"Bad" music or personal prejudice?

Recently I was in M&S, commiserating, so I thought with a cashier.  We talk to each other still, in Scotland. I had lamented, perhaps gauchely, that while there were no windows by the checkout there was at least a bucket of tulips by her elbow to enjoy.  I had lasted two weeks working in M&S as a student.  Admittedly, the shop was a building site at the time.  It was the dust, the boredom, the lack of natural light.

She glanced at me warily.  No, I've never missed a window, she said, categorically.  This brought me up short. Had she even noticed the tulips?  I have always felt the deepest sympathy for anyone I have encountered in a windowless working environment. I had assumed the difficulty in enduring this most depressing circumstance was a universal feeling - like being cold and wet for a long time -  and that people trapped in windowless worlds were just profoundly unfortunate.  The lesson here is that no matter how instinctive your conviction, other people just may not share them.  Tolerance or even awareness seems to be highly contextual. 

So it is with classic tracks.  Most people seem to like them, but most is not all.  It is perfectly possible to recognise tracks as widely appreciated and popular yet acknowledge your own personal prejudices against them.  

I have these against some Di Sarli, Rodriguez vals, a few classic Donato tracks and only want to hear OTV sparingly. 

When you ask people what they don't like about certain classic tracks, they often say it is because they are annoying.  I find this with some Donato milongas, or with Gato (1937), for instance.  I enjoy it as a satirical piece, just not so much to dance. 

Some classic tracks are nonetheless so grating I wonder if they have become classics by accident. Did they just work their way into the unwritten canon by pure chance, like some insistently affectionate, mangy dog you can't bring yourself to turf out. OTV's Cacareando (1933), mentioned recently might be such a contender. There is a clue there: including in tangos animal noises, combined with whiny singers could be chancy.  Cacareando somehow seems to be compulsive enough to have pulled it off for decades.