You Used to Like Terrible Music

I’m going to admit what is probably my deepest, darkest musical secret. Of all the potentially career-ending things I’ve said online, this may potentially be the worst. Here we go…

Written By

Isaac Schankler

I’m going to admit what is probably my deepest, darkest musical secret. Of all the potentially career-ending things I’ve said online, this may potentially be the worst. Here we go: I was briefly really into the music of Yanni when I was a teenager.
I don’t have any good explanation or justification for this. The best I can say is that I guess I really liked synths? And, I don’t know, he played piano, and so did I, and he could emote without singing, in a really overwrought way. Recently I went back and listened to some tracks in the hope that I could find anything remotely redeeming in them, something that would rationalize my enthusiasm after the fact. But there was nothing I could latch onto in the aimless melodies, the poorly chosen synth patches, the excremental quality of the production, the self-congratulatory schmaltz slathered over everything.

If this seems superfluously harsh, it is more of an indictment of myself than anything. There is other music I liked during that period—e.g. Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Patrick O’Hearn—that I used to denounce, but gradually came around to appreciate again, though in a drastically different (and occasionally contradictory) manner. This is, I think, a healthy impulse, a good way to reintegrate your past musical selves and learn from them.

But what do you do when you simply can’t relate to a past self? Here’s the thing: tons of people still like Yanni. A lot. And I can’t write them off, because I used to occupy that space. But I can’t understand them either, any more than I can understand the 13 year old rocking out to Keys to Imagination on giant headphones (if such a thing can be said to be rocked out to) while reading a Tolkien novel (though while I’m being honest, it was probably actually a Dragonlance novel, statistically speaking).