I remember things like being at a party once when I was in my 20s and a fellow Smiths fan, in fact a Morrissey look-alike, suggested that we should convince our friend the hostess to play some Smiths, and she moaned and groaned about what a moaner and groaner Morrissey is until we had to shut it off and listen to more "tasteful" crap like Billie Holliday (nothing on earth against Billie Holliday, but she's been co-opted by college students as a safe and generic choice).
I think this is what Garry Mulholland has very aptly described as "Fear of Music". If you're fortunate, you have one or a few music buddies who take it for granted that you will find it interesting to spend an evening not just talking and drinking, but also listening to a lot of music with nothing much in common except he thinks it's excellent. This is the sort of people who is not afraid to use music and to make it what it has the capacity to be for anyone ready to invest a bit of attention and care.
At least 95% of all people however suffer from "Fear of Music", and will, on all social occasions, be motivated primarily be fear of the inappropriate. Fear of playing something that puts other people off, fear of playing something that labels you the wrong way, fear of playing something that risks ridicule from the cognoscendi, fear of deviating from some unspoken norm of what music fits which occasion. Hence Billie Holliday: Almost nobody dislikes it, all music lovers virtually irrespective of taste respect it. It may not mark you as avantgarde, but certainly it shows that you do not have bad taste. It can be ignored if you want without much trouble, it is familiar and requires no effort to appreciate by anyone, it works as mood music, it is interesting enough to talk about. It is, in short, the sort of 100% perfectly safe music you put on when you don't want to take any chances. Not a big sin and we've all done it, but it does rather mean that if the particular party in question is going to get interesting, it sure as hell isn't going to have anything whatsoever to do with the music.
I used to find this a lot more difficult to accept as a student than I do now as an adult, and I think I was right about that, to be quite honest. There were - are - people who seem to think that playing anything else than a commonly agreed set of tasteful music that cannot possibly offend anyone is an unthinkable act of bad manners or base egotism, like showing up without having showered for two weeks or vomiting in the punch bowl. This suggests that music is a neccessary evil from a party point of view, like napkins - it's got's to be there don't you know, but if it becomes a topic of considerable attention, it's not the thing. Hence, much as I like Billie Holliday and Björk and all the other tastefully safe stuff that gets pushed on these occasions, it always did give me an overpowering urge to throw the CD out the window, followed by the host. Or leave. Or at the very least get drunk and insult someone. Or, well, get semi-drunk and be quite surly, or stay in the kitchen/on the balcony all evening and chat with the other refugees. Oh yes, they will be there, because any party automatically structures itself around a few dominat elements, and the music is almost always one of them. You can try to quench it by doing the Billie Holliday thing, but the sort of people who resent that sense it imediately, and respond instictively by simply drifting away from the core of the party and to its margins, where more congenitality might be found, an act of intuitive protest and rejection of the party's core values, one could perhaps say.
But that's when you're 18, or 25. Nowadays, it merely shows that the hosts are in possession of commendable hosting skills, because social gatherings are supposed to not be about music very much, but about more mature things. No, f*ck it, I've changed my mind - I still despise that just as much as I ever did.
cheers
I was introduced to them in 1986, and they were not yet popular in America at all then. In fact, they didn't get any radio play in the states until Strangeways... AFTER they'd split up! 
