I no longer feel the least bit of guilt about any of my tastes, musical or otherwise. However, in my youth, I went through several different phases during which I felt obligations to "like" certain categories of music while disparaging others.

For a period of time in my late teens and early 20s, I consciously rejected whole categories of music that I had enjoyed throughout my previous life, in favor of a rather narrowly defined selection of "authentic" folk and blues styles. Not that the object of my newfound enthusiasm was at all unworthy ~ the stuff was and is wonderful ~ but there was really never any reason to reject the entire remaining portion of the musical spectrum.

Only as certain segments of the "folk" world began to morph into "folk rock" and electrified blues and psychedelia did I allow myself to resume feeling good about enjoying good performances of all categories of music.

One observation, something I find interesting and quite telling: the popular "soul" music of the 1960s ~ material that I originally found to be a bit "outside the pale" and that I briefly resisted enjoying before opening my tastes back up ~ has now become the object of quasi-scholarly interest and snob-appeal to a younger generation. Their interest in the output of the J&M Studio in 1950s New Orleans, Stax/Volt of 1960s Memphis, etc., is very much like the interest that some young folks in the mid-60s had for blues and/or country field recordings from the 1920s and 30s.

My older son and his friends, for example, reject much of the current pop music marketed towards their generation (quite rightly, in my opinion, by the way, but that's another story) and cultivate a nearly-obsessive interest in R&B and soul music from the 50s and 60s. They know much more than I do about, say, Sam Cooke's family life, the origins of the F.A.M.E. studio in Muscle Shoals, etc., etc.