how do you define bad musical taste?

(i suspect my list at 12 would have contained a number of bands i hadn't heard but knew i would count as part of "my taste")

It pains me to see high school kids categorically dis r + b as if it's "cool". I can say that because I felt that way when I was in junior high / high school. It's even worse when 30- or 40-year olds do it.

Maybe if most rn'b weren't so abjectly stupid, they wouldn't feel compelled to dis it.

To my mind, bad taste is defined by settling for any old thing that's making the rounds (as opposed to seeking out something a little off the tired, hackneyed menu).

let's get less rnb and more goth up in dis area

Some xposts: second half of being 14 for me. I'd made attempts a little earlier than this, but when I were young it was harder to find that stuff. Which was most of its appeal, needless to say. I grew out of it pretty early - probably from 18 onwards when it seemed like everyone else was becoming indie (again a major factor).

It might be as accurate to say that I just ran out of indie - I'd always had a residual reaction to other types of music and it was feeling more and more obvious that a lot of the stuff I should've been into, even by my genuine favourite bands, just wasn't very good. Then I moved abroad when I turned 20, which was the decisive break as I physically couldn't get the NME any more and was marooned with my tape collection, which thankfully had had enough time to significantly evolve before I went, plus whatever new stuff was popular enough to reach me there.

I've cringed ever since at contemporaries professing their indiedom, which still happens occasionally today - although to be honest I'm not sure that cringing is very different from the mentality that made me indie in the first place all those years ago - they both seem a bit snobbish. Certainly I displayed similar behaviour in developing interest in other things - classic films, politics, um, genuinely struggling to remember any other interests I've ever had - up until I was about 28, which is probably when I'd be comfortable saying I finally, indisputably became an adult (also makes me sceptical about lowering the franchise to 16, because what the hell do teenagers know about anything?!).

These days I'm all about enjoying the everyday, which is nice after that journey, but even so it has an element of celebrating what noone else does. I doubt I'll ever break out of that mentality now - it seems clear that it's a big part of what I am.

I like your last point, Ismael, since I'm right there with you -- though it takes different forms: when it comes to music, I can't really celebrate what nobody else does since, well, I'm here and that covers a hell of a lot of ground. But that's the quandary of the net -- if you just want to cultivate a private pleasure, how do you do that? (And, arguably, should you?) The best answer, maybe the only one, is nonparticipation in the discourse. This applies for me more with books, I feel -- I read a hell of a lot but I rarely get into deep discussions about what I do read.

Indie germinated at 13. I even had a latent period between 10 and 13 after being introduced to stuff like MBV, Yo La Tengo, Bardo Pond, Aphex Twin, Jeff Mills, wherein I declined into listening to the worst music of my life, skate videos resuscitated me.

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'm born in 88 so I'm kind of on the edge.

What was 'the worst music of your life'?

For me I guess an indie taste (v loose term) kicked in at maybe 13 and was a slow builder in that direction for another few years - fwiw I didn't really have a music taste before that, didn't buy music or listen to the radio or watch TOTP - then just decided it might be a decent use of my time and started listening to evening Radio 1 after school most days and joined the lol Britannia lol Music club lol

people who don't surprise me have bad taste. If you ever construct a sentence along the lines of "I listen to everything from (x) to (y)" you can't be surprising, by the way.

Not sure if (x) and (y) are supposed to be artists or genres, but given the context, I assume Tom meant genres. So liking a wide variety of music genres means you have bad taste? Can't agree. I do think unpredictability is good, but you can be unpredictable and still like a wide variety of genres. I suppose I might agree with his point in the case of someone who liked everything, but I don't think he meant to limit his comment to such an extreme situation.

xxpost: middle school, which is to say mostly bad, overplayed tv/radio stuff.

Books are a really interesting point to raise, Ned - I read a lot too and am always dead keen to make recommendations, but as for the content there is very little I could or would want to share with other people. It had always puzzled me that I Love Books never seems to get into things in depth, and am only now realising that perhaps everyone here feels the same.

Jonathan Franzen said something about there being two types of readers - those who love it because they've got the habit; and those who've got to read because they need to spend time in an imaginary world, and that second type rings very true for me. I also suspect that ILX is filling that very same need (and why I've been progressively acquiring reader's block over the last year or two).

I really resent attempts to turn literature into fashion, or worse part of another trend. I've ranted elsewhere recently against Sebastian Faulks for pedestalling the clique that runs British literature. For me it's the opposite of what books are about.

Books are a really interesting point to raise, Ned - I read a lot too and am always dead keen to make recommendations, but as for the content there is very little I could or would want to share with other people.

Book clubs can help but there's the obvious social difference in terms of how music v. reading is consumed -- you can share a song with someone just like that as you both listen but it's little hard to be sitting leaning over someone's shoulder as you both read along the book you've recommended to the other...

x-posts

Kind of doubt his equivalent indie neophytes from ten years ago would have the likes of Hall&Oates, Madonna and MJ on their lists&I think I know which will give first out of his love for them and his anti r&b/top 40 sentiments.

i was a bit ashamed to start listening to indie, since the punks i knew were always bashing it. i was always dreadfully self-aware and weary of easy classification. i would have rather been ignored than make a list like the one above. i don't know if i've totally grown out of that-i can't think of anything i'm ashamed to listen to-but now that i listen mostly to music that nobody i know finds cool, i'm still feelingly aware of what people think. when i started really becoming a music nerd i envisioned it would end up with me owning a bunch of rare vinyl and knowing a lot about jazz and underground hip hop or something, but so far it's only gone in the other direction, falling in love with modern rn'b and southern rap and synth pop. but that's great; as i grew out of caring about what people thought of my tastes, i started getting more interested in the notion of music listening as narrative, as a personal and free thing.

x-post, ogmor how old are you? I knew plenty of people who "discovered" the "cool" music while still liking Madonna and if you fail to perceive Michael Jackson's enormous influence on dance, you just don't have ears. Or are we not listening to idiotic gay-ass dance music either? Sorry, I can't stand this "I'm so bright, I listen to (hippie) indie." Was a time when prep school twerps with "progressive" parents wouldn't be caught dead listening to "indie", when it was, like, hardcore and stuff. A lot of the music he names is really just lo-fi hippie music....

sorry not making myself clear; I think the anti-top 40 attitude has lingered around even though indie kids are now enthusiastic enough about hall&oates et al to put them on their favourite lists, which I don't think was really the case 10 years ago, but then he has orange juice&linkin park up there too so maybe he's a one off.

sorry not making myself clear; I think the anti-top 40 attitude has lingered around even though indie kids are now enthusiastic enough about hall&oates et al to put them on their favourite lists, which I don't think was really the case 10 years ago

Were these people even alive when Hall & Oates were in the Top 40?

are you suggesting hall&oates are closer to trad indie kid tastes than top 40 on the basis they're old?

I'm just thinking about how teenage musical tastes (esp. those that are somewhat oppositional to the "mainstream") are tied to identity issues, and that, as the aesthetics of what is popular have changed, the "indie" aesthetic has perhaps changed with it, in terms of what teenagers that identify with that aesthetic say sucks.

my teenage cousin is a big fan of the mountain goats AND alanis morisette fyi.

(she rules.)

pretty sure based on the pinefox's first post on this thread that i would define bad taste as the taste being most similar to the pinefox's.

Yeah the more inclusive range of indie tastes is what I thought was interesting. When I was a teenager the ppl who liked hall&oates were not the same ppl who liked orange juice®ina spektor. But this kid likes linkin park too so maybe he's a one-off.

it's just weird seeing someone under the age of 50 professing unironic fondness for Hall & Oates.

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.