I tried to like Beethoven.  I really, really did.

Every other morning on the way to school, when mastery of the in-car radio fell into my eager hands, I would dive, unthinkingly, for preset button three, and the grainy tones of Classical FM would shimmer out into the car. While my younger brother – less concerned with his own cultural wellbeing at the tender age of ten – sulked and yawned theatrically beside me, I would close my eyes and try as hard as I could to soar, spiritually, on heady cadences, or embrace the deep moral resonances of a mighty chord, or do any of those other things that intelligent, cultured, sophisticated people were meant to be able to do. To my twelve-year-old mind the situation had already been made crystal clear: clever people liked Classical music, and anyone who didn’t appreciate it was small-minded, limited and generally destined for failure. Obviously.

This charade continued for a few months before I was forced to accept the awful and hopelessly inescapable truth: I hated Beethoven. Technically, of course, I knew it was brilliant, but to actually sit down and listen to its endless twiddling keys and heavy chords was, for me, about as spiritually uplifting as a trip to the dentist. Thus ended the reign of Classic FM, and both the cheerful tunes of Edinburgh’s Capital FM and my brother’s friendship were restored to our school runs. Meanwhile, I resigned myself reluctantly to my ignorance.

From where did I acquire this stereotype?  I find it difficult to recall any particular TV programme explicitly advocating such a narrow and bipolar view, or to remember my similarly pre-pubescent friends being at a sufficient level of cultural snobbery (yet) as to embrace it; indeed, the various ‘Queen Bees’ of Form 8 could usually be reliably identified by the number of current Top 40 tracks they could blare at will from their brother’s old iPod shuffle.  I do remember, however, with worrying vividness, my mother’s insistence on keeping the kitchen radio constantly on Classic FM, because it was in some never-quite-specified way “better”, despite my suspicion that it was playing too quietly for anyone but a bat to actually hear.  Whatever the reason for my prejudices, they were about to become relevant to my musical taste in a much more intrusive way.

Flash forward three years, and I had a guilty secret: I liked dubstep. Not just dubstep in general, but Skrillex, the one and only Dub King, in all his screeching, bass-tastic glory. I couldn’t remember exactly how I came across this genre, but, when I did, something instantly clicked. Skrillex was like no music I had heard before: it not only stripped away the niceties of pop – sensibly rhymed lyrics; the predictable strictures of verses and choruses – but somehow still managed to awake a huge emotional response in me as I listened, enraptured. There was something deeply freeing in returning to my room after a hectic day of school, collapsing onto my bed and letting ferocious, crashing blasts of Bangarang rip into my ears until they rang. I had finally completed my quest for total oneness with a piece of music, with its distinctive narrative, with its character, with its meaning. It was utterly thrilling to me.

On one level, this was great – on the other, it was a calamity. Holding a deep disdain for artists like Skrillex is right up there on the intellectual to-do list with promoting moral relativity and bidding for restored typewriters on Ebay. This naturally did not escape the indoctrinated brain of a teenager who had only a few years ago been attempting to scale the peaks of Classical good taste. I was therefore not only embarrassed (it was a few months before I could safely risk ‘dubbing’ in my room at school) but also vaguely perturbed – if I didn’t fit into the kind of personality that had been laid out for me, then who was I?

Well, obviously, I was an academically-motivated teenage girl who also enjoyed kicking back to a bit of Skrillex. For a fairly simple solution, it took me a remarkably long time to come to terms with this. Naturally, however, as I matured (and got bored of having to muffle my speakers at every knock at the door), I began to tell more people about my secret passion for a good drop, and to reshape my identity – and thereby my prejudices.

As a result, my behaviour towards other people’s music tastes started to change, too.  Whereas before I might very well have teased mercilessly any friend who admitted to a case of Bieber Fever or a soft spot for Hungarian whale music, I really did start to respect people’s differing tastes, and, what’s more, to appreciate the simple fact of their sheer variety. 

My obsession with Skrillex has waned over the last year or so (the new order of the day is electro-swing, if you’re asking – give it a listen, it verges perilously close to perfection), but I still stick on the occasional song. Nowadays, if someone opens my door to be hit by an alarming wave of crashes and screams, I do not leap, scarlet-faced, for my '101 Classical Hits' Youtube tab. Thanks to Skrillex, I can not only relish the opportunity to leap to his defence in musical terms – but, more importantly, I can take in my unfortunate visitor’s reply with an open mind.

Unless they like Beethoven, of course. One can be too open-minded.