Bad Taste
Dude, you're killing the vibe
I’ve been thinking about taste, and how it’s not always a good thing for it to be too pronounced.
A few years ago, seated at a desk island at an indie record company, I told my colleagues I didn’t like Abba. Silence descended over that little corner of the office, and the people around me frowned. ‘What?’ one of them said. ‘Why?’
‘Because it’s mild Swedish pap,’ I told him. ‘Like something squeezed from a tube.’
The frowns gave way to open-mouthed outrage, like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
‘How can you not like Abba?’ someone demanded.
Shit, I thought, hiding – red-faced – behind my laptop. I obviously underestimated the strength of feeling here. I’d recently had a stern talking to at home, too, from my wife, for expressing the same opinion to my daughter. The ageing disco-Swedes had just launched a high-grossing, hologrammatic tour. But since when did my fellow alternative music types start liking Abba?
Many years earlier, in another indie label office, someone brandished a magazine in which The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds had been selected as the best album of all time (I was young enough to think this list was some sort of landmark, rather than one of the many that would appear, periodically, for evermore.)
‘What do you think of that?’ they asked the label boss.
‘Not only is it very much not the best album of all time,’ he said, ‘it’s piss-weak fucking rubbish.’
Yes! I remember thinking. It’s not just me who thinks these things! I found my tribe through not liking stuff, as much as loving it.
—
Having an overdeveloped taste can be alienating. A decade or so ago, at an elegant wedding in Silicon Valley, I watched as a friend of the bride opened the party by singing Lionel Richie’s Hello. As the crowd beamed happily on, I wondered if there was something wrong with me. Was I the only person who wasn’t pretending not to like this stuff? Was there something I should’ve grown out of, like everyone else, and somehow didn’t?
Taste can appear pompous, affected. In an interview around TV on the Radio’s Dear Science, a journalist reported that Dave Sitek was lying under a table in the hotel lobby, to get as far away as possible from the music playing. ‘Ah, young people,’ my boss at the time said. But there’s something in that. I too feel an almost physical revulsion at bland, tepid music. The worst of this is the lounge / easy listening cover version. I will never recover from hearing a version of Smells Like Teen Spirit in the style of an ersatz Astrud Gilberto. One of the worst days of my life was spent listening to Air’s limp, insipid Moon Safari on repeat, as a house full of young people warmed themselves up for a performance at FYF in LA. I wanted to go full Sitek – beyond Sitek.
If, like me, you think In Utero is a better record than Nevermind, people think you’re lying, just to try and look cool.
It’s not about good taste, really. It’s about too strong a taste. It makes you into a spoilsport. Recently, on a road trip to the desert with one of my oldest friends, already made stressful by the top being down under the brutal sun, roaring through the fumes of the 10 freeway, I endured a barrage of sunny, grit-free, schizophrenically skipped music at ear bleeding volume. It wasn’t the time or place for Elliott Smith.
Often when I go to a party, people ask me to make a playlist, or bring along one they imagine I already have. ‘You wouldn’t want to have my playlist,’ I tell them, sheepishly. ‘It’s not really party music.’
Not that I’m listening to something cool. If anything, I’ve reverted to the music I listened to at 13, back when alternative rock and the punk that inspired it seemed hell bent against anything bland or middle of the road, like Abba or Lionel Richie. It’s definitely not cool to be a regular listener to Alice in Chains. And anyway, there’s always someone cooler than you. When I interviewed Tony O’Neill for the Rejects, he told me how he’d built up the courage to play his compilation tape on the Kenickie tour bus. When he did so, the band and crew fell silent. Then someone asked: ‘How long is this fucking song going to last?’ And then someone else ejected the tape and threw it out the window.
At a music conference once, I told one of my favourite people – a label head and manager – that I liked Nine Inch Nails. ‘Why?’ he asked, grinning sardonically. Then he did an excellent impression of a comedy hard rawk voice and yelled ‘HEAD LIKE A HOLE!!!’ I admire this man’s taste. He once told me that he considered certain, bland forms of electronica to be ‘graphic designer’ music. Nothing too strong to distract them from their work.
I’ve always been drawn to music that’s angry, sad, exciting, or otherwise has some grit. ‘You’re so hardcore,’ another boss said once, when I told him I didn’t want music to be a comfort blanket, and that was why Dizzee Rascal’s first album was more important than anything else under consideration. I took it as a compliment, but looking back I don’t think it was meant as one.
—
Something shifted in music, in recent years. The etiquette became less about signalling your taste by what you didn’t like. That was negative, cynical. Now, the norm is to like pretty much everything (except, perhaps, Christian rock). To signal your openness and range.
But that’s not how I’ve ever felt about music. I hate stuff as strongly as I love other stuff, and I simply can’t pretend. I don’t want musical bubble bath. I want to feel something strongly, to get split open and ruined by music.
