Your lack of openness to new music is ruining you.

While we all have our own unique tastes and music profiles, it can be easy to fall into the same listening cycles over and over again.

I tend to always come back into rap, no matter how far I may stray from it.

For a number of years, this habit plagued me. After entering college, I became bored and dissatisfied with rap music and subsequently switched to more genres.

One genre I dove head-first into was jazz piano.

I appreciated the off-the-cuff, sometimes improvisational nature that challenged both my patience and my production-oriented mind.

There’s something irreplaceable about Bill Evans and Jim Halls’ 1962 album “Undercurrent” and the clashing dance of piano and guitar that I wouldn’t have found if I had never explored my music taste.

Yet, at the same time as I was enjoying discovering new music, a large portion of it was flat-out horrible and unpleasant to listen to.

This is a risk that I took on, though, when I set out to discover more new music–if you can’t handle being uncomfortable for three to five minutes, you’re depriving yourself of the uncertainty that is venturing out of your comfort zone.

Furthermore, exposure to multiple languages and cultures through music grants us a baseline understanding of not only other languages but also other people.

However, in exploring cultures other than our own, we must exercise caution not to misuse harmful symbols or perpetuate untrue or harmful stereotypes. As an example of how not to act, take Australian rapper Iggy Azalea.

Though her speaking voice carries a strong Australian accent, she prefers to use a “blaccent,” or “Black accent,” when rapping. Her use of the blaccent, though she claims to have grown up in the south, mimics African American Vernacular English (AAVE) conventions.

In a predominantly Black-driven industry mostly consumed by white listeners, people like Iggy are able to twist and steal elements of Black culture in order to further their own career.

Iggy started as a hip-hop listener and was raised in the south, granting her exposure to rap music and the linguistic dimensions of AAVE.

Listening to multiple genres exposes the listener to different content and, in turn, can lead to greater knowledge of unfamiliar sounds, languages and even cultures. In this way, switching between genres challenges preconceived notions and allows us to tap into cultural spheres of places we might be unaware of.

Of course, music streaming is inherently privileged–not all those who wish to listen to a record have the financial or connectivity needs to meet it.

We should not limit ourselves to one sphere of music and ought to expand our horizons not only because it’s novel and exciting, but because it’s necessary as a globalized society.