a few comments regarding taste in music

Part I:
Walter Pater says, "all art aspires to the condition of music": in our modern world, this means to be constantly sampled in car commercials, rap songs, summarized in cursory greatest hits collections, butchered in covers, and turned off at parties in favor of reggaeton.

Yet music does hold an unique position. Music, after TV, is the most quickly consumed form of art. It takes thirty minutes to watch a TV show, and thirty minutes to listen to an album, but you don't really take it all in on the first listen, whereas you are supposed to have taken in an entire episode of, say, Drew Carey, in order to follow his zany adventures next week.

However, there is so little TV (would that this were true!) that it would be hard to really define oneself by the TV one watches. The most die-hard fan of Lost probably has not seen any more episodes than someone with nothing better to do most nights and catches the missed episodes in reruns. Moreover, the mass audience and mass appeal of popular TV prevent differentiation (from others) and intimate relation (to the show), respectively. Even being a huge fan of The Simpsons and Law and Order, I find not only little in common with most other fans, but I'm not even sure what it would mean to identify with these shows.

In literature, the moral conceptions, plots, and style of a given author are so unique (the opposite of TV's condition) that there can be no identical relation to an ouevre.
Films simply take too long to watch to meet our criteria here. Even among my favorite movies, there are few that I have seen even a dozen times. In a sense, one *moves on* from a movie after far less contact than with a record. (This could also be said of books, although it is not the main objection).
Art is too expensive. I would possibly allow that an art "movement" could work here, though, were one involved.
Poetry almost succeeds, but how many times can one read a poem?

Exceptions:
1) Trekkies
2) Tolkien fans
3) anyone leading some sort of expatriate, drunk "poetic" lifestyle (warning: you are a cliche!)

Which leaves music as the easiest art form with which to form a social bond-- and therefore a defining one.

Part II:
Walter Pater says, "all art aspires to the condition of music": in our modern world, this means to be constantly sampled in car commercials, rap songs, summarized in cursory greatest hits collections, butchered in covers, and turned off at parties in favor of reggaeton.

However, what interests me is the dialectic of taste. The other day, I was (half) joking when I said that I wanted to get into jazz because I wanted my music to be more dialectical. However, one's taste is already dialectical. What is taste, but a winding, mistake-filled dialectic which finds itself in the end through tribulation and identification?

In this sense, it is hard to argue with *and* hard to credit someone with really shitty taste in music. No one is born liking shitty music. This is something that must be arrived at. In the same way, however, liking shitty music is inherently valid. [Although, I should say that I once heard someone say, "I don't like the music that I like," and I suppose their earlier taste had not been constructed on firm ground.]

However, this process is essentially a reductive one. To wit, what people LIKE about the music they like is not a good guarantor of what they will like about the music they don't already like. We imagine that we have "cornered" our tastes from a really wide field, but the ordering of the points where one approaches each genre is colored by the previous instance. I know a lot of people approach black metal from the noise or hardcore scenes (for instance), and want to hear in that music what they already like, but this normally ends up with the WORST taste in black metal. What happens is that people decide "i don't like that kind of vocals" or "i don't like the production on this", but at the same time they listen to Modernlifeiswar is something, which is hardly the music an infant would choose at the outset, from the entire field of creative endeavor.

I do think that someone can simply "suck at listening to music." Old people, for instance, who insist that a distorted guitar is "angry" while the exact same notes, played acoustically, are "happy". Or people who insist that a particular form of pop-rock, with different inflections of instrumentation, somehow constitutes a new genre.

In short, (and to be honest I have to go eat some potato chips right now and can't continue this until later) musical taste should reproduce the wise words of Mr. Eliot: We shall not cease from exploration: And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.
Which is just to say, not that one should "taste every flavor" or "understand the history of a music before he forms his opinion"--nothing so trite--but that with each new song we hear, we simultaneously have to bring every song we've ever heard into the headphones with us, and to forget them at the same time. I do not believe there is such a thing as "being open-minded," nor that all music is equally valid, etc., but I would like to start thinking about (good) taste not as something one "has" or arrives at, but as maybe this other thing outlined above.

---i am staying up all night in order to touch my mousepad every hour so that my computer does not shut down, so that my download of the new Fucked Up album will continue without incident
---today I wore blue suede shoes; there were no remarks.
---if you convince me to buy an expensive reissue and i don't like it, we have beef [b33f]
---the construction "which" as a relative possessive pronoun is so egregious that it does not even occur as an "erroneous" usage in the OED--- and yet I snuck it by in my senior thesis. oops!
---no one likes being told they should go listen to "the teddy bears' picnic"
--- generate your own (meaningless) graduate paper
---text message distro updates=the future is here
---"veering towards solipsism"= the definition of my life/method
---all complaints about the content of this blog should be directed to the fact that I spend all day in the library