappealing is Heavy Metal, mostly the sub-sub-genres of Metal. Not the early bands that made up "heavy music" (as Dunn put it), e.g. Deep Purple, Iron Butterfly, Zeppelin & Sabbath. Most Metal bands fall under the first option i.e. Banality, contrivance, and cliché but not sentimentality. There is no sentimentality in Metal, unless it's some Hair Metal power ballad, but those can be incredibly cheesy that it negates any sentimentality by being so unbearably contrived.