how do you define bad musical taste?

http://home.online.no/~knhongro/Geir/engelsk.htm

i think that picture up top is new! with it added -- and even without it, truthfully -- this is a mahir in the making.

Anyhow Geir Hongro looks like Matt Pinfield's crazier brother. Geir Hongro is my definition of bad taste, not because of what he likes but the reasons behind it. It's that fascist taste thing, ironic with his anti-fascist sticker on the page.

I guess this is because I (want to) believe that people are more than the sum of their influences. This is where I think Tom's ideas about unpredictability come in. That is, tastes should be unpredictable with respect to expectations based on class, gender, etc. but should be predictable in the sense that they have their own internal logic - which could be a joy to discover in a partner, as I guess Tom is doing.

As for Ally's and james edmund's comments, I don't think it's necessary to agree upon what's good. You just have to share some sense of which questions are important. And questions of taste don't go any further than what they're trying to decide. I mean it's not like you're saying X is stupid or bad because X doesn't like Y (or hopefully, no one is saying that).

Guy wrote: "Here I think aesthetics is important but it is a much neglected subject. Much of what passed as classical aesthetics was actually a discussion of taste and easily blown apart by a materialist analysis. To really explain the pleasures of a chord structure or a particular rhyme scheme is terribly hard."

This might be a stretch, but I think people basically agree upon notions of physical beauty. Maybe that could be a start. But then again, maybe not.

These things (particular chord structures & rhythms) surely appeal on an instinctive level. Mathematical structures and relationships may have a lot to do with it (I'm absolutely no expert but it's noticeable, for example, how many rhythmic/melodic patterns in folk, pop etc. are based around three measures of a particular phrase with a variation/resolution on the fourth measure).

Re good/bad taste..I'd go along with the idea of these notions being strongly based on social/class divisions and affiliations. This is much easier to pin down with things like interior design than with Pop music (which, in the traditional good/bad view, would *all* fall under 'bad').

But at the same time, it's very easy to convince yourself that your aesthetic sense is derived solely from your own unique sensibilities, and then to construct an idea of good/bad taste that flows from that.

Maybe the concept of taste as good or bad, something you can have more or less of, should be abandoned and replaced with the concept of taste as something like haircolor that can take different values - blond, brunette, etc.

This might be what people meant in saying that taste is simply what you like. But this admission doesn't mean that the concept of taste is not useful. It's a reason for finding people interesting. And again not for what a person likes/dislikes, but in the pattern of what a person likes/dislikes.

The horrible thing about this is that I was just reminded of the character in High Fidelity... Blech!

I can respect the tastes of just about anyone, no matter what they're into. What I can't respect are people who's listening diet looks like something voted by on by a coalition of rock critics, zine editors, and Selected Influential Musicians.

It's not that I think such people are repressing their "true selves" for the sake of a hip image. I just think it's a lack of curiosity for anything that hasn't been designated "safe" for consumption.

Does that make sense? Thought not.....

x0x0x0

"Bad taste, to me, is simply taste with no guts or no personality"– ie the function of taste is to affirm the individual self. Oliver’s need for "guts" suggests he is affirming the strong male self. Thats’s ok as a fetish but are you arguing this as general principle?

Repression of working-class culture? Piffle. Status Quo, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Smokie all (in their very different ways) reflected working-class culture in the 70s, all were very popular, and all were unspeakably vile. If drawing on the songs collected by Cecil Sharp involves repressing latter-day working-class culture, then IMHO it deserves it. Enough with the class-conscious paranoia, Dastoor. I know that's an old public school tie you're hiding.

Because there is a certain fringe of contributors here (no need to name names; it's obvious which ones they are) who seem to have a *huge* chip on their shoulders and a disdain / contempt for their past, which leads them to make quite ridiculous "superior / we're above it all" comments. I appreciate that I was criticising the book Nick alluded to, not Nick himself, but the point holds; he was clearly attracted to such sub-Marxist conspiracy theories, whereas I am a Liberal Democrat. Irreconcilable.

Mark as ever is the master of metaphor. Wrong in every way it is possible to be, of course, but what a comparison. I quite like Black Sabbath, but I see the *culture* they stood for as unspeakably vile, not worth defending, not the music itself.

That's enough. Why do I always start these threads? Ah well.

take the cure. a casual affection for them is most admirable. in fact, the absence of any feeling whatsoever for them in many an indie/post-rocker is somewhat of a turn-off in itself. however, deep- seated cure fandom suggests a truly disturbing level of attachment to harlequin-romance stadium-rock. coupled with a love for u2 (especially if also with a distaste for rap, punk, or metal), it's enough to make one flee.

conversely, a casual taste for sonic youth (esp if _dn_ is favourite album) might make me wary, mainly because it suggests that the listener is more heavily into unwound or mogwai or some other bullshit indie/post.

i think i'm too alienated from belting diva music to really feel anything if someone else is a fan. so long as i don't have to hear it. . .

By 'sorted out' I don't mean 'come to a final resolution' - I can't imagine the dissensus on ILM doing that - but rather, clearly - and relatively systematically - articulating our positions, if we have any, on this stuff. (I don't think that everyone should have a position, or that everyone should be compelled to answer these questions - far from it. But it might provide some clarification in some cases.)

Ridiculous. Why shouldn't there always be a favorite band? I will use my MBV example here with a particular point -- no other band was ever, before or so afterward, able to so completely, totally and utterly *send* me on first listening. The problem is not taste, but arbiters forcing taste into boxes and processes to suit their own visions of the universe -- as, frankly, you're trying to do.

see "your cv as a music listener" thread where you did not contribute actively yet

This might be me, but I don't start threads to take people to task for not adding to them, or not doing so the right or 'active' way. I gave you my answer and if that bugs you, do believe me that I see that as your worry, not mine.

What I *am* annoyed with your astonishing presumption -- there is absolutely no other way to describe it -- with how you feel others should react/deal with/interpret music. And that presumption is truly mind-boggling. Your last few posts see you take on the role of an incredibly self-righteous commentator who cannot and will not see anything except through your own lens. You express revulsion -- it is not too harsh a word to use -- that others would dare to have opinions on taste and its functions that don't match your own worldview, and react to these differences not with an appreciation of how those opinions might be different, but instead with patronizing condescension. I find this to be impossible to deal with if you expect me to engage in a further discussion with you.

You say yourself we are here to 'exchange' views. I have heard your views and while I do not hold to your personal standards of growing with and enjoying music, I do not dismiss them as invalid, because obviously they succeed for you. Why, then, do you not grant me that same courtesy?

I think that could be delivered both ways here.

Why do you attack me? Did you read the whole thread? There were other people you could have attacked before (like Ally and Sundar).

This should perhaps tell you that I found something in your posts that I objected to which I didn't find in theirs -- which does in fact happen to be the case.

I would be interested in your opinion concerning bad taste.

It does not exist as an objective phenomenon. I have yet to see anyone anywhere *prove* the existence of correct taste or critical reaction. There are many who claim to have found it, but they are in the end speaking for themselves or for a tradition that is not inherently universal. I find your claim of shifting between subjective and objective taste impossible to accept as a result.

Sorry Ned but I find your behaviour quite destructive

I find yours incredibly frustrating, the complaint of someone who says something and then wonders why in the world anyone might even slightly disagree. Believe me, I'm well aware that others disagree with me in turn.

Posting to Plasmastics fan sites.

Being 33 or 34 and never having heard Small Faces or Sly Stone

Sorry, Alex.

There is actually a way of defining "taste" that skirts your arguments for radical subjectivity, and that is to consider "taste" not as a set of critical reactions, but rather as a set of tools used in the formation of those reactions. I.e., "U2 is great" and "John Zorn is great" fall on the unprovable-assertion side of subjective taste, whereas having the ability to compare, contrast, or otherwise draw connections between the work of one and the other -- or more generally making clear and coherent distinctions between and critical appraisals of the music one "likes" and "dislikes" -- would be an objective, if impossible to measure, skill. (I say "impossible to measure" because it takes a whole other set of verbal skills and music-jargon knowledge to adequately express those distinctions and appraisals, but I think we can take it as obvious that the initial skills exist in differing quantities and qualities, can't we? One-word post reading "No" will result in annoyance on my part.)

Possibly a bad way of putting it, but do you see what I mean? "Having good taste" can mean not the ability to objectively identify overall good / bad value in individual works, but rather a well-formed understanding of what one likes and dislikes and why. I think the example given last time this point was raised here was the difference between (a) the guy who hears a song on the radio, buys the record, and hates everything but that single, and (b) that person's friend, who heard the same single and said "Dude, I guarantee you're not going to like the rest of that record." It's not the greatest example, in that I see a few glaring holes in its logic, but it gets at the idea of taste as being "discerning," in the literal sense -- being able to discern between various musical qualities. This favors those with extensive listening backgrounds as having better "taste," but this doesn't bother me too much, insofar as continually experiencing any art form is surely the way to refine one's taste.

Am I going anyplace useful here?

Nein. There, see, you can relax now. ;-)

More to the point -- it's an interesting way of looking at it, but I think it sort of...loops back in on itself, for lack of a better way of putting it? Is that 'well-formed understanding' really a matter of taste at all? *thinks for a bit* Hmm...it almost strikes me as the difference -- and I'm thinking of it this way based on your own example regarding purchases and hit status -- between a couple of folks at the horse races, one saying, "That's a really great looking horse! Fiery, well-groomed, looks powerful" and another saying, "I'm willing to bet that that horse over there is the one which is going to be the winner." This is an extreme example, but I trust you see what I'm trying to get at, if hamhandedly. Person one appreciates for lack of a better word the aesthetics according to his/her standards, person two is interested in figuring out what will succeed, both are potentially looking at the same animal.

I have to say I'm also sympathetic to Tom's discussion about how things *can't* be predicted, how the capacity for surprise exists, even if the scope goes from greater to lesser shifts in thinking. The impact of sheer chance is important, and there's no A & R person canny enough to know every potential twist and turn.

I'm only saying that the idea creates an objective sense of what "taste" is, not that you'd actually want too much of it.

Are Morton Feldman aficionados seen as having bad taste? Odd.

I like your construction, though, in the sense that there is something seen to be challenging standards and that this can provide the taste thrill. Though I don't think it's always the case -- as Brian can confirm, I've said for years that I don't have any guilt over liking something or not, that I don't have any guilty pleasures. The 'surprise' is not so much that I find myself liking something I'm not supposed to as it is simply finding something new and going, "Ah, neat!" At least, this is my own perception and experience.

No, no, no -- I don't think I'm being clear. I'm accepting the Radical Subjectivist Program. What I'm saying is that people have differening abilities to discern between musical features -- e.g., when I was listening to Portishead once and my mother asked "Is that Toni Braxton? It sounds like Toni Braxton." My argument, which I'm just now becoming clear on myself, is that those "discerning" listeners therefore know their own taste, and that that taste is knowable to others with those "discerning" abilities -- and thus all that rockist music accumulates a "critical consensus" precisely because it's makers can programmatically figure out what tastes their satisfying. I.e., these tasteful rockists have it down to a quantifiable science, and thus know officially that X is "good" and Y is "not good."

On the other hand, the rank-and-file casual pop listener does not have this Proven By Science "taste," and thus his/her reactions are less knowable. (It's 100x harder to recognize a chart hit than a solid-selling highbrow indie record, right?) Thus pop music can't simply punch the standard critical-discerning-appeal buttons and have done with it -- pop makes no assumptions about how it can make you feel, and therefore just tries its hardest. I'm saying I think that's what Tom likes -- that neither he nor the pop knows what the reaction's going to be, and he can be excited to actually have that reaction, as opposed to the critical- consensus stuff, where his reaction might be "Ho, hum, yes, they are doing everything they are supposed to do in order to be considered 'good.'"

Does that seem to make more sense than what I said before, or am I just making this worse?

Yes I see what you're saying but but but - still the problem seems to be - where does this exercising of taste occur? In the example given the tasteful person is exercising his knowledge of other people's tastes not his own. Using the method on his own listening comes down to "I know what I like" still, surely? You talk about listeners being "trained to respect" things - well I agree, but I think this training is social not aural.

Sorry for posting so much.

No no no no no! I'm sorry -- I'm doing a lousy job explaining this. What I'm saying is that "like," "good," and "bad" are all beside the point, and that "taste" is simply an ability to discern between what's what. Thus I would have "good taste" in shoegazer bands if I could listen to a three-second snippet of a previously unreleased track and say, "Ahh, judging by the guitar processing, I'm fairly sure that's either Slowdive or Chapterhouse." And thus I do have not-so-great taste in IDM, because I don't yet recognize what I imagine are fairly crucial differences between Datachi and Cex. (I haven't really listened to Cex yet, but I think you see what I mean.) No "like," "good," or "bad," just an ability to make clear, coherent, or incisive distinctions and connections between X and Y, A and B.

For example: in your own listening to West African pop, haven't you noticed a sort of learning curve of "taste?" I'd imagine it all sounded pretty similar at first, and then gradually the distinctions and ins-and-outs of it became more and more clear to you, right? I'm considering that skill -- whatever allowed you to form those mental distinctions and associations -- "taste."

no way are you serious

i am serious - did these guys get recuperated from dad & mom rock status at some point recently that I missed?

yes.

i mean, i personally am not really down with h&o, but a bunch of people in the under 50 set are iirc

Pretty much everyone I know is at least fond and they're on GTA and ryan schreiber loves them so I don't think I'm alone.

see this is part of what I was talking about in terms of oppositional aesthetics changing over time ...I associate Hall and Oates with the bland and/or brainless top 40 that I grew up with and developed teenage musical tastes in opposition to. See also: Huey Lewis & the News

Kind of tempted to respond that "No, you don't have a bad taste in music, but your mates do. You are a bit of an early-bloomer in getting decent musical taste, but another 2-3 years and your mates will all be into the same stuff".

Just realised I never answered the question - it was probably around my 15th birthday or so.

Thing is, time has a way of smoothing over "cool" vs. "uncool". I mean, I can only think about when I was in my teens and discovering the music of 20 years previous. (Obv I was a teenager in the 80s, and thus discovering 60s music) And there wasn't much discernment - would consume Nancy Sinatra with the same enthusiasm as the Electric Prunes. And yet, in the 60s, those two things were polar opposites of cool and uncool.

Those of us who are old enough to remember the 80s have distinct ideas of what was cool vs. uncool - Hall and Oates definitely being in the latter, when the cool kids would have been listening to Echo and the Bunnymen or TalkingHeads or whatever. But without that frame of reference, it's not a question of irony or whathaveyou, it's just finding this cache of music From The Past and not assigning labels to it.

Exactly, cool is always context specific and "timeless cool" is an oxymoron.

Same applies to good and bad taste, really.

What interest me is to try to strip all considerations of social capital away from the notion of "taste" and try to see if anything remains. By "considerations of social capital" I mean claims like Alex in NYC's that good taste = not being a populist sheeple, a means of standing out from the masses as a good educated person should. Does anything remain of the notion of taste when you remove those considerations? I know this is an old well-worked question but it seems to me the heart of the matter.

It's the only interesting part of the question, sure. Personally I think taste only exists within a specific social context tho.

I agree with you not least because I think everything exists within a specific social context (death of the Enlightenment and all that).

Well, firstly I don't know that you can strip away the notion of Cultural Capital away from notions of taste. Even when you remove the accompanying culture that assigns cool/uncool to certain strands of music, you still are dealing with individual notions of what is appealing in Music which vary so much from person to person (as evidenced by a thread where both Geir and Alex NYC have weighed in with similar opinions for opposite reasoning)

I think a more useful dichotomy is discerning/non-discerning - not to put value judgements on either. But there are two ways of coming at music - the first is that you have an idea of What It Is You Like, and to ruthlessly pursue that as your individual Taste. The other is to absorb all music on an equal basis, and weight it as to weather it is a ... quintessential example of the kind of music that it is.

Whether, not weather. Ha ha.

Bless the weather! (Actually, One World right now.)

Re. the discerning/non-discerning dichotomy: there are different types of discernment, though. For instance, Alex in NYC's stance seems discerning to me. Its discernment, though, is based on optimizing his social capital: to maximize his social distance from others who are less discerning.

In our individual judgments regarding taste, do we tap into anything more than the subjective, anything that's not reducible to a desire to stake our own cultural territory?

Well, I take it that you've seen the research on musical taste-clusters, right? That computer analysis of music reveals cross-genre preferences within disparate groups of people. (Argh, wish I could remember who did the study, it was very interesting.)

No, but it sounds very interesting indeed! As long as they don't venture into neuroscience or evolutionary psychology.

Ha ha, no. It was within the context of trying to analyse which songs will be "hits" - it was a long article in a magazine, though unfortunately I can no longer remember which. Might have been the Guardian Weekend, in which case it would still be sitting in a pile in my loo. (Or the OMM in which case it won't.)

I mean, obviously record companies and songwriters would be bery happy if there some way to mathematically analyse what songs will be most appealing on non-subjective criteria. (Complexity of melody, rhythm, BPM, harmonic structure, that sort of thing) But instead of boiling down to the perfect popsong, it found songs gathered in clusters, whereby if a person liked one of them, they were highly likely to like the other music within the cluster, regardless of whether it was Motorhead or Brahms.

I think I saw something like that about the time 'Crazy' by Gnarls Barkly came out - it fell into about every cluster imaginable, so the record company knew they had the ideal hit on their hands.

is it this you're talking about?

Ah, thank you! That's the one.

Another piece on the same process, different company apparently, has gnarls barkly factoid:
http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_10_16_a_formula.html

Thread has moved on, but I guess listening to the rock show on the radio aged 12-13 was my first attempt to like music that my peers hadn't heard of and/or thought was weird. Sort of a proto-indieism but I hadn't worked out that indie brought the real smug superiority or where to find it. Got there by aged 14.

If Pitchfork had existed when I was a kid, maybe I could've reached indie dorkdom a couple of years early by bypassing entirely the stage of convincing myself that I'd like Megadeth but not daring to spend the money on their albums. But then, kid doesn't need to spend money buying CDs any more (nor did I once I discovered the local library had music, but still, time, effort, blank tape money, lending fees).

Strange to think of me aged 13 with like 5 CDs, each saved up for and treasured and listened to over and over again, and him aged 13 with a list of fifty bands he's downloaded that week, presumably listened to about once, and decided are part of the list which encapsulates his identity. But that's a familiar impulse too - age 14-15 I wrote lots of band names and put free-with-magazine band stickers on my school science folder to, like, impress people with my musical authority, or something, and maybe a third of them I'm fairly sure I'd never heard at all.

Perhaps the more interesting question is what this was like 15 years ago, when you had to spend a lot of time and money amassing a collection of cd's before you could profess things.

I listened to what was then called "classic rock" of the 1960s and 1970s until I was about 16, when as an explicit act of identity formation I decided to programatically make my music taste "more cool" -- this involved buying two R.E.M. cassettes (Document and Murmur) and playing them every night until they were my favorite records. From there, the Cure, Jesus and Mary Chain, Julian Cope, etc. but didn't really go full-on "indie" (or "alternative" as it was then called) until first year of college (1989) when my roommates gave me cassettes of Doolittle and London 0, Hull 4 for my birthday.

It was definitely different pre-internet; I guess you could have subscribed to music magazines, but barring that, for a kid in the suburbs you heard about bands from your friends or on alternative radio (I don't think I knew there was such a thing as college radio then) and it was a bit random what you heard and what you didn't hear. I bought my first Julian Cope record because I read a good review of it in the Washington Post.

Oh yeah, and as a representative of the past, let me just say that the Alanis Morrissette record was certainly branded as indie when it came out and tons of huge Mountain Goats fans really liked it, and still do, me included.

And that Hall and Oates was indeed a pretty straight-ahead, not-cool thing to like when I was a kid. A lot like Huey Lewis. But does a readoption of Huey Lewis by contemporary tastemakers seem out of the question to you? Not to me.

You're right that it was hard to find. I think I was the first kid at school to get anywhere beyond chart music, and that needed a total leap into the dark - the Chart Show's Indie Chart with its lovely psychedelic carousel was about the only gateway I can remember. The first few NMEs I got were like discovering the Americas - Indie No.1s! Stiff Records! The Greatest Drummers Of All Time! - there was so much undreamt-of stuff to care about that I managed to miss Nirvana breaking about six months later because I was poking about in Sarah Records or some other blind alley instead.

For all that I criticise the greyness of indie as an aesthetic, I guess it really did feel like a world of discovery at the time. It was really weird to get to university three or four years later and find that, the odd metalhead or goth apart, people there had never even attempted a similar journey and were mostly content with stuff like Mike & The Mechanics.

first thing that came to mind when I saw the thread title was, "someone who doesn't like black sabbath."

I'd say if you enjoy the musical stylings of Nickleback then you are beyond hope.

I don't think it's so much the things you like but why you like them and how you express this liking
e.g.
National Review's Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs

though certain acts lend themselves to and encourage being appreciated in an ugly way (ha! nickleback!)

do you people pay attention??