Is there a musical act you hated as a teen....and like now?

It is to laugh:

 

ABBA.

 

I hated Led Zep until I was about 30 (college roommate played a role in that). I don't love the band now, but I like it better than I did.

I'm starting to like more of the Stones' catalog after being mostly unimpressed for years. Playing Exile on Main St. over and over hooked me.

Still don't like more than about 10 Springsteen songs.

 

Count me among the kids who didn't get Prince but love him now. Verse - I think you're right. He might be the most talented musician ever.
I've also been big on Motown. Growing up I made fun of my buddy's parents for listening to the oldies station that played Motown and other songs from the 60s, but I can't get enough of it now.

 

OK, this will really place me in the "he just turned 40" category, but ...

The Beach Boys. Their early surf/car songs were overplayed like crazy when I was a kid in the 1980s, and "Kokomo" was awful.

But in the past few years I've discovered some of their post-"Pet Sounds" stuff, and there's some real gems in there ("I Can Hear Music," "Heroes and Villains," "Surf's Up," even "Do It Again").

My wife and kids mock me for it, but the recently-issued "Smile" (by all the Boys, not just Brian Wilson's band) is great stuff. I probably listen to it once a week.

 

Kokomo was complete garbage, but I loooove the Beach Boys. Not a big fan of Smile, though. Just seems like a bunch of noise to me, but I don't think I gave it much of a chance before I stashed it away.

 

Bob Dylan. At 20 years old in college, I force-fed myself a greatest hits album to get over that first visceral reaction to his voice. It took about two weeks of constant play and it was like a switch clicking in my mind.

Hank Williams. I didn't realize how much I loved pre-1980s country music until my mid-20s.

David Bowie and Prince. I was just weirded out by both as a kid and never really listened to their music. How stupid of me.

 

I know I gave the genre answer earlier, but I thought about it more and I'd have to say the Beatles. I'm not old enough to have experienced the Beatles phenomenom, but I had some friends in junior high and high school who would listen to The Beatles because it seemed like the cool thing to do. I remember hearing some of those songs and thinking how vastly overrated they were.

Then about 10 years ago, a co-worker of mine was a huge Beatles fan and would listen to that all night long. Eventually I borrowed a couple of his CDs and listened to them and realized what I had been missing all that time.

 

The issue with The Beatles as a kid is: 1) If you're not old enough to have grown up with them, your parents invariably love them; 2) Your earliest exposure probably will be "I Want To Hold Your Hand," a song that is terrific in its own right but lumps The Beatles in with the Beach Boys. I'd bet very few 10-year-old boys from 1980 to the present are big fans of The Beatles for the same reason those boys aren't big fans of the Beach Boys.

 

Most of the people I knew in high school in the mid-70s who were Zeppelin freaks were complete stoners.

I toked up once in a while in those days, but these dudes were pretty much baked every time you saw them.

So I associated Zep with sitting around and saying, "Wow, man...." for 10 hours at a time.

I knew the hits of course -- "Stairway to Heaven" was the closing song at every single dance we ever had in high school (really, who the hell can actually DANCE to it?!?!) -- but I really wasn't inclined to get into the music.

Then, some 15 years later, God invented CDs (or at least I got a CD player) and I got the Box Set.

I dug down, down, down, deep into all the cuts I never listened to before.

I'm still not a real Zep-head, but I have done quite a bit of catching up. And.... wow, man....

 

Johnny Cash. It's the only thing my dad listened to while I was growing up. I went with my mom's taste in music more (Beach Boys, CCR, oldies)...then I grew into a metal head.
A friend posted a youtube video of The Highwaymen song on his Myspace page a few years before it went to shit, and I started to look into his stuff. Now, I have almost every major box set, listen to JohnnyCashRadio.com constantly and have bought all of the "bootleg" series in the last 2 years.
I also delved into alt-country because of Cash's stuff.
I still hate the "popry" crap they schill on CMT and whatnot, but I love me some classic twang now.

 

Actually I would bet very very few kids who came of age since the Sixties start the Beatles with "IWHYH" or "She Loves You." I would bet probably 80% start out with Sgt. Pepper, which I suppose turns a lot of kids off because it's so dated.