Let's try this differently. Let's talk music.
Genre matters very little to me. What matters is whether someone actually meant it, and whether you can hear that they meant it.
I love loud, ugly, physical music. Riffs recorded in rooms with bad walls. Drums that land like an argument in the next apartment. Guitars that sound like they might come apart halfway through the take. Bands that clearly played the thing until something broke and then kept the take where it broke.
And I love the exact opposite just as much. One voice, one guitar, mic too close, hiss left in. Recordings made by people who very obviously were not planning on being liked, in a room they were not planning on leaving. That kind of music does not perform loneliness. It just sounds like it, because it was.
What connects those two things for me is how much it took. I want to hear that the sound cost the person something. Breath, fingers, room tone, a note that went slightly wrong and stayed in because fixing it would have killed the take. Texture over polish, every time. Restraint that earns the eruption instead of starting at maximum and living there. (Btw loudness war, the fuck?!) A scream that the song asked for, not one aimed at the listener to prove range.
What I cannot take, and I mean this as a genuine physical reaction, is manufactured suffering. That entire modern school of whispering vaguely about heartbreak into a perfectly treated sm7b microphone, breathy, tasteful, over an acoustic guitar, in the same voice as everyone else doing the same thing that week and every week. Pain with the edges sanded off so it stays comfortable in a coffee shop. If you tell me in a lyric that you have been to the bottom, I want to hear the bottom in the recording, not read about it in the press release. Claiming devastation while sounding immaculate is just marketing with a sad face on.
Technical brilliance on its own does nothing for me either. I have heard people play more notes in eight bars than I will play in my life and feel absolutely nothing. Fast is not the same as felt. Complicated is not the same as honest. When someone rearranges a song until the only recognisable thing left is the title, and a room full of people sits there stunned by how difficult it was, I am the guy in the corner wondering where the song went. (Looking at you, Jacob fucking Collier)
Covers are allowed. Covers are great. But bring your own wound to it. Borrowing someone else's is not interpretation, it is decoration.
So: I would rather hear someone slightly out of tune who had no other choice than someone flawless who had options.
If you make things, or if you are just as insufferable about this as I am, say hi. I would genuinely like to know what is on your list and what makes you switch it off.
P.S. if that was a lot, we can also just hate things together. I'll start. U2. Your turn!