None of what Rosen writes there resonates with me. This almost reads like the insufferable reddit comments where people claim you don't like Moby Dick or Shakes

None of what Rosen writes there resonates with me. This almost reads like the insufferable reddit comments where people claim you don't like Moby Dick or Shakespeare, that you are just parroting opinions you were told to hold in school. I read and listened widely, often discursively, and ended up liking stuff that none of my peers even knew about for the most part. And no, I wasn't trying to be an iconoclast, the endless teasing was oppressive, but what can you do, you like what you like. Like I started with Bach because my mom showed me how to read music, then let me loose on the piano. I had a songbook, and it had Bach's (actually Petzold's) Minuet in G major&minor. That grabbed me in a way nothing else in the book did (kid's book, so stuff like silent night, camptown races, etc). No one 'told' me to like it, or even play it, and there was certainly no social pressure to do so, quite the opposite. It was entirely internal, and contrary to everything happening around me (pop, C&W, think rural uneducated population with a disdain for learning and the arts). I'm not arguing that people can't develop appreciation via faking, but I find it a rather dismissive and cynical way to look at it in general. I would say it takes a bit of openness if you are approaching something that you didn't consume naturally in social situations, but not too much, except perhaps for very abstract things, or complex things far removed from your experience (Chinese opera for an American, for example, which fascinates yet eludes me at some level).