You are walking down the street and you see a young man coming towards you. He has a hat that is too big for him tipped both diagonally and backwards on his head. He is wearing sunshades, even though you live in Toronto and it's the middle of January. No coat covers his bare arms, exposed by the lack of sleeves on his Toronto Raptors Jersey. You can see he has polka dotted underwear on, because the huge belt he is wearing seem unable to hold his pants up above the knees. And of course he has a lot of jewelry on, and is gabbing away on his international cell phone.

Your first instinct might be to judge. The way that young man dresses may lead you to jump to certain conclusions. You may think him a slacker, uneducated, probably selfish. And you probably immediately assume that he listens to rap, the heavy kind made by people in need of a good anger management course.

Is it right to judge a person based on their style of dress alone? The answer in this case is definitely yes. You should cross the street and avoid this young man. It will probably make him feel even tougher, but it's better than him thinking he has something to prove against the nicely dressed lady on her way to an appointment with a commercial mortgage company. It is not always good to pass judgement on someone but often it is better to play it safe than sorry.

That might be obvious in some cases, but you won't be able to tell every time you see someone which kinds of music they listen to. The fact is that many genres have a mixed fan base these days, thanks to the melting pot of music which we call the 1990s. There are no kinds of music which have only one type of listener anymore; rockers like country, a person with a real estate career might like to listen to some punk as well as some pop, and of course young people are all over the map in their musical tastes.

The moral of this story is, you can't always tell what kind of music a person listens to just by what they are wearing, or where they work. Rap fans may be found even in Toronto executive search firms. Much as people come in all shapes and sizes, so too do music tastes vary.