Lil Yachty. Animal Collective. New Found Glory. Every film that Liza Minnelli sang in from the years 1964 to 1977. Charles Manson's debut album. What do all these things have in common? I pretended to like them intently at one point because the person I was sleeping with or wanted to sleep with liked them and I wanted to impress them. Actually, I would have rather listened to someone kicking a plastic bollard over and over again than hear another second of these various acts' incessant wailing but I had a goal in mind at the time.
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Weâve all been there. No two people are the same, so itâs natural to want to merge your interests in a bid to get closer to a person. Someone has probably done it for you too. When I posted a call-out on Instagram for this piece, for instance, an ex got in touch to say that during all our years together they actually despised The Smiths and did I want to speak to them about it? And then I got thinking about all the times I made someone sit through another episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, about the times I tried to explain that jfc Blond(e) isnât boring by the third or fourth listen, about singing (or rather groaning) Sonic Youth songs at someoneâs face in a bid to get them to like them too. Fuck, I thought, this is bad. This is really bad.My point being: different people like different shit and sometimes people pretend to like other peopleâs shit because of romance. Which brings me to today, Valentine's Day, the day of love and also objectively the shittest national holiday because nobody gets time off and all the basic couples in your life are even worse. Anyway, to celebrate the proper way, we thought weâd ask a bunch of people about all the bands they pretended to like for a shitty ex. Here's what they said:There's this Avenged Sevenfold song called âDear Godâ and the lyrics are like, âHold her when I'm not around / When I'm much too far awayâ. Anyway, my ex chose it as 'our song' when I was going away for uni. I absolutely hated it, but it was just my ex's type of music so I just sort of accepted it? I honestly couldn't listen to it then and definitely can't now. But he would get super emotional every time he played it and I just cringed inside. Then when we broke up, he made a slideshow of our most recent holiday pics together and put it as backing music. ALEX, 24
AVENGED SEVENFOLD
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THEE OH SEES
BEN FOLDS
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