Ok, so I seem to have done quite a poor job of replying to this. Great to see all the discussion, as it's gone on quite far now I'm just going to respond to general things that keep coming up rather than individual posts.
People who are saying 'it's not music that is middlebrow, it's only music listeners that are middlebrow': in the final analysis, yes, I would accept that. And we can see that in the way the genuinely strange or challenging music can come to be seen as middlebrow purely as a result of long periods of critical acceptance. However, I would argue that, taking the existence of the middlebrow audience as a given, there is some music produced that seems to fit this audience like a glove, right from the off. Nomad's concept of a 'bourgeois sensibility' seems important here. Such a sensibility clearly must exist first and foremost in the listener, the consumer. But once it's widely established as a public standard, it becomes something that musical artists may come to share, or something that artists can market their work towads, whether they share the sensibility themselves or not.
People who are saying things along the line of 'Listeners should just like what they like and not feel guitly about it, not feel the need to justify it'. This is an interesting one.
In terms of the context of the thread, I would have hoped the lighthearted intent in the 'confessions' aspect should have been obvious. If anything, rather that simply accepting that middlebrow music was A Bad Thing, the thread was meant to interrogate what middlebrow actually meant and whether people are right to so often dismiss or disparage it. I did wonder how long it would take us to start talking about hipsters though, it's rather like our own personal Godwin's Law
. FWIW, I'm certain that a lot of the music myself and others actually dovetails with a certain sector of hipster taste and has gotten great write-ups in places like Pitchfork. But to reiterate from a previous post, what I'm talking about is
not the same thing as the ironic enjoyment of chart-pop. Like most people here I hope, I think mainstream pop can often be great, and can be appreciated as such without any need for irony.
But as to the basic contention itself, about lack of guilt - yes and no. Yes, in that certainly, in our society it is still the case that exclusion works by labelling groups as 'the wrong sort of people' and by making they themselves feel to be as such, often in very subtle and underhand ways and often operating through seemingly rather trivial areas such as cultural taste. This is obviously something we need to move beyond. But on the flipside, I would feel that a certain degree of guilt or unease about musical taste are inevitable, precisely because music is something that people care about and invest their time in so much, and part of this care can involve deciding what you don't like, what you think is a bad idea for music as much as a good thing. It would seem that there
are legitimate aesthetic and ideological reasons for being at least suspicious of middlebrow music - that it tends to be joyless, unimaginative, comforting/comfortable, tied to a limited or outdated idea of what is 'tasteful' and so forth. Therefore if like myself you find yourself enjoying things that seem to fall within this category, it doesn't seem surprising that at first you would feel uneasy as a music fan; but hopefully rather than just feeling ashamed and unworthy, you would then go on to try and justify what appeals and what is worthwhile in this music, despite any potential drawbacks.
I should say that, although I thought this thread would be one that could generate stimulating and in-depth discussion (which it has), I didn't anticipate it getting so many people wound up. Whether the fact that it has is bad or good I'm not sure yet.
