Do I have bad taste?

Some years back I had a job where the Bluetooth speaker was hotly contested territory; whoever got to it first decided what everybody else would listen to for the rest of the day. Usually, victory was claimed by one co-worker who tended to be in early. I didn’t enjoy her music much, but whatever. I took my moments when I could, put on Bruce Springsteen or Green Day when I did, and got on with my life. Until somebody commented on how different the music I played was to our usual soundtrack. The co-worker responsible for said usual soundtrack overheard this and announced ‘that’s because he has bad taste’.
 
This bothered me. Not because it was an unnecessarily mean comment (although it was), but because of how she said it. With firm certainty, as though the quality of her taste versus mine was immutable fact. Which is a sentiment familiar to anyone who has ever been fifteen and pretentious, but as an adult it felt… odd.
 
So I asked what she meant. Surely it would be fairer to say we had different taste? She held the line, insisting that there is definitive good taste and bad taste and she had the former and I had the latter. Okay, I pushed on, but given I don’t really like what you play, who gets to decide that?
 
At that point, she started to struggle. I felt a little bad because it was obvious that this ‘good taste’ thing was a point of pride for her, but given it was clearly a point of some sensitivity for me, the challenge felt fair enough.
 
Finally she cited ‘tastemakers’ who decide what’s good and what isn’t. Which might be one of the wildest things I’ve ever heard. Apparently she wasn’t telling me I had bad taste, some nameless person I’d never met was.
 
There are a million reasons why a piece of art might resonate with you or not. Reasons why Bruce Springsteen could move me to my soul while the warbling indie stuff this co-worker played left me mildly annoyed. Reasons why I’d rather go and see a cracking thriller or sharp comedy than like, the latest Yorgos Lanthimos thing. It’s always bugged me that those very personal reasons don’t seem to matter much in the face of some seemingly arbitrary notion of taste.
 
I’ve been hearing versions of this most of my life. In primary school my best friend and I were mocked for liking The Saddle Club, which might have been fair. In high school I was given shit for listening to Green Day and told I should be getting into Queens of the Stone Age or Rammstein or Daft Punk, all of which I tried, none of which I enjoyed. I went back to Green Day. But I still obeyed when people told me what I should be consuming. Hence my late teenage years spent pretending I got anything out of Carlos Castaneda or Vladimir Nabokov.
 
If some degree of personal insecurity about my lacking taste is not new, then nor is the superiority certain people think their own taste affords them. Back in high school, one of those friends who tried to get me watching and listening to things I didn’t like regularly mocked me for what I did. It was usually easier to laugh along and subscribe to the notion that he knew what was good and I didn’t. But one night a group of us watched a film that we all enjoyed, and this one friend didn’t. Maybe owing to some sort of safety in numbers, none of us backed down when he loudly insisted we were all wrong. Our response amounted to a shrugging ‘hey, we liked it and you didn’t and that’s fine, let’s move on.’
 
This friend did not move on. Later that night, we received a furious group email. An excerpt below:
 
“You guys have horrible taste. Seriously, I'm the one who has shepherded you out of pathetic adolescent fiction. How many shows and films have I forced you guys to watch that have been exceptional and quite addictive? It seems that you will consume ANY media regardless of the quality. I'd rather save you from yourselves now than have you look back and be revolted.”
 
Yeah, that’s a real snippet of a real email sent by a real person. I cut out a couple of nastier, more personal takedowns to protect privacies, but what’s left is still a pretty staggering thing to receive from a ‘friend’. I would have been around sixteen when this happened, and it led to an understanding; if this person’s belief in his superior taste was so fragile that he would send things like that to friends who didn’t share it, then who really had the problem?
 
But the good taste argument is a sliding scale. In the above anecdotes I’m the one being judged for my taste, and yet there have been many, many instances, some probably more recent than I’m comfortable with, where I’ve been the one looking down on somebody for enjoying Transformers or Family Guy or The Big Bang Theory or whatever I had decided was comparative low culture to my gold standards like… The Silence of the Lambs, Kill Bill, Breaking Bad or Community. Popular classics, sure. But certainly not markers of some extremely elevated taste. And while those are the first things that came to mind as illustrating my favourites, it’s telling that they are also all things I’ve loved since I was a teenager – the last time I was truly open to new things.
 
One of my major insecurities is that I don’t push my own cultural boundaries. I don’t listen to a lot of music outside of classic rock or folk or artists I already appreciate. I watch new movies far less than I would like. Same with TV. I read widely-ish, but let’s be real, it’s mostly crime thrillers. I have developed this baked in disdain of anything I suspect to be boring or pretentious, to the point of not giving certain new films or shows a chance. When I was a teenager, Mulholland Drive blew my mind. I have an uncomfortable suspicion that if I was discovering it today, I would turn it off after fifteen minutes.
 
For most people, taste calcifies in youth and doesn’t change much. I respect the hell out of my film critic friends who are very good at recognising the value of a Fast and Furious movie while also knowing the French New Wave inside out, but I don’t think your average person who doesn’t live and breathe pop culture has a huge amount of interest in broadening their own horizons. Case in point, I don’t and I absolutely should. Maybe it’s fine to just enjoy what I enjoy and make peace with the fact that I’m probably missing out on great stuff that I would find if I risked my time a little bit more. But the truth of it is, I’m at a place in my life where if something feels like a chore and I don’t have to do it, I’m just not going to.
 
This would be different if I was a film critic or scholar, if being good at what I did depended on the widest consumption and consideration possible, but it doesn’t and so my energy and time go elsewhere. But then even as I type that I start laughing because I’m the first to tell aspiring writers that they have to consume stories to know how to write them. By that logic, how can I ever improve or develop if I don’t wilfully expand my horizons beyond the stuff I’ve spent most of my life enjoying?
 
But years pass and wave after wave of new movies and TV shows and books come out and I make notes of the ones I should catch then more time passes and I forget and then there’s another wave and another and on the cycle goes and I wonder how many potential new favourites have passed me by, now lost in such an overwhelming mass of stories that it feels pointless to go back and try to see what I’ve missed because I wouldn’t know where to start.
 
If it’s a rainy evening after a day of writing my own stories, I’m more inclined to go back to one I know I’ll enjoy then potentially waste my time on something I might not. This makes me a little sad. But try as I might to change this, I don’t really see it happening. Hopefully just trying means that I’ll occasionally come across new and exciting stuff that shifts and shapes the spectrum of what I consume in the same way as the things I discovered when I was younger.
 
Taste can and probably should develop, but for most people it doesn’t and that’s fine. If you find enjoyment in particular movies or books or songs then it’s ultimately just dickish for anyone to try and take that away from you.
 
Having ‘good taste’, if such a thing exists, isn’t bad, but it doesn’t make you better than anybody else. You develop good taste in media by watching, reading and listening to a lot of different things but you’re always going to be drawn more to the ones that deeply resonate because of how they speak to your unique sensibilities. A broad pop culture diet heightens your chances of finding the works that do that best, but this can only happen if you’re passionate enough to develop that diet. Other people have other passions. It’s up to you how much of your self-worth you want to stake on that discrepancy.  

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