good taste doesn't exist

taste happens at one level. the level above taste is about openness.
but obviously there are risks involved in opening yourself to an influence.
things get in that way.

in terms of what taste is pattycakes referred to our collective
'fetish' for r&b. that is one possible point of departure.

It might exist, but it becomes limiting to talk through the prism of good taste. Almost anything is fascinating when another person adequately describes why they like it - a frequent breakdown in communication/interest is when that explanation is lacking.

I like both R&B and Jane's Addiction.

cuckoo. cuckoo.
the mind/the circumferenceless soul/are both as porous as the body/and equally prone to infection.
SQUATTERS IN THE TOWER.
thought forms/emotions/beliefs/modes of consciousness/
all circulate through shared space/cross the open borders/of the selves/like germs.

I keep telling people to read this:

Stefan Szczelkun - The Conspiracy of Good Taste

http://www.stefan-szczelkun.org.uk/taste/CGTindex.html

Great book, particularly the stuff about early collectors of English Folk Music - there are good parallels with certain white boy ragga curators.

It's also been republished in hardcopy recently...

It doesn't on this forum (... only joking )

EmpressJess said:

It doesn't on this forum (... only joking )

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inverse snobbery is the rock this church is built on.

of course it exists, it's just entirely subjective - it's a particular way of expressing preference

what doesn't exist - except as a construct, albeit a powerful one - is the class-mechanism "good taste" that the book john linked is going at

I saw your original post and thought it was a question worth asking because here as much as anywhere there is a taste hierarchy and unspoken rules re: what you can like. OTOH it was rather unfair to both Barty and Reynolds, both of whom have championed "cheesy" music - in fact, Simon was one of the very few critics who argued that "wobble/Bristol" was the truly Avant/hardcore flowering of dubstep.

I was sufficiently "sophisticated" by the time I was a dubstep fan to find wobble boring, especially as I'd been so into what came (slightly) before it. But when I first got into electronic music, it was two pills and a night of jump up drum n bass that did it, and although I can't comfortably return to the world of Clipz and Pendulum (too old, probably, and too enamoured of more complex/"subtle" music) now, I always think that the fact I loved that music then doesn't mean that I am a better person with better taste now, and that actually in some ways I've lost something very precious by leaving behind the naivety and intensity of that first love affair with drugs and cheesy synth lines.

People on here tend to be somewhat intellectual and ruminative, and so we're all very adept at arguing for the validity of our in truth probably rather arbitrary sensibilities.

My inner counterargument to this runs that if you only ever read Spot the Dog you'd think it was the best book ever written, until you read (insert your favourite book here). Spot the Dog retains its charm and it's usefulness as a book to let children read, but once you've read something more sophisticated you can't help but see its limitations. I pick that book for no particular reason and I don't mean to patronise fans of DJ Hype (current form) as childlike. But although part of me rejects the concept of good taste, another part of me balks at that rejection with the sense that there IS better and worse art and a sense of this has to be cultivated.

NB: music tends to be (at least on a surface level) apolitical, but other artforms can be MORALLY objectionable, and worth denigrating. Perhaps it's worth denigrating music, too, but harder to establish upon what grounds.

Corpsey said:

I saw your original post and thought it was a question worth asking because here as much as anywhere there is a taste hierarchy and unspoken rules re: what you can like. OTOH it was rather unfair to both Barty and Reynolds, both of whom have championed "cheesy" music

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what'd that fucker say about me?!

go on corpse, spill the beans.

Corpsey said:

People on here tend to be somewhat intellectual and ruminative, and so we're all very adept at arguing for the validity of our in truth probably rather arbitrary sensibilities.

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over intellectualising music is more often than not a bad move. whether it be making it or listening. it can take the joy away from it.

Corpsey said:

My inner counterargument to this runs that if you only ever read Spot the Dog you'd think it was the best book ever written, until you read (insert your favourite book here). Spot the Dog retains its charm and it's usefulness as a book to let children read, but once you've read something more sophisticated you can't help but see its limitations.

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like your tastebuds becoming more adventurous as you get older. simple flavors can be wonderful to return to but as we start to grow, we prefer things a bit more complex/interesting. and it's funny how in music there's the cliche of a genre's evolution gaining momentum, becoming more and more technical until the point where it gets way too indulgent and alienates the fans, and then there's the return to the primitive.

I always think that the fact I loved that music then doesn't mean that I am a better person with better taste now, and that actually in some ways I've lost something very precious by leaving behind the naivety and intensity of that first love affair with drugs and cheesy synth lines .

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Yeah definitely. Of course it's to do with getting older, things just change and so do you. Unfortunately.

john eden said:

I keep telling people to read this:

Stefan Szczelkun - The Conspiracy of Good Taste

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This is really great, thanks John

This legitimate aesthetic was argued by Kant to be superior to a common aesthetic in which the pleasure to be gained is through an object's sensory pleasures, its usefulness or its meaning as a sign. In the legitimate aesthetic the important quality is one of 'disinterestedness'. The satisfaction is not connected to bodily pleasures, nor to social necessities, but to an "elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world" which "takes the bourgeois denial of the social world to its limit."

Kant would probably not have liked Dissensus.