Let's talk about taste

Bad taste or good is not a uniform entity but a malleable force governed by social parameters

LET’S TALK ABOUT LOVE: WHY OTHER PEOPLE HAVE SUCH BAD TASTE
Author: Carl Wilson
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 300
Price: Rs 499

I was introduced to singer Katy Perry through her 2010 release, “Firework”, before which I had shown only a cursory interest in her work. Among my friends there were those who were unabashed admirers of her work, and this group also constituted the subsequent fan base of the likes of Rihanna and Justin Bieber. I am not a music person, so it was difficult for me to comment on my friends’ choices but I had the sneaking suspicion that because they liked pop, they could not have been discerning listeners.

“Firework” changed my opinion of Perry. While the song was catchy, it nevertheless suffered from a brand of schmaltz that connoisseurs despise. My reason for liking it was the music video in which Perry acted as a guardian angel to a slew of down-and-out characters, including a cancer patient, a gay man and an overweight teen. I was hardly the eagle-eyed critic that a part of me aspired to be but if that meant dissing something as clearly wonderful as Perry’s large-hearted generosity, I did not want to join the brigade.

Carl Wilson faced a similar dilemma with regard to fellow Canadian and music sensation, Celine Dion. As a man who knows his jazz from his punk and the others besides, Wilson was unable to digest the singular popularity of Dion, whom he considered the epitome of all that is wrong with the music world today. When Dion won an Oscar for My heart will go on, her popular track from Titanic, Wilson decided to investigate the roots of his discomfort with Dion’s music and persona.

It was to be an educational experience. Wilson met hordes of men and women who looked upon Dion’s work not merely as fun and popular but transcendental. He recounts the story of Mohammad Younis, a Baghdad barber, who won the Iraqi version of American Idol against great odds. He faced deaths threats from conservative Islamists but vowed to perform under a pseudonym because the winner of the competition would get a ticket out of Iraq. He chose to sing Dion’s song from Titanic.

Celine Dion (centre) won an Oscar for My heart will go on at the 70th Annual Academy Awards. This triggered Carl Wilson to investigate the roots of his discomfort with Dion’s music, which he considered the epitome of all that is wrong with the music

  While Wilson could not bring himself to appreciate Dion as an artist, he came to sympathise with those who found meaning in her work. One fan he met, Stephanie, gave him roundly political reasons for her love for Dion, in spite of her awareness that some of Dion’s work can be kitschy: “I think we live in a society where people’s visceral responses or emotional responses aren’t really respected. And I think they should be. Even if it’s not cool, even if it borders on the ridiculous in a lot of ways... . I think we should have more of a respect for people’s lack of guile. I think it’s good to have things that you can’t explain.”

Stephanie’s response resonates with Wilson’s own discussion of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In the mid-1960s, Bourdieu surveyed thousands of people on what culture they liked and consumed and collated that against the respondents’ social and economic backgrounds. The result was the 1979 book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, considered a milestone in social science. Bourdieu’s contention was that taste is not a uniform entity but a malleable force governed by class and other social parameters.

Applied to Dion, Bourdieu’s theory enables Wilson to better parse his distaste for her music: “I am intuiting that there’s no sleight of hand or subtle reinterpretation I can use to fit her music into my store of cultural capital… . Conversely, her fans, from another class or field standpoint, find something in the music that seems to increase their own cultural capital, the value of her voice or her romanticism or her westernness, so they latch on.”

True, there is good art and bad art, and then there is art in between, those particular choices in creative consumption that defy easy categorisation. Some cultural products crystallise at a stage in life that is special to us — the first burst of romance articulated by George Benson’s Nothing’s gonna change my love for you or the wintry nostalgia of George Michael’s Last Christmas. Lata Mangeshkar, for example, is said to have diluted her classical roots by singing Bollywood songs but can we really deny her artistic achievement?

Furthermore, our artistic tastes undergo transformation as we grow up and look for art that speaks to the changes that we witness in ourselves and the world around us. A Kenny G sax that seemed exquisite in our teen years can acquire a less exalted meaning in later age. What may be considered out of bounds for one generation may become acceptable to the next. Truth be told, Wilson’s work can sometimes sound like academic navel-gazing in pursuit of his next, largely unnecessary, thesis. The welcome upshot is that he forces the reader to look into his own artistic preferences and the nuances thereof.