There is no such thing as good or bad taste in music

Personally I find people who crow on about their spectacular taste are idiots — what about all the great things they are missing? I would never say that I have good taste in music, because what I want to listen to at any given time is influenced by environment, mood, menstrual cycle, footwear choice, hunger pains, workload. What I have is my taste in music. I can listen to a song a million times and then never want to hear it again; I can dredge something up that I loved in the 90s and enjoy a cover of it on the steel pans. Who knows what it will be, and if I change my mind in that particular moment, I can change it. 

My book, Punk Perfect Awful, documents 13 years of BEAT magazine – which I started as a reaction to the narrow-ness of other music magazines at the time. I treated, and still do, every issue like a playlist, something old, something random, something new. Putting it together not only highlighted how broad the artists we have covered is — from Nick Cave to Yaeji, Warpaint to Skepta, but that that great music is just great music. Below is an extract from the book, which is out now.

It is theorised that Paleolithic cave paintings in several different caves around the world served more than one purpose. Some of them act as a calendar, marking where the moon is in relation to various beasts’ mating and birthing seasons, and some of them are painted in “points of resonance,” which basically means that if you stood at the mouth of the cave and banged a drum or clapped your hands, by the time the sound bounced all the way down the cave, it would be reverb-ing and echoing like crazy and you’d go into what scientists have referred to as “an awe-inspired state.”

These Stone Age soundtracks appear elsewhere, in burial mounds that have a certain rhythmic frequency. Research has been done to show that drumming at the same frequency (obviously you can’t get inside the mound) results in an elevated pulse rate and heightened breathing. Sound familiar?

We can’t hop in a time machine and go back and check out these early cave raves, but my point is that music has been twisting people’s melons for at least 13,000 years, if not more. The day the first goat hide was stretched over a dried-out gourd to make a drum and Stone Age man banged out a rhythm was also the day that music taste was born.

I don’t believe in good taste or bad taste: it’s an oxymoron to me, like saying something is awfully good, or definitely maybe. I like all sorts of music, some sorts more than others, admittedly, but I am always willing to give something a try for at least thirty seconds—or even up to the chorus and beyond, just in case it’s really great. Or I might listen to something once, then come back to it later on. There are some bands that I just wasn’t into until I’d had my heart broken for the first time, because I had no idea of how that particular sadness sounded, and what I was listening to before that just didn’t make sense.

So taste really is whatever you decide you like, for no other reason than you like it. Some people try to define taste as something you were born with, or something you can cultivate. People who think that they alone have good taste, I find, tend to be quite bossy. The dictionary defines taste as “the ability to recognise beauty in something.” Did I recognise beauty in wearing jeans so tight I could barely breathe, with five-pound plimsolls, and listening to the Klaxons? At the time I thought I was the height of sophistication and, well, retrospectively (and sorry to any Klaxon reading this)—not so much. It goes without saying that a lot of what is deemed good taste is funnelled to us by obsessive freaks who just love music so much that they have to make a magazine about it—or DJs, or journalists, or the radio. This is, ahem, honed by marketing budgets and influenced by those who wield power, such as friends who we think have good taste, or people who are just loud about what they like. Then there are other deciding factors, like how many followers someone has, or whether they are followed by a Kardashian. Does having a million followers on Instagram make someone more enjoyable to listen to than someone who doesn’t?

In the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu’s book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, he notes that good taste was really just a way of society’s ruling class to separate themselves from the poor and less powerful. Perhaps this is why having a love for cheesy pop music is described as a guilty pleasure, or people think that they’ve reached enlightenment if they love Nick Drake. Well, I have something to admit: I love pop music, and if Nick Drake comes on the stereo I have to switch it off. Sorry Nick, but you just don’t give me an elevated pulse rate in the same way that a good oldfashioned pop banger does.

Some of my favourite musical moments have included driving across Los Angeles at night, listening to Phil Collins at full volume as the world wobbles past the window. Or the time I saw Siouxsie Sioux play and I was sitting next to PJ Harvey, and she made notes in a wee notepad she fished out of her handbag. Or the time I DJed and played this stomping remix of A Fifth of Beethoven (which in itself is a funky remix of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, by Walter Murphy and his band) and was totally unprepared for how wild everyone would go. Or the time I saw Fleet Foxes in the desert and it was magical, even though I didn’t know any of their songs and historically had thought I wasn’t really into “that” sort of music.

Whether or not I like it, taste does define our lives. It informs where we live and how we live and what we put in our bodies, what we watch on the TV, how we relax. If we were dating and you rocked up in a Lighthouse Family T-shirt and started reciting the lyrics to “Ocean Drive,” it’s likely you might find yourself quickly single again. But taste is chaotic. It knows no boundaries. You can love Mariah Carey and The Make Up. You can sing along to Sinéad O’Connor and Little Mix, and the truth is that maybe we should be a little more open to trying both ends of the spectrum. If you’re a pop purist, maybe give some groovy funk a go? If you consider anything without a guitar unworthy of your ears, get some deep-cut disco on your headphones. There is so much pleasure that has been derived in such a broad scope of music. Taste has nothing to do with it. Taste exists without rules, it can’t be borrowed or taught, it just comes from inside.

‘Punk Perfect Awful: Beat: The Little Magazine that Could …and Did’ is available now from Rizzoli