More rambling about music

I love music. I love to listen, and think about it. I love to talk and write about it, and as I have used this forum, I love to make lists of the best of this or that. And I love it all. The other night I was out with some friends, and a friend of a friend made some comment about the inherent sappiness of Elton John's music, and I was personally insulted. That music is how I frame my feelings in my own head. Not like I did when I was a teenager, when some artists music expressed exactly how I felt. I am not that chump anymore. But I hear a song, and it is a memory, or it expresses something like I felt one time, or it takes me out of a feeling that I don't want to have, or it gets me pumped up to run, or it just makes me think.
And the love and appreciation keep growing. Just this year I grew to "get" punk music. I mean, I always liked punk, and I don't like it any more now than I did before, but I get the anger, the class struggle, the rage, the fight. That wasn't my life when I was fifteen. The awareness of those things came later.
I wrote a post about how I reluctantly and secretly still love the song stylings of Jimmy Buffett, though I flatly reject the "parrot head" culture... Dismiss it as silly. For me it is the memory of solitary hours as a teenager wanting to be part of something, a party, to be somewhere else, a beach, I didn't give a shit. Anywhere but where I was. Now I listen and it makes me happy and sad, nostalgic for those sad days, and grateful for them, and grateful for the life I have now. Right now I think Paul Simon and CCR are the greatest things to happen to music since someone first banged one thing against another in tempo. Fifteen years from now I might look back and cringe, but still love the stuff, and all of sudden be into opera or jazz, or blues. 15 years ago I heard ska for the first time and it changed my life. 10 years ago I purchased music by people like George Strait (and I even still listen to some of it). 5 years ago i saw Nine Inch Nails in concert, and a guy named Saul Williams opened the show, and my mind was blown once again. Anything is possible. I hope that never changes.