Rock On

Man oh man, I've been thinking a lot about personal taste. Now what is it about this? I mean, it's not like we really give it a lot of though. Everybody's got preferences, and we all sort of admit that they're idiosyncratic. And then the matter drops.

Of course everybody is different and has different history and so forth. And yet, somehow, I still don't understand a lot of the things people like. The infinite possibilities, if you think about them, really make you sort of blanch. I mean, really, it's kind of vertiginous to think of the way in which anything at all could be preferred by someone. We call a lot of these people crazy, and maybe with good reason. But that makes us a lot stranger than other things out there. Amoebas don't get screwed up like that. Squirrels don't. Dogs only rarely do. But people are really diverse and nutty in their likes and dislikes.

But maybe that's just all part of our architecture, you know? I mean, if our wiring is really so complicated, whatever it is that makes us people but cats and so forth not, then it would stand to reason that our preference hardware is likely to be complicated. We're adaptable--there are people nearly everywhere on the land of the earth. We have the omnivorous ability to subsist there, and the know-how not to die of exposure. I mean, only Antarctica is so relentlessly Coccyx-like as to be uninhabitable.

Okay, so that accounts for cultural variation, sure, but what about within a culture. I mean, with all of the ideological pressure on people to conform to a certain understanding of the world, why isn't it likewise understood what is the "correct" thing to like or dislike? Maybe though I'm looking at the problem wrong. There is a huge amount of overlap in what people like at least a little. But the divergence comes in when we talk about what people like a lot. Or most. And there we want to say that some things are better than others. Chocolate vs. The Beatles; Dega vs. Baseball. Those comparisons are pretty spurious, sure. I mean, I guess the "apples and oranges" line applies there. Okay so what about vanilla vs. chocolate. There is no arbiter here, I think, unless you appeal to other values like does cocoa production cause appression in the third world, or something.

Well, so I mentioned the Beatles which I have to say is not my favorite band but I recognize as do many, they have some sort of objective betterness to them as compared to the vast majority of rock and roll bands. How about this:

There is a sort of objective goodness to enjoyment. I don't know what exactly, but we put value on people vuluing. A reflexive relation, we might say. But likeing stuff is a good thing. I mean, wanting food is good in terms of survival. Liking beauty in people is good in terms of securing a mate (beauty being of course whatever it is that attracts you to another person sexually--cf. the beauty of sadness and then figure out how the suicide girls site is so popular). And so on. Maybe then we can say that loking other things, like at least cultural artefacts has a sort of value that is objective to it as well. Like we recognize the utility or something for keeping the myths and legends of our society alive--the story we tell ourselves about ourselves; the identity we invest in by inhabiting the narrative.

Which brings us to the Beatles. This group has a hold over our collective culture far outweighing that of, say, Peter, Paul, & Mary, or Slipknot. Their value was first in the emotional appeal of the songs, then in their symbolising a whole generation's esthetic vision of itself, and then as the archetype of a form of cultural expression now so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable. Rock and roll is, now, literally the soundtrack to some people's lives. I must admit, I'm one of those people who plays music pretty much whenever I don't have to listen to anything else.

Of course, there is the whole question of the value of aesthetic objects, which I think is a cool topic all in itself. But I guess the idea is that personal taste, besides providing arguably valuable benefits like personal individuation etc. also really gives us a flexible mechanism for cultural evolution. Nothing is worse, I think, than a culture or cultural group that spends all its time trying to preserve exactly the past because it is somehow the perfection from which we've fallen.

I don't want to get all philosophical here on that topic, it's really a rant for another time. What's good, or what've objectively good, is what, unfortunately--I mean, I think it's unfortunate to have to think this, it'd be better to have a clearer theory, many people like _and_ is not popular for the sake of being popular. That is I think what separates lowest-common-denomenator t.v. and Brittney Spears from the Dave Chapelle Show and Erykah Badu. So if you like The Dismemberment Plan, or Modest Mouse, The Roots or Tupac, etc. and so on, take heart--you can like something everyone else likes and still like something good.