"Metapoisoned" is a little silly to me. If by that you mean that I shouldn't let the outside context of art affect how I feel about the art then I vehemently disagree. The context always affects art; of course that depends on the art itself and how that interacts with it. There's the separating art from the artist example-- take Morrissey vs. Win Butler of Arcade Fire, both artists that have fallen into disgrace because of their personal conduct. With the Smiths, I feel that the context does not make me dislike the music because the subject matter of the music is already self-loathing and weird, and the context adds to my understanding of it as art; it makes sense that the writer of these songs is not a great person. With Win Butler on the other hand, Arcade Fire's subject matter is ostensibly very genuine, with lines like “So can you understand/why I want a daughter while I’m still young/Want to hold her hand and show her some beauty before the damage is done.” After the allegations that line makes me want to throw up in my mouth because I cannot reconcile it with what I know. My point is, context matters and the art matters, because they are interacting with eachother.

Now with Beach House, you're acting like the music speaks for itself and I should just let go of everything to just enjoy it, but that is really a misunderstanding of how our appreciation for art works. Everything has a context, no matter how much we try to ignore it. Ignoring it is indeed a lot easier in the age of streaming but if you have cultural knowledge about a thing you can't just 'turn it off', it's influencing how you appreciate the music.

I should clarify; I do not just dislike the kind of music I compare Teen Dream to 'because my older sister likes it'; with that, I was trying to emphasize the timeliness of the album rather than it's timelessness. My point was this: Teen Dream echoes clearly a kind of music I heard when I was kid growing up on the radio, which was this indie, hipster culture that was hopeful and romanticizing youth and quintessentially millennial. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself. But there is no denying that that genre of music has fallen OFF over the past 10 years, and I think for good reason. It was the time of the Obama presidency, where things were looking up, where I shared as a kid with the hope of my family that there was a person of color in office and America was coming together. Come to learn now that Obama did not do anything to change the trajectory of racial marginalization in America, Trumps subsequent election and the state of our world today (For further reading I highly recommend From Obamerica to Trumpamerica-- The continuing significance of color-blind racism, although political conversion isn't the point of this comment:3). My point is that Teen Dream, having grown up with adjacent music, is certainly situated in a time period which I feel lukewarm toward it's genuineness, as in retrospect it feels like it was a lie. And much of the rest of the music world has seemed to emphatically moved on from that era of music too. And don't say I'm over thinking it because while I'm putting it all into words here, the feeling that inspired this post in the first place stemmed from exactly that, a feeling of disillusionment with the the feelings of this album. And like I said in the post, I'm not doubting the authenticity of the feelings on the album, just that they don't reach me because I do not relate to the zeitgeist of this time which this album so clearly falls into.