I spent halftime of this year’s Super Bowl trying to like Kendrick Lamar’s music. I failed. The show was one of the biggest musicals of the year, set in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, blues, and rock and roll, yet none of that city’s greatest music was part of the halftime show. I couldn’t get past my disappointment.

If my grandmother were still alive, she’d say: “Now, you understand how I felt about rock and roll.”

I loved my gram, and I know she loved me, but that didn’t mean we had to love each other’s music. The same goes for the music of my children and grandchildren. My son, Ryan, has played guitar in several “garage rock” bands in his current hometown of Portland. I’ve failed at liking his music.

My taste in music was influenced by the records Gram and my parents played on their 78 rpm consoles – Glen Miller, the Dorsey Brothers, and Benny Goodman, show tunes by Rogers and Hammerstein, the Gershwins, and songs by Cole Porter.

Gram’s favorite was Lawrence Welk. After she got a TV, she never missed a show. Sometimes, I watched Welk with her.

She’d weep with pleasure while his band played numbers that brought back wonderful memories from her youth. I understood her joy. But I never did care much for the Welk show or his music.

My parents had some records I liked more, especially cast recordings from their favorite musicals. I listened to them so often that I learned all the words. Those old musicals are still among my favorites. Every now and then, they are “revived” in a new version of an old Broadway show. Here in Sonoma, our own wonderful Broadway theater group, Transcendence, revives a few, bringing tears of joy to my eyes whenever I see their shows.

But, despite the heavy influence of those songs from my youth, my tastes “evolved” after I got my first transistor radio and discovered stations that played rock and roll.

I’d sneak that little radio into my bed because the signals from low-powered radio stations in the Bay Area came in better after dark. That’s how I discovered rhythm and blues and its sub-genre, “Doo-Wop” rock.

Bill Haley and the Comets already had their hit, “Rock Around the Clock,” which brought rock and roll into the music mainstream, and Elvis was just around the corner. Lawrence Welk wasn’t playing that music, but Elvis made three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show starting in 1956 when I was a freshman at Sonoma Valley High School.

New hit songs were coming out almost every week. They were on top-40 radio stations that we played as loud and as often as our parents allowed, not that they, or Gram, ever became fans.

Some musicians, like Fats Domino, whose musical skills and taste were honed in his hometown of New Orleans, even took old mainstream tunes like “Blueberry Hill” and “My Blue Heaven” and turned them into rock and roll hits. But that didn’t impress Gram. She knew what she liked and stuck with it.

As long as his reruns lasted on TV, she watched Lawrence Welk shows. On occasion, I watched them with her. I miss those moments, even though, as far as music on television was concerned, I preferred American Bandstand, which she couldn’t stand and would not watch.

I don’t think I’ll ever like rap, even if it’s wrapped in a football game. But I can still love my music, while those generations that have followed love theirs, even as their kids and grandkids, will discover some new, and probably annoying, sound, which they will try to like and probably fail.