Is Having Good Taste Overrated?
And Why Is the Internet Insufferable About What It Likes?
Of all the ways the internet has impacted communication, few are as convoluted as how it’s affected how people talk about what they like. In a world of open forums where entertainment is king, people will seemingly always find ways to clump and discuss their favorite music, movies, television, and books, whether on Tumblr blogs, Subreddits, or Twitter stan communities. On platforms where there’s little else to do but consume, discuss, and repeat, internet users are what they enjoy viewing and listening to. As such, it’s easy to see how media can become inextricably tied up with peoples’ identities - how they view themselves and want others to view them. On Spotify, you are the music you listen to. On Letterboxd, you are your Top 4. And when you are the media you like, you will understandably become quite protective of it - it’s practically your personhood after all. You become both a protector and a gatekeeper - an arbiter of who has “good” taste and who has “bad” taste. And if anyone is to disagree with your designations, the gate will surely lock.
People judging other people for the art they like certainly isn’t a new thing. In pre-internet days, finding out what kind of music someone liked was a surefire way to get to know something about them. One could cast a number of prejudgments on someone based on how far their taste wavered from mainstream or not. Liking things that are “cool” is obviously cool in its own right, but liking things that deviate from the masses often has even more fervent, nonchalant prestige, particularly among young people. In the Brandy Melville choker-clad, faux 90s wonderland of 2010 Tumblr blogs, liking a band that nobody had ever heard of allowed one to rise in the soft pastel grunge ranks. As a Swiftie and Directioner, the farthest I managed to get off the beaten path was The 1975 and Arctic Monkeys. As you can imagine, my online presence wavered more towards mainstream “cool” than alternative “cool” (if you could even call it that).
As a teenager, everyone I knew with an internet presence was a critic and curator in their own right. Social media platforms were avenues for teens to develop personal style - one distinct from their parents, classmates, and communities. A unique aspect of the internet is its perceived lack of connection to the physical world - users have opportunities to reinvent an identity - a life - by architecting their persona from scratch. Instead of asking “What music do I like?”, the question becomes “What music does the person I want to become listen to?” “What movies do they watch?” “How do they part their hair?” “What color scheme is their Twitter layout?”
Through constructing an online identity, internet users, in essence, learn about taste - specifically, they learn to align themselves with those with good taste as opposed to those with bad taste. Of course, what’s considered “good” and “bad” is specific to whatever character they’re trying to project and whichever aesthetic or fan community they’re desiring access to. Nonetheless, these online styles and networks are constantly cycling and recycling - what was once edgy and alternative becomes popular and then becomes edgy and alternative again out of irony. Which begs the question: what does it mean to have good taste?
In 1949, Life Magazine published a chart making high- and low-brow designations for clothes, salads, furniture, and more. Among the classifications, Eames chairs and ballet were high-brow, while comic books and jukeboxes were low-brow. In the West, things have long been considered tasteful when they’re simplistic, clean, and intellectual. Houses and garments with neat lines in modest, neutral tones. Yards with picket fences and evenly trimmed grass. Music with good, clear melodies and reliable choruses about common themes. Stories with meaningful plots that make you think just the right amount. Matters have a kind of clarity and candor that can border on banal, but all is generally pleasing to the eye and brain. Aligning oneself with good taste typically affiliates a person with a higher-ranking class. Anything overly zany, loud, or crude - in volume, color, or character - is considered without taste, and thus lower brow.
However, as I alluded to before, there is a class of individuals who designate taste based on their rejection of this haughty, apple pie sensibility. This class has almost always encompassed teenagers and young adults. And the internet has allowed for an ever-variable amount of niches - it’s no longer just “having good or bad taste,” but having a palate that lands anywhere along or outside the spectrum. As such, taste is subjective in that trends are cyclical, but also subjective in that “good taste” can mean anything to anyone.
In this climate, Judy Berman argues in Time that pop culture has entered an “era of unapologetic bad taste,” meaning people are allowed to like just about anything free of shame. Today, gauche reality TV like Love Island, The Ultimatum, and The Kardashians remain highly viewed. The radio plays songs conceived and popularized by social media algorithms, so formulaic at times that they give 2000s pop a run for its money. The gaudiness of the early 2000s also spills into fashion trends - it’s not uncommon to see technicolor pairs of Crocs, loud trucker hats, or graphic tees with ironic text on fashionable youth and in magazines. Surely, none of these items would have ranked favorably in Life.
The democratization of taste online has indeed allowed individuals to further cement a personal style and has also heightened the protectiveness some feel over their interests. I recently saw a since-deleted tweet of a user claiming they could never date someone with poor taste in movies, giving the example of someone crying at a showing of Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) (which was the Best Picture winner at the 2023 Oscars).
This widespread acceptance of mainstream gaudiness can make deciding what’s tasteful a bit of a challenge. As does, the ever-expanding number of micro internet tastes. Liking things that are overly mainstream was once considered bad taste in alternative circles, but what if it’s consumed with post-ironic intent? And what comes of esoteric media when it’s distributed and enjoyed by the masses?
I don’t necessarily think the unapologetic acceptance of “bad taste” means our society has surpassed the need for criticism. There’s still value in being discerning about what you like - discovering the music and movies I connected with most as a teenager played a genuine role in helping me figure out who I wanted to become, and still does. And I also don’t think that people need to grip their carefully discerned tastes and projections of those tastes so tightly that they silo themselves off from other perspectives. As I mentioned before, on the internet where you are what you consume, it’s understandable to become protective of such consumption. With such a mindset, it’s also easy to write others off based on what they like. In pre-internet days, tacky taste in music and movies may have just been a silly quirk in a friend or dating prospect. In certain circles online today, it appears (hilariously) sacrilegious.
Anthony Bourdain once advised people to not be afraid to eat a bad meal because "if you don’t risk the bad meal you never get the magical one.” Having good taste isn’t about maintaining the appearance of having good taste, pretending to enjoy what the popular or alternative circles like to gain clout crumbs. It’s about being honest about what you like, what you dislike, and what you feel complicated about. Keeping your eyes, ears, and heart open because that’s one of the great joys of art - the exchange of stories, feelings, and points of view. Perhaps even put yourself at risk of enjoying something you didn’t expect or despising something you thought you would love. Be as receptive to the possibility of laughing as you are to the chance of crying, and vice versa.
For more on people discussing what they like online, check out my article Should People Be Allowed to Like Things?
this topic reminds me of that infamous buzzfeed article about which books are “red flags”. Absolutely no nuance, just “if you like this book, bad!!” Lol. I think there should be less emphasis on what someone likes and more emphasis on why they like it. I think that’s a nice middle ground between the “let people enjoy things” crowd and the pretentious contrarian crowd.
Amen!!! 🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻 There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so – William Shakespeare 🤗 a difficult concept for most to understand