Bad taste: a matter of exposure, or, well, taste?

Who's WE, kemosabe? (hahahaha! just kidding, I've just always wanted to say that.)

You missed out possibility 3. YOU are lazy or flawed in some way and won't put the hours in to 'get' it.

>Following on from the "who buys this stuff" type sentiment, do you think that if you played people whose taste you lament, well, your music, they'd come around?
Or do simply either 1. like music that we find tedious, or 2. sortof only like music in a passing way, so wouldn't make the effort to seek out interesting stuff.<

How about imagining if those people were making this post about YOUR tastes, which they find tedious and lament in the same way you do theirs. And maybe they think you'd never take the effort to seek out the stuff that *they* find interesting...Would they be wrong, or what?

alot of music isn't worth "getting" and people who listen to it are just unsophisticated

you know this, you think it, but you don't want to publically say it

long way of saying ... i vote for tom's #3. YOU are lazy or flawed in some way and won't put the hours in to 'get' it.

To cite a certain dreaded acquaintance of mine with whom I share a living space, she's not going to listen to anything that her social circle might challenge her on. No hip-hop, no country, no classic rock, no blues, certainly no jazz. Emo, '80s and '90s alt rock, and 103.1 approved "indie". She's someone who really is smart enough to seek out all sorts of interesting music, but that wouldn't fit into her style. She doesn't love music, she loves the connotations of certain genres of music.

People who don't seek out music or who don't consider music to be important in their lives and who won't go beyond Third Eye Blind, well, I feel sorry for them to a large degree, but I respect their taste more than someone who parades their music around like some chap who only reads Delillo in a public place, on the off chance it might get him laid.

But it's very sad when a person spends lots of time listening to new and different kinds of music and then likes stuff that sucks. :(

plz give examples so that fans of said artists (and there's bound to be some on ILM, there's fans of everything on ILM) can realise the error of their "unsophisticated" ways and learn to listen to groups that we all know are better, even tho of course only you have the guts to say so (not the guts to actually say who *those* might be either, tho.)

I firmly believe I have better taste in music than anyone else on the planet.

garth brooks

barbara streisand

limp bizkit

the band wes borland formed after he left limp bizkit

chad kroger - he did that "hero" song

these "artists" are utterly irredeemable on any level and if you enjoy even one of them you can shut the fuck up about music forever

daniel you lose and i win

Let's talk about something else and see if we can all get along nicely, shall we?

Now - did anyone else watch the special one-off edition of Hell's Kitchen last night, in which Gordon Ramsey went back to his old school (with Jennifer Ellison and James Dreyfuss) and attempted to give the kids a real gourmet meal instead of their usual chips-with-everything school dinner?

Did you not scream in outraged anger and frustration at the ignorant little tossers when they insisted that they simply wouldn't eat anything that contained celeriac / salsafy / ginger / coriander, because they didn't know what those things were?

Didn't you not feel like reaching through the screen and shaking the little bastards warmly by throat when they were scraping the sauce and the garnish off of their chicken escalopes, without even bothering to try it, and leaving it, akong with all the vegetables and anything else they didn't immediately recognise, on the sides of their plates, and insisting that they'd rather have just had burger and chips again like they did every other month?

Now I'm not certainly not saying that I think Gordon Ramsey's a nice guy by any means. I'm not even saying that I think the functionality of his taste buds or his personal taste in food is necessarily in any way empirically better than any one of those kids....

However if I want to know about food, I am far more interested in the opinions of someone who has a real passion for the stuff, who has studied and read books about the subject, goes out of their way to try as many different types of food as they can and to experiment with different ways of cooking those things; than I am in the opinions of someone who just sits there and whines if they're not served with a Birdseye burger in a Homepride bap with McCains oven chips and Heinz baked beans at every meal.

I also feel the same way about people's opinions about music.

.... shit, I almost turned into C*l*m then!

http://www.theladsmag.co.uk/ice/feb03/pix/je_01.jpg

.... desperately trying to conceal her bitter disappointment after being told that some fat 41 year old accountant from Reading, who used to be a punk, still prefers Trout Mask Replica to her latest single, "Bye Bye Boy".

I think the "production line" analogy, which is what I assume you're getting at, is pretty limited when you start talking about pop music. You're still talking about a team of people who put a lot of fucking effort into the creation and production of a record - maybe more than went into Trout Mask Replica, who knows - and are invariably really proud of what they've achieved.

I'm not criticisising those factories, or the products that they produce, or indeed anyone who choses to eat them occasionally in any way.

What I am criticising is those people who simply won't investigate the possibility of eating anything else.

Cheese Slices

Yes but my objection to Kraft CS (theoretical objection since I have just guzzled 5) is that they are cheap and made in bulk from shoddy materials. Whereas Britney's records are vastly expensive to make and use only the finest production techniques - the only similarity is the mass-consumption of the end product. Some horrible lo-fi indie record made in a basement for 50p is the kind of thing I should be avoiding. With pop you get the best of both worlds - the priciest and most gourmet sounds are also those the public loves.

I wouldn't disagree.

I would, however, like to take a hugely unneccessary amount of glee in pointing out that it was _YOU_, _DJ_Mencap_, who immediately leapt to the assumption that, in an extended metaphor comparing music to food, "junk food" must be analagous to "chart pop". Tee hee hee!

I would have been equally appalled if I'd been watching a programme in which a load of schoolkids refused to try doener kebabs because they were only prepared to eat roast venison stuffed with truffles with a tamarind and creme de menthe coulis served on a bed of couscous infused with camomile and sandalwood.

In fact actually I'd probably have bee even more appalled, because I'm actually a terrible inverted snob - but that's another matter altogether.

That depends entirely on how many other things they investigated eating and how thoroughly they investigated eating them.

a) all records cost more or less the same to buy (maybe this should be addressed)
b) the most expensive food and drink to produce is more often that which comes from the smallest, cottage-industry-like cheesemakers, organic farmers and winemakers, whereas the most expensive musical productions can only be financed by the big record companies, with mass-market artists.
c) cheese slices are so num

I'm sorry to say so but I'm afraid that as an analogy that's a complete load of bollocks (or do I mean bullocks?).

If Birdseye continued to retain all the factories and all the equipment and buy the same amount of raw materials and pay all the staff and run all the delivery lorries etc. etc. etc. that they do at present but only actually made one burger every day, they would either have to sell that burger for an astronomical price or they would go out of business.

In exactly the same way, when a huge record label allows one of their artistes to spend a fortune recording their next album, they only do because they believe they're going to sell them in huge quantities and amortise (spread recover) those costs over all those albums.

If they're wrong, they end up with a huge pile of rotting carcasses on theor hands which they have to get rid of before they stink the place out.

The small labels only expect to sell a few records so they have to keep their production and overhead costs down.

This is called "The Law Of Diminishing Returns" - you'll find it in your "Economics For Beginners" textbooks, chapter 3.

(isn't that 'economies of scale' rather than 'the law of diminishing returns' though)

To get back to the original thread question, getting casual fans into different music can be a wonderful thing: but it has to be (for lack of a better word) consensual, and you have to aproach it without the idea that the other person's casual music listening is some sign of dumbness or brainwashing on their part. And that's assuming that we *are* talking about casual music fans here: converting fellow music geeks that just happen to have tastes directly opposed to yours is another issue entirely.

so my old copy of libra actually does have a useful purpose now!*

*ladies, i'm waiting