On Being TastelessAuthor(s): William BrooksSource: Popular Music, Vol. 2, Theory and Method (1982), pp. 9-18Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/852973 .Accessed: 11/07/2011 04:34

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On being tasteless

by WILLIAM BROOKS

It is hard to be tasteless. It is not so hard to have bad taste, I grant, but that is another matter.

To have bad taste, one simply must consistently make choices which offend those with good taste - an ability which is relatively common- place. For some, bad taste seems to appear naturally, as a birthright; others must learn to cultivate it. But no matter how acquired, or how skilfully employed, bad taste is not tastelessness.

To be truly without taste, to be tasteless, requires great dedication. Our daily lives conspire against us. We live in a tasteful world. We are surrounded by people of taste. Worst of all, we ourselves must con- stantly choose from a wealth of options open to us; we are seduced by our own preferences, our likes and dislikes. How can we possibly aspire to tastelessness? And why, after all, should we?

Consider the advantages of taste, whether good or bad. When we choose tastefully we usually know what we are getting and how it fits in; we have some kind of framework within which our choices are assigned values, both aesthetic and economic. Often the framework is social, built primarily from the judgements made by a group of our tasteful peers. Using it assures us of a home among society's tribes; our taste both reflects and shapes the circles in which we move. Or the framework may be historical: our taste to a large extent depends on what we have been taught, and enables us to view ourselves as part of a continuity, a tradition. In either case, taste helps to place us - to regulate the company we keep and to define our position. Aestheti- cally, economically, socially and historically, taste gives a certain pre- dictable consistency to our lives.

One virtue of tastelessness is that it undermines this consistency. When we are scrupulously tasteless, we are forced into choices we would not otherwise make, the value of which we have no way of knowing. We find ourselves in company we might rather shun, or of whose existence we were unaware. We are cast adrift, historically; our concern shifts from placing ourselves and our choices to simply com- prehending them. Tastelessness can greatly help us to overcome our habits and our histories.

9

10 William Brooks

It ought, then, to be a boon to scholars, who profess to seek a certain detachment from that which they study; yet its potential remains largely untapped. In the arts, especially, tastelessness has been sedu- lously avoided. The fine arts, after all, are by definition fine arts, and discriminating the fine from the foolish has often been the most important goal of art scholarship. Tastelessness would encourage a different approach, in which the arts were quite literally de-fined.

A start towards such a de-finition has been made by students of popular culture. But they too have exercised taste, and consequently their work in many of the arts has been beset with problems. Popular poetry and popular visual art are rarely studied, except in relation to commodities and advertising. Dramatic and literary criticism, though extensive, is bedevilled by the obvious fact that language is meaning- ful; scholarship has tended to concern itself with that to which litera- ture refers, rather than literature itself. Only students of popular music have been fortunate enough to choose a field in which meaning is largely non-referential, the quantity enormous, and the products somewhat independent of other commodities. What an opportunity for tastelessness!

Yet most popular music scholars- most of us- at one time or another have succumbed to the temptations of taste. We have argued that the music of a certain performer or composer is 'better' than some other person's music, or that a particular genre or period is 'richer' than another. We have identified the 'great' singers, or bluesmen, or song- writers, and tried to justify on aesthetic grounds the attention we pay to particular pieces or performances. To be sure, from time to time we have paused to explain what we mean by 'better', and perhaps even to offer some historical or sociological justification for our choices - but far too often our explanations have been ruses to mask the essential point: our central concern has been with the value of the music we have been studying. We have been tasteful.

This condition especially plagues those of us whose training is primarily musicological. Historians and social scientists seem to have a slight advantage, trained as they are to observe phenomena with a fairly dispassionate eye. But they have their own limitations: unless they are also skilled musicians, they lack the technique to explore details of musical structure. Those of us with extensive musical train- ing have a chance to probe more deeply; what a pity, then, that we bring to popular music all the baggage with which we were laden when studying art music- especially a cumbersome old sea chest filled with weights, measures and all the other appurtenances of judgement.

We have an excuse, of course: the study of Western art music has been based for centuries on valuative distinctions. Confronted with

On being tasteless 1l

music's abundance, nearly everyone's first step has been to assess and categorise works according to their importance. To be sure, systems for assessment have varied substantially- they have been hotly contested, in fact- but each has served to filter from a large body of material the personages or works deemed significant. And while historical or social considerations have sometimes influenced the process of selection, the rationale for choosing to study particular works most commonly has been aesthetic. The starting-point for scholarship has been the exercise of taste.

The judgemental character of art music scholarship follows from the nature of art music itself. Innumerable attempts have been made to distinguish between art and popular musics (cultivated and vernacu- lar, serious and light) on the basis of strictly musical characteristics: rhythmic profile, melodic inflections, complexity and so forth. By now it has become clear that such attempts cannot succeed; the distinction rests rather in the place each sort of music occupies as a commodity. In a nutshell, I think, professional art music generally entails some sort of economic subsidy, while professional popular music does not.

Categorising music economically rather than aesthetically has the virtue of allowing individual pieces and performers to move from one category to another as circumstances change. Liszt's piano music was popular music when he played it, back in the 1840S; nowadays it is art music. John McCormack performed art music at the Metropolitan Opera House; on the vaudeville circuit, singing many of the same pieces, he was a popular performer. It is even possible for the same piece apparently to occupy both categories at the same time: a few years ago, although concert performances of Mozart's piano concertos were part of art music, the Theme from Elvira Madigan was popular.

But though they avoid problems of style analysis, economic categor- ies present other difficulties. The distinction between subsidised and non-subsidised music is not always easily made, especially when the notion of subsidy is extended to include private patronage as well as governmental or institutional support. And such an extension clearly is appropriate: opera performed in a house which survives only because of its benefactors is surely a subsidised art; so was Haydn's music at the Eszterhazy court. On the other hand, a person who buys a record by the Rolling Stones, or even one who pays scalper's prices for a ticket to one of their concerts, is obviously purchasing a commodity, not subsidising the music. Yet in all these instances, whether con- cerned with art music or with popular, private funds have been used to support a musical activity.

Other situations are even more problematic. Although a purchaser might regard a recording of an opera as equivalent to a recording by the

12 William Brooks

Stones, an observer with a broader perspective might argue that the opera remains art music because the company which has been re- corded requires subsidy to continue. Even more curiously, compare someone who spends $500 for a ticket to an opera-house benefit with someone who spends $500 for a ticket to a Stones concert. Clearly it would be nice to be able to claim that the former transaction is (at least in part) a kind of subsidy, and that the latter is not; but what is the justification?

There may well be a grey area in which popular and art musics cannot be distinguished, but in the cases above it seems to me that two different things are actually being purchased: the experience of the music, and the fact of the music's existence. To buy a ticket to a Stones concert is not to contribute to bringing the music into existence; the concert has producers independent of the audience, and what is purchased is only the experience. At an opera-house benefit, on the other hand, although a ticket admits the purchaser to the experience, most of the expenditure is intended to enable the music simply to exist; the purchaser of a benefit-night ticket is, in a small way, a co-producer. Unlike the Stones' producer, however, this co-producer's 'investment' is not made with the hope of making money; the purchase is quite literally for the 'benefit' of the music.

Subsidies, then, entail expenditures made not simply to consume music, but to produce it, without expectation of financial return. If there is a reward for the patron, it is to be found in status or prestige, or perhaps in the pleasure of bringing about something important that would otherwise not happen. Patronage entails the production of music that is not economically viable. And because patrons cannot defend economically the value of the music they patronise, they must justify their activities by affirming values which are not economic. Thus art music- subsidised music- is inextricably entangled with aesthetic judgement. And students of art music are inevitably con- cerned with value systems which can distinguish between musical sounds and noise, between greater and lesser composers, between masterpieces and minor works. It is not their fault; such systems are fundamental to the organisation of their scholarly domain.

But popular music is another matter. Unsubsidised music has a value which is defendable and measurable in very straightforward economic terms. It requires no further rationale, and scholars working with it are under no obligation to invent one. In working with popular music, most of art music's aesthetic skeleton can be left behind.

Or it can be kept. It is perfectly possible to transfer bodily to popular music the value systems created for art music, to select materials to be studied because of their aesthetic merit. Or the structure of the system

On being tasteless 13

can be kept but the details altered; if conventional aesthetic values do not apply to punk rock, for example, some other measure ('authen- ticity', perhaps) can be applied to evaluate individual pieces. Some writers on popular music do this sort of thing all the time, and I imagine that all of us do it some of the time.

Evaluations of popular music are, of course, extremely useful. The assessment of products by people of taste is a vital part of the popular music industry, and effects greatly both production and consumption. But scholarship need not follow this path. It can instead turn away from aesthetics altogether, pressing forward into unexplored terrain. This opportunity, I say again, is not available to those concerned with art music, because art music's very nature entails value judgements. We who study popular music have a unique chance to move into the vanguard of scholarship, to begin the process of de-fining the arts. We need only learn to be tasteless.

What opportunities are offered by tasteless scholarship? For a start, to espouse tastelessness is to assert, essentially, that all music is equally valuable (or, if you prefer, that all music is rubbish). It follows that all music can be approached (and should be approached, sooner or later) with interest and without prejudice. And 'all music' must mean, in fact, exactly what it says: all music, from all cultures, at all times. Even within the limits of our own cultural tradition, 'all music' encompasses a vast domain: popular music, of course, but also classi- cal, the avant-garde, hymnody, folk, easy listening, liturgical chant, Musak, and any other category one might name. Although the study of art music requires a tasteful exclusion of popular music, the study of popular music requires tastelessly including art music. Our commit- ment must be to understand everything in our musical domain- Beet- hoven and Boulez as well as Chuck Berry and banjos.

But life is short, alas, and so we inevitably focus our attention; we choose to study only a few items from the enormous heap before us. Though unfortunate, this compromise with mortality is consistent with tastelessness so long as we ensure that our choices have nothing to do with aesthetic value. The rationale for our selection can be political, personal, statistical, coincidental, or whatever - but it cannot entail an assertion that what we study is 'better' than what we neglect, or 'more worthy' of attention.

We can even choose what we study by exercising our preferences, our likes and dislikes, so long as we agree that these have nothing to do with value. After all, 'liking' a piece is not a property of that piece, but rather of the relationship between it and a person; 'liking' has nothing to do with the music per se and need have nothing to do with value. Personal taste is perfectly consistent with tastelessness provided it is

14 William Brooks

used only as an arbitrary way of choosing from the vast, undifferenti- ated universe that tastelessness makes available.

Such a use of taste is impossible in art music, of course. But in studying popular music, taste could be conceived as an arbitrary mechanism for selecting material; alas, it rarely is. Instead, it is usually invoked to mask a hidden system of values: material chosen tastefully is better than that rejected. Scholars truly seeking tastelessness do well to choose by means of other, more 'objective' techniques. But these, too, often conceal obliquely tasteful assumptions.

Historians, for example, are inclined to assert that the material they select is 'important' or 'historically significant'. Their argument usually rests on the assumption that history is a tangible thing, like a rug, and that one need only look dispassionately at it to see where the bumps and twists and patterns are. But there is no rug called history- only a vast accumulation of bits of wool. All that we have is residue, yester- day's leavings; yesterday itself is altogether inaccessible. The past has been fleeced by the present, and we make history's rug ourselves from the tufts that remain - tying together the strands, weaving and knot- ting and cutting and crumpling until we have some reasonably accept- able construct to offer our public. Historical importance is in no sense self-evident; it is defined by the selections we make to suit a rug half-woven. We compile artifacts to build the history we want to build; there is nothing 'objective' about our choices.

We can minimise our visibility, however. Surrounded as we are by vast amounts of musical debris, we can invent rules, screening proce- dures, to help us choose what to study. And by exercising a modicum of ingenuity, we can invent rules that leave our opinions out, rules that select and reject music automatically according to criteria which are peripheral to musical 'value'. By means of such rules, I might select, for instance, only those records that made Billboard's Top Ten lists be- tween 1945 and 1955, or only the records owned by my grandfather, or all those issued in 1960, 1970 and 1980 with pictures of women on the cover, or all 4ss released last May whose titles begin with C, I or A. As long as the rules are inclusive and unambiguous, they will operate virtually autonomously; there will be no need for me tastefully to assess the musical content of each recording. To this extent such rules allow me to choose bits for my history 'objectively' - though 'arbi- trarily' is probably a better word.

Rules of this sort offer me several practical advantages. For one thing, since I need no longer evaluate in detail each item individually, I can work my way through the rubbish around me fairly quickly; I can cover more ground. Then, too, scholarly disputes will no longer centre on my taste; instead, they can concern themselves with my rules for

On being tasteless 15

selection- a topic that is both more concrete and less personal. Best of all, if I apply my rules conscientiously, I will probably be led to items I have never encountered before, so that the collection which goes into my history will be both larger and more diverse than if I simply chose tastefully from the material I already know.

But there are liabilities to this technique as well, and prime among them is a tendency for my scholarly attention to shift away from the music and toward the screening procedure. It is very likely, in fact, that I will shape my study to suit the rules, or devise the rules to suit my study- which, to be sure, is not a problem as long as I recognise that I am now more concerned with the rules (or the relationships they represent) than with the music per se. If, for instance, I select only pieces that made the Top Ten, the chances are good that I will either believe or be led to believe that there is some sort of connection between a certain kind of music and 'Top Ten-ness' - and it is probably this that I will end up studying. If I start with my grandfather's collection, I may find out a great deal about my grandfather and little, if anything, about the music. If I work with a diachronic sample of records whose covers contain portraits of women, I will be sorely tempted to relate changes in the sort of music they contain to changes in the role of women in society. No matter how eccentric or arbitrary the selection procedure, the temptation remains to 'use' it in some ingenious way. From a whimsical decision to choose titles beginning with C, I and A, I might be led to some intricate theory about the transmission of secret messages by means of recordings.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with this sort of scholarship, and many studies of popular music are devoted to it. Because popular music is a product, it relates in complex ways to other products and to social structures. Analyses concerned with these relationships are both necessary and valuable, and many of them rely heavily on the use of rules to obtain 'objective' samples. But, in general, such analyses are concerned only superficially with the music itself; instead, the rules are used to highlight some extramusical feature- 'Top Ten-ness', or Life As Grampa Lived It- which becomes the actual focus of the study. 'Objective' selection enables scholars to avoid the pitfalls of evaluating music, but it also encourages them to avoid the music itself.

Because of this, art music scholars are inclined to dismiss the study of popular music (when they take notice of it at all) as being more concerned with sociology than with music. They are very often right, in fact, and to reply that there is nothing wrong with sociology begs the point. Popular music scholarship has to a large extent left the study of music per se to the art music world.

But what can this possibly mean: 'the study of music per se'? Music

16 William Brooks

is a perceptual event, and studying it by itself, in isolation, is im- possible. We cannot examine a piece of music as if no one were there (we cannot even do that sort of thing in physics anymore); we have to take the observer into account. Studying music per se must entail studying the relationship between the acoustic event and the observer; and this relationship depends in part on the observer's history, person- ality and preferences. The study of music per se, it would seem, entails the study of taste.

We need not succumb to subjectivism, however. Though proverbial wisdom and daily life both insist upon taste's unaccountable diversity, we can choose nevertheless to pursue taste's consistencies. We can argue that, being human, all observers to some extent will display uniform ways of interacting with the world - and with the world of sound in particular. And we can note that this uniformity, if it exists, will also be part of 'the study of music per se' - better termed music theory. In fact, the discovery of consistency is music theory's most logical objective. A theory of music, like a theory of language, en- deavours to account for a wide variety of human behaviours which for some reason have been grouped together; crucial to the theory is an explanation of the grouping.

Like linguistics, music theory can rest on either of two basic assump- tions. The first asserts that musical interactions are ruled by the same principles that govern human interactions in general; in this case, music theory becomes merely a particular application of a more univer- sal theory of psychology, such as behaviourism. The second, in opposition, asserts that musical interactions are to some extent distinc- tive, regulated by innate principles which may not apply exactly to any other sort of activity; in this case, music theory will also be distinctive, and will offer insights into human behaviour not attainable in any other way.

In linguistics, Noam Chomsky has long defended the latter position, and some of his arguments apply equally well to music. Like language, music appears in virtually all cultures, and usually can be recognised even when its meaning is not understood. Like language, music often exists in both a written (notated) and a spoken (performed) form, and the differences between the two are both systematic and revealing. And like language, music appears to consist of meaningful units struc- tured according to syntactic principles, with both the units and the syntax varying widely from culture to culture.

If this second assumption is adopted (and I of course prefer it), then one can argue that just as there are certain key principles underlying human languages which are independent of the tongue spoken and of the speaker's idiosyncracies, so also there are certain key principles

On being tasteless 17

underlying human musics which are independent of the idiom used and of personal taste. There may not be very many of these, but those which exist are innate; they constitute an hereditary part of the human condition. That is, there is a kind of 'musicness' that automati- cally is part of 'humanness'; it is to the discovery of this 'musicness' that music theory ought to be devoted.

But, of course, it is not. Instead, music theory has become a domain to which only students of art music are encouraged to contribute. And although art music theorists have learned much about certain musical systems, their work has been severely restricted by their obligation to proceed tastefully. The limitations of art music have left theorists ploughing a small and stony field; they would find popular music's ample pastures far more rewarding, for two very obvious reasons.

First, if music theory is to generalise convincingly about the 'music- ness' of musical languages, it clearly must be able to explain the musical dialects used by large numbers of people. Art music, subsi- dised by only a few, is only rarely used by many; and even when it is, it often quite self-consciously entails a distortion of the dialect it evokes. To some extent, composers of art music are necessarily committed to the individualisation of the languages they employ; their 'value', after all, depends in part on their distinctiveness. Analysis of their music, even at its most colloquial, almost always results in a skewed picture of the language with which they started. Building a theory of music on the compositions of Beethoven or Schoenberg is like building a theory of English on the writings of Wordsworth or Joyce; in neither case will the principles discovered be generally applicable to daily life. Far better to build a theory on the basis of what one hears people say on the street - or hum, or whistle, or dance to.

Second, it is clear that music theory can have nothing to do with aesthetic values, judgements or preferences. If a theory is to account for a particular musical language, it must account for all utterances in that language. It does no good to eliminate from consideration a large collection of 'inferior' utterances; indeed, those rejected are very often the ones whose straightforwardness might be most helpful in getting started. Taste gets theorists nowhere; in fact, taste gets in the way. In the past, taste has distorted many music theories into theories of aesthetics, weapons with which the 'value' of art music's competitors could be attacked. Theory has become converted into yet another defence of taste and the need for taste - but along the way it has stopped being theory.

Popular music scholarship has a wonderful opportunity, then, to bring music theory - the study of 'musicness', of music per se - into its own. But once again, in attempting this, scholarship cannot be exclu-

18 William Brooks

sivist. Any music theory, strictly speaking, will apply only to the set of pieces upon which it is built; the most general theories will be those built upon the most diverse collections of music. Although music theory ought not to rest on art music, it ultimately must be able to account for it- just as a theory of evolution must be able to account for dinosaurs, platypuses and horseshoe crabs as well as cats, dogs, cows and people. A study which begins by tastelessly investigating popular music is obliged eventually to accommodate music for taste; indeed, it may be that an explanation of aesthetic 'value' will form a significant part of the theory ultimately advanced.

Though somewhat whimsical, the analogy just drawn between music and biology is curiously apt. Like biology, music requires a theory which not only describes individual entities in isolation (as taxonomy does for living things) but also accounts for their interrela- tionships, both diachronic (evolutionary) and synchronic (ecological). And, in music as well as biology, the most obscure varieties are as crucial to the theory as the most common ones; when a species is lost, a network of relationships is lost as well. From this perspective, it is no more foolish to subsidise art music than it is to subsidise zoos; if we are willing to preserve the snail darter, we ought to be equally willing to preserve Sigismondo d'India.

But at the same time, in both fields, preserving the obscure is no justification for neglecting the commonplace- crickets and Christmas carols, milkweed and Mantovani. Coexistence is the ultimate goal: a world in which mosquitoes, Mozart, moose and Muddy Waters co- habit comfortably, in which the difference between the rare and the ordinary is a matter only of quantity, not of value. To be sure, such a world would require the eroding of the economic base for music (and for biology), and perhaps this is impossible; perhaps economics is more fundamental to humanity than 'musicness'. But we can try.

As a start, we can turn our scholarly attention away from the subsi- dised art and toward the non-subsidised. We can learn to ignore the systems of value impressed on us by the studies of art music- or to use them only selectively, self-consciously and critically. We can agree to choose what we study without recourse to aesthetic judgements, to build our histories by selecting systematically but arbitrarily from the detritus left by the past. And we can seek to build a truer theory of human musical behaviour by starting with the ordinary - without, however, rejecting for ever the exceptional.

We can, in brief, do something about our taste: we can acquire a taste for tastelessness.