The A.V. Club has just recently reviewed a reissued version of Reckoning, by R.E.M. The review is sort of interesting in itself, but the comments where the action is: Found within were dozens of passionate assertions as to which of the band’s albums are the good ones, and which are bad. But aren’t such discussions typical? Well yes — of course they are. That’s why they’re interesting to me.
Why do we like the things that we do? I’m the kind of person who favors mechanistic explanations for things, and I imagine that this question has a mechanistic answer — even if it’s way too complex to derive at present. (People are working on it, though I suspect that many of the answers they come up with are proprietary, and lack the elegance we find in the works of Newton or Einstein.) It’s hard to talk about these sorts of things without recourse to squishy, slippery words like heart, soul, or spirit.
In the discussions over which R.E.M. album is the greatest of them all, it’s easy to see the echos of a million other, similar conversations. I myself have a friend who used to demand rational justifications from anyone who professed to like any given aspect of pop culture. The results were… informative. Even — no, especially when his victims became defensive. You could see in them a growing awareness of how arbitrary their tastes seemed, how randomly assigned their likes and dislikes appeared. Most of them didn’t rescind their favor, however. They knew what they sounded like, but they also seemed to be convinced that the problem was not whether they actually enjoyed something, but rather that they didn’t know how to communicate those feelings well enough.
I, of course, blathered like an idiot. It was a valuable lesson, though. Over time, I let go of any pretense of objectivity, and allowed that my preferences represent not much more than a description of the random cultural artifacts that managed to provoke powerful emotional responses at various points in my life. Which is something that might even be true for other people, too.
There seem to be certain moments in our lives when our native skepticism develops a weak-point, or even collapses entirely, leaving us vulnerable to some kinds of outside influences. I know people who love songs in ways that seem completely out of character for them, because they’re associated with memorable, or life-changing events. In cases where people fall in love, or break up, or reach their lowest point, and so on — how often do we hear stories of a certain song or movie or book that pulled them through it.
Sometimes, it’s even appears to be a function of age. They used to say that the Doctor Who you first saw at eight or nine was your Doctor Who forever. Many of us have had the personal experience of loving the contemporary music of our teenage years, only to despise the newer music embraced by the following generations.
The explanation that says that this sort of thing is normal, has happened in the past, and will keep on happening forever is not really very satisfying. It’s like saying that the sun rises in the morning because it rose yesterday — it’s actually no explanation at all. Unfortunately, this sort of complex behaviour is not likely to be a simple case of a certain gene that codes for a certain protein that makes one person a Smiths fan, and another a person Cheap Trick fan. In the end, it’s likely to be a question that’s so complicated, the answer could never repay the expense incurred in finding it.
So, we’ll probably be stuck with passionate arguments over our irrevocably subjective likes and dislikes. And maybe it’s better that way. It certainly can occupy a lot of time, if one allows it to.
As for myself, considering these questions has made me a bit more forgiving when it comes to judging other people’s taste in pop culture. Not completely forgiving, but I’m working on it.
