He didn’t even like it. Too schmaltzy. Too whiny. Why the hell couldn’t he get it out of his mind? He liked hip-hop, raw and thumping. Maybe his taste in music—or lack of taste, his parents insisted—had been a reaction to the violin lessons he’d been forced to take as a child. Every week he’d had to trudge down Brighton 7th Street to Mr. Chomsky’s apartment, where he’d spend an hour sawing away on his cheap, battered fiddle while Mr. Chomsky would mutter, “So much talent going to waste because you don’t practice enough! Apply yourself!” Max had wanted to apply himself to the stickball games going on in the street or to the stretch of beach beckoning him from the southern end of Brighton 7th,, not to mastering vibratos and bow positions. But his parents were old country, old school, old everything. They might have emigrated from Russia and embraced their newly minted American citizenship, but the only music they considered worthwhile was what Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky, Stravinksy and Shostakovich had written.
