Music Taste is Irrational!

If you had known me back in 2008 you would have met a different person to the man I am today. Back then, I worked a day job but at night I had a different employment for I was also a DJ. I specialized in parties and so I was expected to play the music of the mainstream... or "dance mixes" of the same music. I played a lot of what was (and might still be) called "Funky House". Even now, in some barely touched archive, I have about 160 mixes of music that I recorded from those times. Nearly every single one of those mixes, which I made live, is at 128 beats per minute, the sweet spot for dance music if you play House Music. Every one of the mixes is an incessant "four to the floor" beat from start to finish. Most of the tracks played appear to be made in computers and use computer instruments. (You can usually tell this if the sounds made seem to be things you couldn't easily play but would be easy to draw on a computer screen in some program.) I find it almost impossible to listen to any of these mixes today. The music seems cheesy and the mixes are monotonous. I ask myself, sometimes, how I ever could have listened to it at all. But when you are a DJ you have to give the people what they want or you don't last very long. Its a scenario which breeds monotony as people want the same thing and the same style repeated every time. I would go to the same Army camp, for example, and play pretty much the same tracks every month. Its what they wanted and that's what got me the gig and the money for doing it.  

Two things happened to me last night. One, I was asked by someone to review an album they had just released so I sent a message asking them to give me a few days. I then listened to it. Two, I was followed by someone on Twitter and I clicked the link to their album in their bio and listened to it as well. The first album, the one I'd been asked to review, I completely disliked. But, nevertheless, its the reason I am writing this blog. The music was samey and formulaic. It couldn't have been more written to a template if it had been written by a robot according to programming. The formula was to start the track with a bit of speech, preferably from "the hood" and spoken by someone of black origin (the album nominally fuses rap with noise, a prospect I was actually looking forward to as something different), before segueing unceremoniously into a number of minutes of harsh noise or what is known in the noise genre of music as a "noise wall". Every track was like this and there was no variation. If you had listened to one track then you had listened to them all. This lack of variation disappointed me but I suppose the composer or composers of the album find it to be a formula they like. And that's their business not mine. 

The second album, the one I idly clicked on the link to, was altogether different. It was what I would describe as "Indie pop electronics" which probably isn't a genre but is my description for what I heard. This music was varied and interesting and I listened to every sound from start to finish. I even tweeted the person concerned who had followed me in the first place to let them know I was enjoying their album (without reply). The music of this second album allowed me to dream as I lay there in the fading light of a Spring evening and think about the sounds I was hearing and how they fit together. The music was somewhat enchanting. This was much in distinction to the album I had been asked to listen to which closed down my imagination and made me wonder why anyone would make music like this at all. Its worth saying at this point that, in both cases, I had started listening with an open mind and without any preconceptions. This is a necessary skill, not least in my DJ background, as you will often be required to listen to things you don't like. I did so here.

So what's the point of mentioning all of this? Well, firstly, I was asked to review an album, the first one mentioned here, and so I wanted to do that as asked. But, having listened to it, I knew that I had a problem. I don't like the album, as should be clear by now, and so there was and is no way I could say that I do or, in weasel words, have mealy-mouthed things to say about it to cover over this fact. So, secondly, I needed an angle if I was going to write about this album at all. We are in the fourth paragraph of this blog already and I'm not entirely sure what this angle is yet. Hopefully, I find one before the end of the blog. However, I must admit that I've clicked on a few of my old DJ mixes from 8 years ago and the monotonous beat isn't doing so much for my mood!

But then its Baby D to the rescue! It seems I mixed in one or two good tracks amidst the constant dance megamixes! (The track is "So Pure" if you're interested.) So let's talk a little about musical taste. This is surely not a static thing either from person to person or within one person from time to time. A lot of the tracks I played 8-10 years ago I actually liked back then but now you couldn't force me to listen to them. I've moved on whereas they have stayed the same. They could not travel with me. You may have a similar story to tell about some style of music or group of tracks. But what is "musical taste" in the first place? I want to argue that it is irrational and cannot be explained in terms of reason or rationality. Why do you like something? You might be able to give a retrospective reason or follow a thought process which justifies your liking something after the fact. But you can't say that this reasoning occurred prior to you liking the thing. "Why" you like the thing is altogether more mysterious than this. It has to do with a number of things too. Your identity at that point in time, how you came across it and in what connection are certainly part of these things, as is how easily you are pressured into liking something in the first place. You may be a relatively easy-going person or a person with a very strong and defined sense of what is likeable or not.

Notice here that I am not using a vocabulary of good or bad. Indeed, I'm consciously avoiding it. There is no such thing as good or bad music. There is just sound. When you say something is good or bad all you mean is that you like it or you don't. It is your own personal and non-transferable stamp of approval or disapproval. So, therefore, whilst I can say that the album of "rap noise" that I heard did not find my own personal stamp of approval I cannot say it is either good or bad. I can talk about it (as I have above) and say what I liked or did not like about it but this never transfers into a binding description of it. I can't even tell you that if I listen to it again next week that I won't, at that time and place, then decide I like it! This phenomenon sometimes occurs with my own music. I make my music quite fast and in an improvised way. Often (very often) its a matter of snap judgments and I never really know if I like the finished piece because I haven't really had the chance to sit back and make that decision. Its only in the following days and weeks, when I do that sitting back and listening, that I can then hear what I have actually made in context. It is only then that I come to appreciate the sonic relationships between the things I recorded. Or not.

So I think that music taste is both irrational (or emotional) and personal. Its not anything anyone should get too over-excited about in terms of its importance. People like stuff and they don't. This is subject to change from person to person and from time to time. This is all fine. No need to call the Culture Cops or the Music Police. If you want to make or listen to songs that are a portion of rap and then 8 minutes of harsh noise then do it. I wish you well with it because I think that the vital thing in music and culture is variety. Ironically, to my mind, this is variety even where all the songs on the album are the same. Yes, its true I would see more scope for variation in the particular album I'm talking about here. (I still think that a more varied mash up of rap and noise would be a great idea for an album.) I make electronic albums with sound and noise too. But I need my sounds and noise to be more varied and more subtle. This binds no one else to do the same. Its just my personal choice. But, taking an overall view, it is good that this rap noise album exists. It offers another choice and its one that someone else may like. All tastes are equal so that's fair enough. There is no overarching catalog of tastes which ranks some as better and others as worse and neither is the democracy of the public a binding guide either. Because some song is Number 1 does not make it good or bind you to like it. 

I imagine that this was not the kind of album review that I was being asked for and, I have to say, its true that I used to do album reviews on a previous blog but stopped doing them because one over-sensitive soul took my honest review of his work very personally and decided I had slated his work when, in fact, all I had done was said what I liked and disliked about it (liking it overall). But there is no point doing a review unless it is honest. Like Aslan, I am not a tame lion. And this is not the music press here. I'm not here to show you what a pretentious writer I am and pontificate about what "great taste" I have using all the twirly prose I can muster. Indeed, if you've read this far you know that I think the concept "great taste" would make zero sense. There is just taste, a sense we all have, for very complicated reasons, of what we all each like and don't like. That's all it is and that's as far as it goes. All I can say about taste is that you should push the boundaries of yours and see how far they can stretch. I guarantee you will surprise yourself and these little surprises are what keep life interesting. (I've now hit some of my old mixes that are more underground and I'm tapping my toes!) For me music and culture is a matter of variety, of nuance and of bricolage. Sticking to one thing and repeating it would be the only "sin of taste" that I could criticize. 

For reference I will give you the details of the two albums I mentioned here:

The album I didn't like and was asked to review was "For Tha Dead Homiez" by Hood Cannibal on Harsh Noise Movement Records and can be heard HERE! 

The album I did like was "The Diet For Life (Eat Less)" by Z Lovecraft Presents DJ Thigh Gap and it can be heard HERE! 

Of course, my personal opinions are absolutely not relevant for you since your tastes will be completely different to mine. This is just one reason I think reviews are largely useless, a tool for the lazy based on some supposed authority or honor you give to the person giving the review. But I've never yet come across a reviewer who I admire so much that I give him or her the position of deciding what I will like. And neither should you!

PS As I finish up this blog I'm listening to a dance remix of Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby"!!

PPS Since writing the blog I've received the following communication from Harsh Noise Movement Records which I quote word for word for sake of completeness: "Glad you like it! "... Dead Homiez" is a Harsh Noise album not a crossover. Its rap theme is purely a piss take. Nothing more."

Rationality Doesn't Exist

Reason versus Passion: its a conflict as old as when the question first occurred to someone "What is a good life?" The Greeks discussed it. The religious have discussed it. We discuss it today. Its linked into a lot of other discussions too about the nature of the world and existence itself. And people take sides. Our society, as many others have done, values rationality. Some within it will believe in a capitalized form of it: Rationality. This will probably go along with their belief in capitalized forms of other things like Morality or Goodness or Truth. For these people, to be rational is the highest good. It is a goal and an end. They will judge people on what they consider to be a rationality scale. The more rational you are, the better a person you are. The flipside of this is the less rational you are, the more emotional you are - for to be emotional is thought by these people to be the opposite of being rational - then the worse of a person you are. 

Let's offer the case in defense of rationality. Rationality is that ability to think logically and to be able to offer reasons for things. These reasons should be based in what can be regarded as reality. To be rational is to be reasonable but also to be speaking truthfully about the world. Scientists think of themselves as rational and that model is a good example of what rationality can do. Rationality has a very high yield where measuring and judging things is concerned which is a lot of what scientists do. Rationality does not involve itself in flights of fancy or speculation. Rationality is about lucid detachment and not letting personal involvements get in the way. Some would offer rationality as the way we humans gain real knowledge of things and set truths about the world in order. It is a true and good thing to have which gives humanity the progress it desires.

But let's compare this view of reality, and its bias in favour of the rational over the emotional, with the world as it occurs to us to be. Survey the world you actually live in with this view. Does it seem to you that the world as a whole is rational? Does it seem to you that the people who inhabit it are rational? I put it to you that it doesn't, certainly not simply so. You might consider that this is because rationality is available but people, for some reason, choose not to use it. Their rationality seems to have been hijacked by that bad alter ego, emotion. People become passionate, willful, controlled by their own interests and agendas, and any rationality that might be available to them gets lost. And where does the capitalized form, Rationality, stand in all this. If there is a deified form of Reason how can it be that so many people can so easily turn their back on it and ignore it, becoming self-interested agenda pushers in thrall to their emotions?

Once upon a time there was a mustachioed philosopher and his name was Friedrich. He proclaimed in one of his books "GOD IS DEAD AND WE HAVE KILLED HIM". He meant to refer directly to the Christian god but his proclamation had much more thorough-going consequences than that. For those who believe in this God, something that is harder to do these days than when Friedrich made his pronouncement, God is the underwriter of all the capitalized things like Rationality and Morality and Truth. But if God is dead then Rationality is dead. Truth is dead. Goodness is dead. These things cannot stand if the guarantor of them all is dead. They must pass away. Friedrich thought this was true, even if you aren't a believer in this God, because he thought that, socio-culturallly, we all live in societies in which this Christian-Platonic view of the world is accepted anyway. So even if we tried to cut God adrift and carry on with divinised concepts like Rationality or Truth it is just a bad faith form of Christianity in disguise. Rationality or Truth become substitute gods and, as Friedrich has already said, God is dead.

To my mind, the interesting part of what Friedrich Nietzsche said is not that God is dead. That, to me at least, seems self-evident. My observations of life lead me to this conclusion. "We have killed him" is the interesting part. Nietzsche seems to be saying that our human ways have laid waste to a deity, to all deities, to all things that we might want to hoist over and above us. The gods crumble before the follies of human beings. He was not alone in that thought. Many other philosophers after him, some referred to as existentialists and some referred to as pragmatists, have made similar points. These types of people would tend to come down more on the side of a human being not conceived as something made for the purposes of being merely rational. These types of people would want to balance rationality and emotion out in the human being. But this subtly changes the picture we then form of the human being. For me, the human beings we all are are not rationality machines networked into a divine arbiter of The Rational. We are complex and holistically configured emotion-rationality organisms. You can't chop the emotion out of a human being anymore than you can stop them making up reasons for things, the activity of the rational.

You are reading this blog on the Internet. The Internet in many minds has gained a certain reputation for outrage. It is a very immediate form of media and people these days complain if anything takes more than a couple of seconds to happen anyway. We are the now generation. This is no less so of human judgments. We are, after all, beings in an environment and this engenders a two-way process of influence. We can influence our environment but our environment also influences back. So we tend to get things served up to us in very superficial and bitesize form. It strikes me as amusing that these days if any debate goes on for more than 10 minutes it is regarded as some kind of long form exposition of a subject. "I haven't got time for this" isn't the least common expression in human language. We want fast facts and fast answers. So we have no end of media outlets dishing up these compact facts and dealing with whole issues in the matter of a couple of minutes by reading a top ten list. Its my suggestion that none of this encourages real thinking, the kind that takes time and involves, get this, more than one side of the story. Indeed, you can go to a lot of places today, maybe even most, and you will get served up to you a partisan description of a problem written from one point of view.

A comment came into my Twitter timeline about a day ago. It was complaining about the overuse of the word "outrage" as a cover all description of any questioning of someone's position on something. I took the point. It is true, I agree, that not all points to the contrary of yours, not all criticism or comment, is about "outrage". But the commenter went further and suggested that saying such people were outraged was some kind of attempt to paint them as "irrational" and the clear inference was that being irrational was a bad thing to be. The commenter clearly valued rationality and wanted to be seen as such, even if also wanting to criticize other people's points of view. The sense was that you can disagree with someone about something but still be seen as rational. I agree with this. You can. But you can't do it if you think there is a thing called Rationality. Because that kind of rational only admits of one thought process, the one that is right and over above everything in an arbitrating way, the one that brooks no challenge or divergence from it. Lucky for us that Friedrich has reminded us: God is dead. 

But what follows from this? Well, it follows that if you criticize a point of view and someone accuses you of "outrage" (which may or may not be true and could be argued without resolution forever) and you take this to mean they are accusing you of being "irrational" then, from their perspective, you might very well be. Since there is now no Rationality there is only partial, situated, local rationality, the rationality some particular person or group is possessed by. And from that point of view your criticism might be irrational. They do not need your agreement to make this claim. They do not need to appeal to some higher court of Reason (which, as we now know, doesn't exist). They just need to use their own personalized form of rationality, do the math, and come up with the answer. That answer can easily be "Your criticism of me is irrational. It is vocalized outrage". Whether you agree or not is, as it would be if things were reversed, irrelevant to that. We all know quite commonsensically that people have their own point of view on things. But when it comes to rationality we get a bit fuzzy about it. We don't like the idea that people might have their own personalized form of what is rational and what is not. But they do.

And, the truth is, its not even really all that difficult to see this and acknowledge it. Every one takes sides in this world. Everyone finds themselves situated inside points of view, attitudes towards things and beliefs about the way the world is. What needs to be seen is that these same things are generative of our rationality. It is these things that will inform us what we regard as rational, when someone is displaying outrage and what counts as these things. There is no outside way or overarching way to triangulate these things. We are already fully equipped as sentient human beings to make these calculations. The problem is that this often results in lots of incommensurability. My rationality may not work always in accordance with yours or your neighbor's, your friend's or your partner's. The traditional way out of this is conversational. We talk and come to some agreement or point about which we can all feel our dignity respected. Rationality is educable, after all. But in the instant world of the Internet that is not going to happen very often. Our feelings (emotion!) get hurt very easily and its often easier for us (in lots of ways too complicated to get into now) to just regard the other person as irrational or outraged as we see it. We have our notions vindicated and the other guy is a loser who thinks differently.

I would hope that none of this comes across as very revolutionary. It seems to me to be common sense. But then that is a function of my own rationality. Within that rationality people are partial and sectarian. They take sides. They are well able to make their own judgments and provide their own reasons for things they say, do and think. They do this without any recourse to a divinised form of the rational because such a thing doesn't exist. They are partiality machines. It is because this is how I see things that I find agreement to be a wonderful thing. Such a view of the human being could go the other way and become a solipsistic world of incommensurable views. Sometimes when you look at the Internet it can seem like things are going down this dark path. But the light is still available to us as long as we can talk to one another, try to understand things as people with their own human dignity express them, and explore each other's views on what being human is all about. That, in fact, is our only hope. Human life, in other words, is all about talking to the irrational and the outraged.