Nothing Personal Ladies

also note: JeffSSSS is careful not to declare what he considers "good" music, except that it must be "obscure"

lady di to THREAD!!

outta the way, feminazi coming through ;)

well, this is kinda dumb. what is bad taste anyway? its quite subjective really. for myself, a person with bad taste is someone who is obsessed with a genre that i find unlistenable and who doesn't venture outside of that genre. the only people i know of who do this are men. (like i know a few guys who only listen to progrock, and i know lots of males of wide age ranges who only listen to pop-punk). but y'know thats my personal take. i mean, the same men i'm knockin here probably think I have shit taste in music. i know some girls who buy stuff that i wouldn't buy, but their taste isn't absolutely terrible.

maybe its true that more women like chart music than men, i don't know. but who cares? chart music isn't all bad. i'd rather listen to kylie minogue than ELP.

i had a bit of trouble following T's last post, but maybe this is what she was saying?: not everyone is a Big Fan of music and if they ain't they shouldn't be expected to be. i would be fuckin pissed off if someone decided i had "crap taste" in art when i don't presume to know anything about it. its judging something out of context really.

We are discussing this point, not if people who are into differenet things suck. No one is saying you have to be into music, art, reading or anything for that matter, to be validated.

Jeff is making the observation, I am agreeing with it.

I, personally, chase down the rarities that I chase down because I believe that they have something, musically, that I'm looking for and that will please or intrigue me. I can't deny that there's some excitement to getting a rara avis, but for me it's something perhaps more like archaeology than stamp collecting. (In that one gives us the Epic of Gilgamesh -- which still has the power to move people, after all these years -- and the other a little picture of an upside-down plane.)

And, getting back to the question that started this thread, can I say that I know many women who spend any time looking for these rarities? I suppose it depends. I do have female friends who chase things down with a fair amount of enthusiasm, but the proportion of those that do is definitely lower, even among the musicians I know (though the gap is a good bit smaller there). Why that is, I don't know. The "women tend to be socially oriented (and thus will gravitate towards well-known, common texts that are widely shared and provide a setting for and complement to social interaction)" argument seems pretty thin as an explanation, just as does the "men are obsessives who want to dominate through knowledge of trivia" argument. (And the argument that starts with something akin to "Since men are by nature explorers...")

But we certainly need something a bit better than just hurling "Obsessive!" and "Passive!" at each other ad infinitum, so...

Please note, statistics from 2001 show that 0.01% of people who aren't me had good taste, and 98% of me had good taste that year.

hey phil, did you mean what i was saying about boys who are obsessed with A genre? cos i tried to make it clear that i have no problem with people who are obsessed with music in general (cos i sorta am myself), and that my take on people with bad taste is purely personal.

i hope its not just cos you find me so offensive that you are determined to take issue with EVERYTHING i say.

I remember getting a ride home from my math teacher in high school, during which he turned on the radio, picking a station pretty much at random; I asked him what kind of music he liked, and he replied with something along those lines -- "whatever's on". It was pretty alien to me, but there's a world of people out there who have that same attitude, to varying degrees. I don't think it's unreasonable for a person who's passionate about music to be frustrated with people like that, although it's ultimately futile to revile them for it. It's certainly not unreasonable for that to play into a person's romantic life, and for frustrations to come of that; I've only dated a couple musicians, myself, but I can't imagine spending very long with someone who was genuinely apathetic about music. In that light, again, it's not a question of "not liking the right music", so much as a question of the underlying attitude that might lead one to choices that are either a product of apathy, or a consistent preference for the path of least resistance.

Should be something like: "Of the people I've dated, only a couple have been musicians, so it's not really important to me that they be as dedicated to music as I am -- but I can't imagine..." etc.

what is taste??

what is a man?

who defines???

This ultimately has nothing to do with taste but number.

Also, if we were to talk about top 40 and teenage girls and boys these issues might be relevant: pop's intended audience and means of inspiring identification; socialisation of gender-related attitudes towards pop; differing gender-ratio of pop audiences dependent on time & place (early 90's grunge invasion and current hip hop dominance both = boy-heavy charts, yeah?).

Shouldn't you be questioning the inside / outside distinction as well?

hurrah! or indeed boo! (since by assuming they are distinguishable WHAT ELSE ARE WE COMMITTING OURSELVES TO? EH!?)

What's already been said that's true: women don't care as much about ramming their opinions everywhere. If someone said to me, Kylie Minogue is shit, just walking around down the street in real life, I'd be like, Oh what about this song? And if they said I hate that song, I'd leave it at that. I don't care, there are much better things to argue about. I fail to see how that means women have shit taste in music.

If anything, I find women have better taste in music because they're much more willing than men (stereotype alert, yes) to listen to a bigger variety. A lot of the men I know tend to fall into "This is what my mates listen to so I shall impress them with my knowledge" stereotypes, at least until they're around 25. Most of the women Iknow are like "I listen to this and fuck you if you don't like it", and just shrug it off if their friends don't also like, say, Jay-Z or something.

And yes, who is anyone to really say "XYZ is shit taste"? We all say it, but I find it a bit weird to lay out a blanket statement because you don't personally like the top 40 (which is extremely varied, for what it's worth, maybe Jeff should try branching out...)

Because that's like walking into the grocery store and telling them to just fill you cart with whatever items take up the most shelf space. It's better to get off your ass and pick something out for yourself. (My apologies to anyone who shops that way.)

This is a very poor analogy. What if Pabst, at 25 cents a can from the grocery store around the corner, works well enough for me that I don't actually feel like driving 10 miles to some beverage botique and paying more for some carefully brewed specialty beer? Or what, even, if I decide I prefer Pabst to the carefully brewed specialty beers, regardless of cost or convenience? Does that mean I don't like beer as much as some goateed ale-snob? Where do we get the idea that people who only listen to the top 40 don't listen critically to the top 40? I've never met anyone, male or female, who likes everything they hear on the radio.

Fashion is a tool of the media, and if you follow that then you are a conformist! Conformists are idiots who have no brain for them selves!

i was going to say the same thing. i dared to walk into the one specialty hip-hop shop in melbourne (that i'm aware of) a while ago, and it felt like walking into a freemasons meeting. not doing that again! similarly, shops with an emphasis on vinyl and deejaying are likely to be intimidating to women. i started asking the men behind the counter at 'rhythm and soul' (which is, by the way, a crap record shop) questions about records they had obviously not heard of, although they feigned knowledge. they made no attempt to help me track the records down once we'd sorted out what they were, and instead stood there with blank expressions waiting for the girl to leave. djing is for boys. didn't you know?