In modern times, there is nothing which more exactly defines social differences than personal taste, whether in food or music or wallpaper or the choice of children’s names. The choices that people make in these areas of life may seem spontaneous and genuine, but, without any apparent pressure or coercion, they usually conform to class lines. The possessions which we place in our living spaces and the way we decorate those spaces instantly reveal our sensibilities, our preoccupations, and our social milieux. That is why they will evoke the admiration of some observers and the disdain of others.
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Possessions were symbols of refinement and politeness. They helped to define individual identity. They even shaped their owners’ physical deportment and behaviour, for knives and forks, cups and teapots, fragile porcelain and increasingly delicate furniture imposed a distinctively mannered way of eating, drinking, moving and sitting. In this way the consumption of goods created social differences as well as expressing them.
The process was assisted by the rise of the idea of taste. ‘Taste’ is a term which first acquired prominence in England in the later 17th century. As goods multiplied, it became a central concept of aesthetic theory and an important form of cultural differentiation. As a contemporary noted in 1633, ‘great folks’ always had a tendency to ‘think nothing of that which is common and ordinary people may easily come by’. Taste involved transcending mere financial criteria when assessing the value of goods, introducing instead a subtler and more elusive yardstick.
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Taste was notoriously a quality which the vulgar lacked, for they were without the necessary education and experience, whereas connoisseurs were cultivated, well travelled and ‘conversant with the better sort of people’. ‘Those who depend for food on bodily labour’, ruled the critic Lord Kames in 1762, ‘are totally devoid of taste’. The middle-class inhabitants of the London suburbs were scorned by their social superiors for their bad taste, manifested in the embarrassingly derivative style of their houses and gardens.
I’ve been thinking a bit about the manufacture of rock taste and about the internet as the place where rock tastemaking happens. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the popular internet gem “There’s tons of great music out there. You just have to work/look for it.” I’m sure I’ve said this before. And even if I never did, I’ve certainly participated in the types of activities where that phrase could serve as an apt motto — community radio, start-up rock zines, webzines, local rock bands, this very blog. What “You just have to work/look for it” means is that you have to busy yourself cultivating sophisticated tastes. Once engaged in this pursuit, you can prove yourself by purchasing (or often “stealing”) the objects of your desire. You can also make others aware of the hard work you’ve put in by blogging, reviewing purchases on Amazon, or posting endless lists of all-time, all-time favs on Myspace, Facebook, online message boards, etc. Also implicit in this “looking/working hard” idea of taste is that the stuff produced for everyone to be consumed by everyone is less-than-good. Origins of hipster backlash for $400, Alex?
Being of that group that came of age during the ’90s alternaboom, I remember a time when “popular” didn’t always mean “dreck.” (Though there’s probably a future blog post in examining my first attempts at rock snobbery and my “horror” at people embracing bands I thought belonged to me.) Still, the motto of the college rock years (and realized in the alternarock era) could easily be “In a perfect world, THEY’D be as big as the Beatles.” Big Star comes to mind as *the* band whose pop appeal was unfairly thwarted, but there are plenty of other bands that SHOULD’VE been huge, if only…
Of course when the underground finally got its due on US radio/television, folks started grumbling about “sellouts” and the modern hipness became a going concern. Interestingly — though coincidentally — the internet also became a going concern for the masses at this point as well. And access to the internet did allow folks to point and click at articles, interviews, and later mp3s of bands about whom very little was available in the wilds of Midwestern suburbia. It became a lot easier to get to the source of what you soon learned was derivative, spiffed-up, saleable versions of bands who had toiled in obscurity for years. I’m sure I became pickier and snootier at this time. I bet I became more vocal about eschewing what could easily be got at by switching on Q101 or whatever. I was on my way to become a better, more proper sort of listener — so was everybody else.
I’m pretty sure that this refinement in taste is when everything went sideways.
Don’t get me wrong. Without the internet and its “sophisticated” hipster vision of pop, I might have missed out on personal favorite records by Modest Mouse and the Soft Boys, and even the Exploding Hearts’ Guitar Romantic. Still, the internet has given us a world where Pop is carved into smaller and smaller wedges of specific niche appeal. I’m certain I’ve griped about this before, but because people don’t have to wade through everything in the same way as everyone else, they can’t assume any sort of common ground. They can navigate directly to what they want without ever considering what other people are up to. Every person a snoot.
In thinking about this process, I started to consider how I spend my “interactive” online time. Mostly, I abandoned checking out new music recommendations years ago, save for the trusted opinions of a few friends/critics whose opinions I trusted. Basically, I replicated my off-line behavior online. Beyond that, I spend a lot of “other people” internet time arguing about why what THEY like is inferior to what I like. Basically, I invest a lot of time/energy in telling other people that they’re wrong because they’re using a different set of aesthetic rules than I am when they choose music, clothes, food, etc. for themselves. For the most part, I’m not even championing stuff I like. (I do that more here.) I’m just bickering with people I don’t know about things they or I aren’t really invested in. Even worse is that I — like most people on the internet — have fallen into presenting myself as smug, sophisticated, and 100% unflappable. You know, that “Heh. Look at how smartly I take this joke without any real self-reflection” pose that confuses a healthy appreciation of irony with smarmy disconnectedness. The internet is a place where no one ever cares about anything — people HYPE things, but they don’t care. At least the internet I visit is very interested in novelty (site/blog updates, hot new tracks/bands/albums, in-jokey videos, etc.) without being concerned with newness or freshness of insight, form, method, etc. Everyone seems very bored on the internet (”OMG! Someone already posted that yesterday, n00b!”). Maybe that’s because the internet is largely used as a boredom-fighting device for folks stuck at work, crippled by social anxiety, disconnected from their local communities, easily distracted by dancing hamsters, whathaveyou.
I think that the internet because people use it alone and because it is so good at giving people just what they want tends to make us each more insulated and convinced of the rightness our own individual taste. Stuff everyone likes or stuff that people like without a wink-and-a-nudge seems a bit vulgar. Outdated. unmodern. Because I’m a contrarian and a reactionary, I find this whole process bittersweet. Self-directed tastemaking could allow people to become more eccentric, more themselves. But yet, everyone seems content to become the same kind of “unique.”
I’m reminded of Andy Warhol’s famous claim about pop and democracy –
What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
Which brings us around to Guitar Romantic. It’s a great, hooky, energetic record. I put it on in the car the other day and beamed from ear to ear as I bopped about behind the steering wheel. It’s the kind of rock and roll that posits a funner, better, more excitinger version of the world. It’s simple, sleazy fun. It’s smart, but not over-sophisticated. It’s clever without being snooty. It’s a fun, funny record that is completely accessible. You don’t need a decoder ring to get at it. It’s the sort of record that can be easily overlooked because it’s not doing anything “special” or novel.
This is a fabulous record. I’ve been listening to it mostly non-stop since it came in the mail the other day. It makes me happy to be alive. I know it’s dumb to read something like that on the internet. Enjoying something wholeheartedly isn’t much of a meme. Rock and roll and the cheap thrills for which its built isn’t optimized for the internet age. Getting a quasi-religious zing of real live window-rolled-down rainbow sherbet glee isn’t an internet thing. Caring too much is not the internet thing to do. Whooping and hollering is retrograde vulgarity best left to the NASCAR set.
Fuck it. I love this record. Sure it’s the sort of out-dated “retro” thing that, at best, is just a bunch of folks recording themselves brushing the teeth of dead monsters. Still, you should buy a copy and turn it up loud. Or at least you should go outside and play. Go get a big chocolate malted from the Dairy Queen. Dress up like a vampire. Flip through old highschool yearbooks. You’re an American. You can do whatever you want.
N.B. — I had some of the ideas from these articles in mind when I wrote this, but couldn’t find a good excuse for quoting them.
