I listen too much to have too many limitations. I have discovered that there is time allotted in life for all music, really. My limitations are with the most modern cookie-cutter pop that is selling a cartoon image more than music. Obvious by the overuse of vocal synth because the person with the actual singing voice isn't built for twerking or the fashion stage. I was also not a fan of that older carnival style country music with the rhinestones and silly hair styles but there are some exceptions. Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Doc Watson, Merle Travis, Chet Atkins and a few others.
When my music choices were limited, I spent a lot of time with repeats. Like following a top 40 radio station that still plays the same handful of classics this many decades on. Then there is the other people who know nothing other than the radio, to inflict the same songs on me yet again because that's all they know to be popular. Repetitive music is a good way to get someone like me to quit music. I don't care to watch most movies more than twice, or read the same book too many times. I'll give it a few chances to help with what I may have missed, but after it becomes too familiar, I want to move on, for awhile at least before coming back to it.
Rock music is more like classical than you might think. Many of the better ones, actually compose complicated music on piano or acoustic instruments. Look at some of the compositions from groups like Kansas, and you can't help but notice there is classical training, or interests at the very least.
Randy Rhoads, one of the most well known electric guitarists of classic rock music, was very much into classical guitar. You can hear it in his playing. Talk about virtuosity. He would visit and train with classical musicians just to expand his skillset and to keep it inspired. There are many others.
Lindsay Buckingham from Fleetwood Mac. The acoustic guitar in the song, "Never Going Back Again," is touted as one of the most difficult to play, styled after a folk/country artists playing of note among guitar players by the name of Merle Travis. Listening to some of the intricacies in even Merles most simplistic playing is noteworthy. Not to mention the tones some of these people pull out of their playing style. And I am not a huge fan of country music, and can't go modern country, which also overuses vocal synth in everything new.
But Jazz? Talk about talent. Some of it's biggest names from some of the most blight areas of this country would be easy to stereotype as a lucky story. Surely they rose up from the ghetto and got a break somehow to be heard at all. But then one starts to dig, and finds many of them are actually formally educated with degrees, and many end up serving what amounts to accredited professorships at some of the more distinguished schools of music, and do indeed know their way around classical theory. Again, you can't help but hear it in their playing. It's what causes me to research their bios sometimes.
The violin player from the rock group Kansas. I recall the first time I went to see them live. What the heck is this hippie violinist doing in a rock band? Hmmm. . . Robby Steinhardt. His father, Milton Steinhardt, was the director of music history at the University of Kansas. Lifted from Wiki: "Robby started violin lessons at age eight and was classically trained. When his family traveled to Europe, the young Steinhardt played with some orchestras there. Steinhardt attended
Lawrence High School and was the concertmaster during his high school years." The rest of the band certainly had the same in common, in order to even know each other at all.
In more ways than not, rock music ends up being simplified (where common people can understand it too), or even evolved classical music that technology could not pass up. I often wonder what a JS Bach could have done with electrified instruments. He probably would have made rock music. It's easier for me to believe that many of these rock musicians have been into classical music, but also could not be constrained by it's apparent limitations, much like that which antiquated religions tended to inflict on the other arts as well.
