It's not Shakespeare!

why your taste in music might -- I said might -- actually suck


Critic
1 a : one who expresses a reasoned opinion on any matter especially involving a judgment of its value, truth, righteousness, beauty, or technique b : one who engages often professionally in the analysis, evaluation, or appreciation of works of art or artistic performances

2 : one given to harsh or captious judgment

If you really, really enjoy music -- if you are, in fact, geeked out about anything artistic, or in the entertainment field -- you've seen it before, this idea that one's taste in entertainment is completely subjective. Facebook lists at least two groups that attempt to explain: Stop Critcizing Peoples Taste In Music and the sedately titled I DON'T HAVE A S**T TASTE IN MUSIC.......IT'S JUST DIFFERENT TO YOURS!!! The fact that one of these groups has two posts total and the other is clogged with spam, and that both are long dead, tells us something further: everyone likes to assume they have great taste in music. They're usually pretty secure in what they like. Or maybe the Internet's just so wide now that dozens of Glee-hating groups exist somewhat peacefully alongside the show's 13 million (!) likers.

What's the word?
Thunderbird!

I'm not here to tell you Glee sucks. You've already made up your mind on that. You either want to take that L finger and shove it up the cast's collective ass, or you've already written me off as a hipster d-bag who hates the show because it's popular, or because it's "fun." And I've got good, close friends with great taste who admit to enjoying Glee, but are smart enough to know that it's not a quality show, just entertainment that expertly pushes some sunny, goofy button inside them. So I am neither here to praise Gleeks nor bury them.

But there is such a thing as good taste. It exists. It's not a religion you can choose to follow or not follow. It can be proven.

By what, you ask? Well, let's put it this way. You wouldn't go to a wine-tasting and knock a glass of '47 Cheval Blanc out of an expert's hand, screaming, "What racehorse pissed this out?! Where's the Night Train?" Okay, that would be funny. But it wouldn't prove you knew anything about wine.

In the same way, a music (or movie, or television, or whatever) critic has a great deal of experience with the genre in question. He's not smarter or better than you, and if he's a good critic, he doesn't pretend to be, but he has lived in the belly of the beast a long, long time. It's his neighborhood. He knows where the best places are. Critics compare what the song is trying to do to what it actually does, and then compare that to similar songs that have already done or attempted the same thing. See? Simple.

It's not personal, I promise. We don't hate you. Or your band. We don't know you. We're not laughing at you. We're not trying to ruin your career. (This is usually said by someone who's career consists of open mic night.) Also, I freely admit to not being smarter than you, you personally, about a lot of things. I had to Google the wine thing. I drink Beaujolais. But I don't confuse it with that other stuff.  

Science uses observation to determine whether something is factual or not, and so do critics. If we don't like something, it's almost always because we've heard it done better somewhere else. A good music critic, a quality one, realizes that this is not the same as personal taste. Like a doctor, he knows where those buttons are inside you, and knows how they need to be pushed. He or she often likes at least a few songs that most critics don't, while realizing that this is because of their own particular receptors and how they operate. He doesn't need to personally love a song to recognize its quality. And you can pick up a knife, but it doesn't make you a surgeon.

"It's a routine procedure,
nothing to worry about."

Yet we hate the music expert, and we don't hate the wine expert. Why? Because wine, as much as we might love it, doesn't push emotional buttons in most of us.

Music is an emotional delivery system, arguably the purest one. A novel is at least somewhat bordered by the limits of language, which has an ordered set of general values, while a film climbs directly into our imagination, gets it drunk, and has violent sex with it. (Which can be fun.) Music, on the other hand, is primal. It relies solely on elements which are difficult to articulate; it uses a series of vibrations, and nothing more, to reach us. Sting once said that telling someone they don't like their song is like telling them they have an ugly girlfriend. It's on that level.

Like scientists, critics don't always agree. I'd probably rather hear Metallica's ...And Justice for All over Ride the Lightning. I'm in the minority on that, which is fine. Most scientists are still arguing over how exactly the universe came to be. But none of them would tell you the Sun moves around the Earth (as ancients once believed), and I'll never try and convince you that Load is a great album (as ancients once believed). Critics' generalizations also change, as one, over time, just like those of scientific research do. Led Zeppelin were once reviled for not being properly respectful of the blues, but that cultural bias disappeared over time, as a new generation of critics found that stance unnecessary. So it was discarded, a natural product of journalistic evolution.      

Like literature, music also has a canon, and critics do, in general, agree on it. Usually when someone farts out some horrible disaster of an artistic abomination -- Black Eyed Peas, Uwe Boll, Stephanie Meyer -- those people whose buttons are easy to push leap to its defense with the cry, "Hey, it's not supposed to be Shakespeare." And every musician can't be, you know, the Beatles. But that doesn't excuse you from being Justin Bieber. Shakespeare, historians tell us, was actually the Quentin Tarantino of his time -- a popular entertainer who mixed high and low art, baiting us with murder and sex but actually delivering substance and style and even some life wisdom along with it. When you say "Hey, it's not supposed to be Shakespeare," all you're really saying is, "Hey, I don't understand Shakespeare."

Most people, critics or not, float along on a vast grey area in the middle of Shakespeare and Tyler Perry, of Beatles and Bieber, recognizing as we do that we don't need to demand total excellence from every single thing we encounter just to make it through another day. Most folks don't wonder how a burger was made while they eat it, but we usually agree that eating nothing but Whoppers isn't good for you. Just because they're delicious and fill you up doesn't make them Porterhouse steaks. You eat too much junk too often, you will get sick. And bad art will wear away at your metaphorical heart just as surely as BK will ruin your real one.

"Stinkin’ like fat ladies shittin’ out logs."

I mean, what's the first thing people do when they come into some real money? They hire people, people in the know, to tell them what's good, what's valuable, what's first-class. Vintage car dealers, home decorators, stockbrokers, goddamn life coaches. Your average Joe is more than willing to let other people consult him on matters of great importance, but don't tell him Nickelback blows or he'll kick you out of his newly-renovated den. This is why, instead of the now-pejorative critic, I prefer the term taste consultant. Let's be honest: Definition 2 up there is steadily overtaking Definition 1. Nation of whiners.

The hipster douches, now, they're the ones to really turn your fury on, the ones who think that music is a secret club that they alone were smart enough to be invited to. Hipsters are differentiated by their psychological need to hoard knowledge -- it fills a giant hole in their self-esteem to know something about a band that you don't, to have been at their gigs first, to have bought the album before anyone. It's what separates the nerd, tugging it sadly in an empty room, from the geek, giving it out like a whore. And, yes, occasionally getting paid.

(Next week I'll introduce this blog's music rating system, once which any non-pro music fiend with a solid depth of knowledge can use to define and explain the general, relative merits of any piece of art.)