CARLTON FLETCHER: Warning: Misspoken words don’t mix well with crow

How can you eat any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

— Pink Floyd

I’m not going to call any names, but recently someone I know — and respect — quite well took a swipe at some of the Classic Rock artists and songs that he claimed he “never wanted to hear again.”

OK.

I usually write stuff like that off to misspent youth or bad home training, but I know this guy too well to think that. So I’m going to risk his wrath by dredging up that old elitist attitude most young people develop when they go off to college. You know what I’m talking about … “I don’t listen to anything they play on terrestrial radio” … “You’ve been brainwashed by corporate America into listening to that pop/Top 40 crap that is an embarrassment to music” … “The only true musicians today are (fill in the name of unknown noisemakers) …

It always amazes — and amuses … maybe bemuses — me when college kids who listened to nothing but, say, hair metal in high school come home for a visit and declare that the music they once loved is now worthless and that they’ve seen the light while off getting educated.

And that’s fine.

Our tastes do change. But to find the true meaning of music during one semester at good old State U is a little far-fetched, to say the least. Especially when the reason for denouncing anything other than the works of (unknown noisemakers) is that the other music is derivative and only appelas to sheep who lack originality.

(That, by the way, reminds me of something I read in Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain’s posthumously released “Journals,” which is, essentially, a collection of his random thoughts and rough drafts of letters and song lyrics pubished in 2003, almost a decade after his 1994 suicide. Noting the phoniness that pervades in the so-called free-love, hippie generation, Cobain wrote, “… In turn, the baby boomers become the ultimate conforming yuppie hypocrites a generation has ever produced.” This about the idealistically self-proclaimed noncomformists … hmmmm.)

Unlike this unnamed — but well-loved, smiley face — anti-Classic Rocker and all of the superior musicologists who have a semester or two of college under their belts, I do still listen to the radio. And I love the “Dazed and Confused” soundtrack. And I’m a Skynyrd fan from way back. And I’ll put Marshall Tucker’s “Searching for a Rainbow” album up against any of the twee British acts/serious chick singers with attitude/local band that has a Jew’s harp player twanging out the lead/three-note grim-as-death metal bands that offer today’s true music.

And I love the pop — evil word!! — songs of Nick Jonas and NeYo. And I’ll listen to Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice” or “Everybody’s Everything” 42 times without pause over some clever but talent-challenged white-boy rapper who infuses his rhymes with irony that only those who “really get it” can understand. Hell, I’ll even listen to a three-hour Kiss/Foreigner/Edgar Winter Group greatest hits marathon over some of the Beatles/REM rip-offs that are all the rage.

I’m reminded of an incident from another lifetime ago that I’ve never shared before. After quoting Ice-T (when he was an angry rapper, not playing a cop on TV) to a group of impressionable young people — paraphrasing here — that only ignorant people limit themselves to one kind of music or ignore an artist’s work because of its reputation, I refused when a young lady asked if she could share the latest Garth Brooks song with her friends.

I said no, and was adamant in doing so. See, I’d heard Garth Brooks’ latest and didn’t very much like it. When the young lady asked why she couldn’t share the song with her friends, I said something to the effect that, “Country music sucks and Garth Brooks sucks even worse.”

The young lady paused for the longest moment, a look of hurt on her face. Then she said, “But I thought you said we should decide for ourselves what we like and don’t like, not listen to someone else’s opinion.”

Gulp.

So, Shannon Tilley, I don’t know where you are now, haven’t heard hide nor hair of you in almost three decades. But I’m sorry. You were right. I was wrong.

Oh, and to this wise young man who is anti-radio, anti-Classic Rock, anti-Skynyrd? May you never have to eat your words of derision. Mixed with crow, they leave one awful aftertaste.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected].