how do you define bad musical taste?

I think there's people who have lazy taste in music, that annoys me. The editor of Uncut for example seems to like bands which are OK, like the Stooges and Patti Smith and the Velvets, but there's something about the combination of all three and little else (except alt.country) which makes his taste seem too easy somehow.

And as Pinefox said elsewhere, the word 'taste' is an ugly one. I suppose what I really think is that I don't think anyone should have any taste.

I get into arguments about taste with Isabel a lot, about interior decoration for instance. She likes quite elegant, minimal, tasteful things, and I argue that 'tasteful' is actually 'bad taste' - it lacks the element of surprise, intrigue. Life's too short not to be surprised by things. So there's another answer.

There are people who seem to discriminate on a genre level and then seem too undiscriminating within it. This is what gets me about the 'indie scene' - another problematic term.

I could list the posters here who I think have bad taste and good taste. I don't think that would get us anywhere really.

If you just read what people write though you dont have any idea about their taste. At the very least you have to get drunk with them. I've been in a relationship for years with someone who owns 12 CDs and she still surprises me with what she likes. That's a good thing. Whereas some people with 3000 CDs never surprise me. So there's my answer - 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. It's like making a record which is meant to be shocking.

If people like something I dislike (eg. Travis) I'll reserve my trashing until I find out why they like it. If they say "because they write classic-sounding songs" I'll thump 'em; if they say "I'm in love with Fran's fin" I'll grudgingly concede them the benefit of the doubt. As Tom pointed out, it's the sum predictability of a person's taste (liking everything for the same reasons) that makes it a crime. Taste should be full of contradictions.

Which is lovely: because he can find out, and still decide what HE thinks, or he can just walk away and NOT find out.

(But why "Fuck you"? "Fuck you" is CorePunk-ish for "Thank you", I guess. I'm so twisted.)

This analysis makes a lot of sense when looking at genres that appeal to particular groups. Bear in mind that the absolute aristocrat of taste has always been the dandy; the one who could head to the East End and indulge his senses in the opium den as effectively as in the West End salon. Tom’s command "surprise me" makes him a modern Dorian Gray; by education (if not birth – I don’t know are you?) a young aristocrat of taste seeking endless sensory amusement. None of us can escape the socially defining role that our tastes perform.

However the Bourdieu argument does run into problems. It’s good at explaining why one group listens to house music and another to opera; and why some people like both. I think it explains why people might like or not like Travis for example.

But it doesn’t explain why a particular song works or a particular rhythm gets people dancing – it doesn’t discriminate within the genres. 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.

In answer to the original question, U2.

What a bland uninspiring dreary inane song, elevator Muzik - plodding and Languid - the vocal style is monotone dull the music has absolutely no emotion, background lite slush.

How did this song get past the Labour focus groups?

Also lifted has another meaning - lifting money through stealth tax rises.

Bring on the Coldcut Re: volution.

geir + social skills = pinefox?

But I also don't let "bad taste" define what I think about a person, because quite frankly I know loads of people who like Radiohead who are perfectly sensible in all other aspects, including other matters of musical taste. And it's generally more interesting to discuss music with someone who doesn't necessarily agree with you.

2. Then again, what if it is possible to think that one's own taste is bad? Possibly it is.

3. The comments on Bourdieu were informed and relevant, rather than the reach-me-down idiot blunders that one might often find on the internet, in the NME, wherever.

4. I like Tom E's comments quite a bit, especially his view that people should not have taste - that all 'taste' is bad taste. I really do have a problem with this word 'taste'. The idea of blowing it up or banishing it seems promising.

5. I am not *totally* sure, though, that I would buy Tom's (doubtless exploratory) thought that good taste was about surprise and unpredictability. That view seems in itself too... unsurprising and predictable. I think that the kind of perverse argumentation that I think Tom was looking for requires entertaining the idea of the redemption of predictability.

Dear me, what a sentence.

Equally annoying is other in-jokes, but apparently they're supposed okay...

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.

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.

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??