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The Infallibility Of Taste
Liking the things we like and passing judgement on the things we don't
Good Ones is a bi-weekly or so personal essay newsletter that covers art, music, movies, food, drink, or whatever. Click subscribe below to get the newsletter directly to your inbox whenever they’re published.
I Think, Therefore I’m Right.
Popular opinion is, by and large, useless to the average person. Popular opinion is also, unfortunately, the main compass that the average person uses in order to define their taste. If you find yourself at a chain restaurant, the servers will often direct you to the “most popular entree” on the menu, while also pointing out the “most popular drinks” from their bar. These most popular items are often the featured ones, given their own menu real estate with large, glossy photos showing off all the detail of the garnish on the plate or the extra umbrella popping out of the glass.
They’re often the most popular items because the restaurant wants you to order them, not because they’re the best tasting dish. They’re heavily advertised to you directly, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The server recommendation is a highly calculated move by corporate ownership to direct the customer to their most highly profitable items, but since those highly profitable items are actually the most ordered dishes in the restaurant due to the featured advertising, the server isn’t lying.
It’s a directive that doesn’t just exist at Red Lobster and the Olive Garden. It’s the same cold trigonometry performed by movie studios in concert with theater owners, record labels and radio station programmers. Top 40 radio plays all the latest and biggest hits only, as a format, but how does a song become a Top 40 hit before it’s even been played on that station? It’s easy: the radio station tells you it’s a Top 40 hit as soon as they choose to play it. You’re given the illusion of choice. As long as it’s one of these 40 songs pre-selected to be the most popular in the nation, you’re allowed to decide which one is your favorite.
I like it, therefore it is good; it is good, therefore I like it.
The paradox of taste as it relates to music is unfortunately built around this mantra. When it comes to food, many people are excited to admit their work-a-day preferences: I love a boiled hot dog, I can’t get enough diner coffee, a McDonald’s cheeseburger really hits the spot sometimes. Most people who express these opinions will also tell you, clearly, that they know the item it question is subjectively bad, but that they like it anyway.
And this is a positive thing!
Understanding what you like and don’t like is a supremely good way to find happiness and enjoyment in life. Being able to separate your preferences from objective quality also helps clarify those decisions.
These thought processes are usually afforded lateral thinking when applied to movies. Many people talk about their “guilty pleasures,” or the movies they like to watch to find comfort and entertainment even though they consider them to be poorly written, or poorly acted, or poorly directed.
And then comes music.
I got into hot water online, once, for suggesting that Jagged Little Pill’s production and arrangements are, absolutely, just dreadfully bad. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true: Alanis Morissette delivers a powerful vocal performance over really well written and catchy melodies, but everything behind it is a pastiche of early 90s flabby pop rock. In efforts to ride the wave of a post-grunge musical landscape, producer Glen Ballard made some choices. It placed the album dead-square in the most popular musical soundscape at the time, but boy oh boy does that album sound dated.
It’s the same criticism that can easily be lobbed at Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A. Even with it’s poppy simplification of songwriting (and Max Weinstein’s pared down backbeats), the album’s core is still a gritty, good-ol’ Springsteen exploration of working class themes. It’s hard to parse that against digitally recorded ear-piercing synthesizer sounds on the opening track, so tinny that they actually can cause you to wince at certain volumes.
It’s bad! It’s truly bad! And I still love it. Many people do!
Of course, this wouldn’t be a newsletter if it wasn’t topical.
This last weekend saw the release of Peter Jackson’s The Beatles documentary, and of course, with it came a slew of people going goo-goo over the not-generally seen before footage of the band noodling around.
One of the biggest Internet reactions was to Paul noodling around to draw up the core of the song “Get Back.”
This of course garnered the attention of plenty of Beatles fans and plenty of Beatles detractors, and the amount of quote tweets that it generated prompted the original poster to reply with this:
I mean, it is how songwriting works. It’s actually exactly how most of these rock and roll bands wrote songs. They had an album deadline, so they’d go into the studio and just write the album in the studio. Individual band members would toss out something they’d played around with, and then the song would get written. Keith Richards famously had a tape recorder he’d play riffs into that he heard in his dreams. They usually didn’t get fleshed out until studio time was booked.
There’s two issues with this sort of band worship. One, this type of songwriting is infinitely lazy. If you go back to songwriting sessions for Tin Pan Alley or the progression of that tradition to 60s and 70s country music, songwriting sessions started with a concept, and then fleshed it out through the lyrics to tell a complex story though simple phrasing. There was an intentionality behind the craft, but at the same time, a songwriter would work independently until they got together with a publisher, and whether an artist would record a song or not relied mostly on the quality of the work itself. There are only so many chords out there; there are almost an infinite number of words, and the quality of the songwriting mattered in order to make it a commercial success.
The second issue is just a really direct one: “Get Back” is a really crappily written song. It’s true!
Like most Beatles songs, the lyrics are gibberish. And, because Lennon and McCartney were skilled at finding catchy melodies, most Beatles fans are entirely prepared to apply some sort of meaning to the lyrics. That doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to enjoy “Get Back,” but by all accounts Lennon and McCartney writing all their own songs while mostly in a studio deadline environment and then taking all the writing credit is more of a publishing scam than it is an expression of artistic excellence. And the fact that their well-crafted pop songs from 8 years earlier made them amongst the best selling artists of their time, it didn’t matter what they crapped out. People would buy it anyway.
The average Beatles fan would do well to consider that the bulk of the band’s catalog could be easily mistaken for novelty songs played on the Dr. Demento show. That exists entirely separate of their ability to enjoy those songs. Some of my favorite songs are “Weird” Al originals!
The incessant need for music opinions to be correct tends to create more tension and trouble than it’s necessarily worth. The worst types of music critics play into this as a way to generate more eyes on the page, which then funnels them more money. There’s an entire economy built around making you mad because the thing you’re listening to is now supposedly “bad” or “good” depending on which will cause more outrage.
We’d probably all like music a bit more if it was easier to look back and be okay with our decisions. Just admit that the Beatles are diner coffee: the quality isn’t necessarily good, but it’s exactly what you want when you want it.
Although, if you catch me on the wrong day, I will be prepared to yell at you for drinking diner coffee.
Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.