Vogue: You don’t need to be what anyone else tells you to be. You don’t need to marry a BMG guy or give up what you like
- to please others
. [ATT MODS: I stink at the codes- can you correct this to either italics or underlining if I did it wrong? Thanks loads and gut voch!] If you decide on your own, for good reasons, that you don’t think that rap or reggae or what have you is good music for you to listen to, then you’ll find plenty of people who agree with you. There are many speakers, like Rabbi Nissel mentioned by ultimateskier, who may convince you. (Happens to be he didn’t really do it for me, but that’s a story for a whole different day. Everyone works differently.) But if you’re doing it for the peer pressure, then that just causes resentment. Like VM said, there is a lot of peer pressure that is absolutely not lesheim shamayim, peer pressure that is for completely the wrong motives and really destructive, as you’ve noticed for yourself. No real, true change can come from anywhere but within. There can be a spark from outside, but if you don’t feel an inner conviction, it won’t go anywhere.
The chumra-of-the-month club has many many actively recruiting members. When they try to send you this month’s new shipment, make sure they don’t hit your address.
I don’t listen to rap, and it’s just really not my style, but I’ve had people tell me that some things that I listen to weren’t kosher, such as (memorably) one respected rov who said that classical music was tamei. Maybe in twenty years I’ll see his point of view (I’m skeptical, but hey, you never know). Right now, though, if I tried to assimilate that perspective and stop listening to Mozart, I’d be a seething mass of disbelief and resentment (and that’s not a metaphor or hyperbole- ask anyone who knows me, that’s literally how I’d act) because that’s just not me and not how I think. It doesn’t matter how truly righteous and correct anyone’s opinion may be- until I really, truly buy it, it’s just a no go. But you know that already. Remember, nobody can “impose” hashkafa on you. Hashkafa is your viewpoint, and even two people looking at the same thing from the same location will by necessity see things slightly differently.