demagogue on 31/5/2018 at 08:30
Re: presuming "bad taste", the way I view it, taste and identity are connected. There's a tacit "from the perspective of X" something is in good or bad taste. And then the key question is really, do you want to be a member of X in good standing? It's perfectly fine to like Y that other people hate, in the sense there's no accounting for taste. What's not fine is trying to say you like Y & be a member of X in good standing of, where Y is antithetical to the values of X. Then you can have debates within the fold what the values of X really are, and whether Y is consonant with them or not. And if there's really no agreement, then it means the community of X needs to split into new schools. Point is, if you take being an X seriously, you need to be able to say "a good X doesn't like Y, and if you do like Y, you have bad taste from the perspective of X."
Unless you don't care about membership to any clique, "music is music", in which case that's a group in itself, and from my perspective (a Gen X musician that's followed jazz and indie music for a long time), those kinds of people have terrible taste from my perspective. They can agree among themselves what great taste they have in shit music to me. I just don't care because I think being a over-privileged Millennial yolk that cares more about virtue signaling than soul searching would be an awful life to live and I'd rather bury myself in thumbtacks. But it's fine for them, sure, whatever. If I were trying to exploit them to make money, I'd make the shit music with minimal effort that they lap up like the record companies are doing too. In that sense they have "good" taste: good for me making money off of them.
Sulphur on 31/5/2018 at 08:54
Heh, that last paragraph's just a little bit cynical even if broadly true. I've had the time of my life trying to understand why people like the things they like, and why I like the things I like. And that's where some of the inherent contradictions come up. I can grade why I like certain kinds of acts in certain genres on a scale of technical proficiency, unpredictability, and lyrics that sound like actual thought went into them, so I can easily make a case that the music I like is a product of polish and talent to within a certain degree of objectivity. But, while I can argue that, say, Spoon's They Want My Soul is worthy of your time due to aforementioned criteria, I can't account for why on god's green earth Super Trouper is still an ABBA song I'd take with me to a desert island. (Well, I can if really pressed, but then we get into personal justification, which we all know is the bedrock of subjectivity.)
And that means my own taste is capable of undercutting my criteria for what's 'good' at times, and I'd like to think that other people have the same problem, just to differing degrees. The struggle is finding a way to balance it out. I mean, I know enough to rein in the impulse to proclaim that Drive by The Cars is the best song in the whole wide world, which is objectively untrue AND fails most of my criteria, though for most of my teenage life it's what I felt was true enough for me. A lot of people don't do that, however, so I find it's just easier to stick with people of group X that like the music I do and are able to quantify and qualify why they like it, rather than every day being a rerun of someone going 'this is so good and I feel the lyrics, man', and suddenly I'm being linked to a Clean Bandit video.
Vasquez on 31/5/2018 at 10:10
Quote Posted by Sulphur
If someone keeps showing me Lady Gaga videos and Modern Family episodes every time I go over to visit them
Graaah. If I visit someone and they want to spend the time watching the internet/tv, I won't visit again. Way to poop a fun party - "Hey stop the music for a moment and I'll show this hilarious video in YouTube!" :eww:
demagogue on 31/5/2018 at 17:03
Re: the echo chamber problem, there's a lyric to a Brave Combo song I like...
Quote:
Reverse your morality. Listen to bands
That play only music you can't stand.
Forget how to worry. Enjoy your fears.
Stop your life insurance and disappear.
I like the idea of pro-actively listening to music you can't stand until it grows on you, and generally doing exactly what you're not supposed to, and liking what you're not supposed to like. That's how you grow. This is the flip side to my last post. In that sense, what you think is bad taste now is the road to better taste later, as you absorb wider and wider boundaries of music or whatever it is.
N'Al on 31/5/2018 at 18:14
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Queue on 2/6/2018 at 03:48
I found my first gray ball hair today.
...I'm calling it "Banjo" in honor of Steve Martin.
Tocky on 2/6/2018 at 20:44
You know it's better when someone else tells you that you have a gray ball hair by spitting it out.
Sort of softens the blow.
Queue on 3/6/2018 at 00:49
I imagine it would soft the blow...for some.
(A good double entendre can be just as satisfying as a good double-ender.)
Renzatic on 3/6/2018 at 01:02
You all must date a lot of women with dry mouths or something.
Queue on 3/6/2018 at 01:12
That's why you punch 'em in the kisser first--gotta moisten those mouths up somehow.
"Making Misogyny Great Again"
