The latest exercise in futility comes out of Queens, NY, where 21-year-old Lianne Hanes has decided that she will no longer accept having poor music taste, and will, instead, change it by force.
“I just think if I really set my mind to it, I can start liking different things than I like,” Lianne told reporters gathered at the scene. “If I simply force myself to listen to ‘good’ music, eventually I will reverse psychology myself into liking it.”
While this does not sound extremely scientific, it is also not scientific at all.
The whole ordeal started when Lianne went over to a new friend’s house for dinner and realized her own music taste is extremely embarrassing.
“My friend invited everyone to add songs to the queue, and it became extremely obvious which songs were mine,” Lianne continued. “Everyone else played a lot of Ms. Lauryn Hill, Fleetwood Mac, Noname, and a bunch of bands from the 90s I’d never heard of. And, sure, I queued back-to-back-to-back Ed Sheeran, but is that a crime?”
Sources confirm: yes, it is.
After anxiously yelling, “The hits are the hits for a reason!” every time one of her songs came on, Lianne took a good hard look in the mirror and decided it was time to change.
“I do think I could like better music if I tried really hard,” she told reporters from inside a record store where she was absentmindedly flipping through records without looking at any of the names. “Taste is really a matter of effort.”
Since the event, Lianne has tried shocking herself any time she listens to a song with over 60 million streams, classically conditioning herself to associate the Hot Top 40 with pain. Other attempts to change her music taste by force include intentionally smiling every time an indie band comes on shuffle, forcing herself to listen to one Metallica song every hour, and committing to “Kate Bush Fridays,” where she puts “The Sensual World” on repeat and does her best to cry.
While she is trying to trust the process, Lianne has also had several moments of weakness. She installed a whiteboard in her room reading, “Number of Days Since You’ve Listened to ‘Unholy’ by Sam Smith,” and sources confirm she was spotted erasing a “3” and changing it to “0.”
At press time, a coworker asked Lianne for a music rec, and without thinking, she answered, “‘She’s Not There’ by the Zombies.” Upon realizing what she’d done, she shed a proud tear.
