Ok,

 but  is  it  Good?  

This essay is an excerpt from what I hope to be a larger work (a book) addressed to
musicians. I play the guitar. Like a lot of musicians I find myself always listening for new
ideas, and that often means exploring different styles of music. Since I started doing that I
became fascinated by how and why people develop their taste in music. There is so much
out there. How do we choose what we listen to? Do we actually make a choice? Why do
we think some things are good and others bad?

Starting  Out  

1) Some of our taste is simply inherited, whether from our parents or our community.
Musicians call that kind of music their “roots.” My mom, for example, gave me the
Beach Boys and Patsy Cline, and to a lesser extent the music I heard in church. We feel
loyalty and affection towards those roots. It’s largely explained by something called the
“familiarity principle,” a cognitive bias that gives us a preference for what we already
know.

2) Another important factor in the development of our taste in music is complexity. Part
of the reason we grow away from the songs that we love as children is just that they’re
boring. As we mature, simple and repetitive don’t really satisfy us anymore. That’s why
most grown-ups don’t live on peanut butter and jelly. Or keep Twinkle Twinkle Little
Star in their iTunes library1.

2) That gets us up to adolescence, which is when we start to develop our identity. Not
coincidentally, it’s also when music has its biggest impact on us. Which music? You
probably had less of a choice than you’d like to think. As teenagers we decide on a peer
group (or it gets decided for us) and adjust our taste in music accordingly. The kids who
hang out with metal kids end up liking metal. The ones that hang out with hip-hop kids
end up liking hip-hop.

Alright. So that’s how we start listening to our kind of music. Why do we get particular
enjoyment from it?
Status  and  Drinking  

Identity is intertwined with status, and it’s been explicitly argued, by Harvard
psychologist Steven Pinker for example, that taste in art is about status. We enjoy

1
The complexity issue actually raises another point. A lot of the things we enjoy, like
food or sports, get better as we learn about them. We recognize new levels of complexity
and we find them rewarding. It’s true for music as well, which is why you can take
classes in music appreciation.
something particular because it builds our esteem. As a teenager, when esteem is at a
premium, that’s a big deal2. It continues to impact us as adults3.

The link between status and enjoyment is perhaps clearer when it comes to other
subjective forms of recreation, like wine appreciation. In studies, drinkers (amateurs and
experts) consistently show a preference for the wine they believe is more expensive. If
you pour a given wine from A) a plain bottle and B) a bottle with a fancy label, drinkers
will report that what came out of bottle B tastes better4. Almost everybody does this. If
you’ve ever bought wine at a supermarket, or ordered it from a menu, the chances are
pretty good that you did it based on the price you thought suited the occasion rather than
how you thought the wine would taste.

Vodka manufacturers actively take advantage of that point. Expensive “premium vodkas”
appeal to snobs but also to people marking special occasions. Good associations are built
up and make a certain brand even more desirable in the long term5. That’s called
“emotional loyalty.” It means we pay for the experience, not the chemical, which is
probably something we wouldn’t otherwise care to drink. The same thing can happen
when you listen to a certain piece of music, right? Scientists who study music perception
call that phenomenon “Darling, they’re playing our song.”

Anyway, the reward we get from drinking expensive wine or vodka has a lot to do with
the label as opposed to the taste. So what about the reward we get from listening to
music? Maybe we could learn something from people for whom listening is an avocation,
namely audiophiles.

Hi-­‐Fidelity?  

Not surprisingly, it turns out that they’re just as deluded as oenophiles. The cost of
equipment enhances a hi-fi aficionado’s enjoyment whether it makes an actual difference
to the sound or not. Equipment companies are happy to exploit them; in the mid-2000s,
fanatics could pay $485 for a Silver Rock beech stereo knob that promised to improve
sound quality. In case you think you read that wrong, you didn’t. It was a wooden stereo
knob. That’s it.

2
My friends and I listen to punk rock. It’s hard to listen to. That makes us better than
you.
3
My friends and I listen to Beethoven. Classical music is hard to listen to. That makes us
better than you.
4
Actually, if it weren’t for the label we might not even appreciate a difference. In a
double-blind study with over 500 participants, drinkers preferred the more expensive of
two white wines only 53% of the time, which is what would be predicted by random
chance. This was not the case with the reds, in which case drinkers showed a significant
preference for the less expensive bottle.
5
There’s a good chance that you’re not really enjoying it anyway. Like a lot of people I
think vodka is gross, so I only drink it with something else (like orange juice) to cover up
the flavor. At that point it doesn’t much matter what brand it is.
In a blind test performed by listeners at home and reported online, self-proclaimed
audiophiles couldn’t distinguish a difference in sound between cables that cost hundreds
of dollars and unbent coat hanger wire. Perhaps an even better example comes from a
comparison of small digital sound recorders. A singer and guitarist recorded himself on
three units - a first generation Zoom H4, an H4n, and the more expensive Sony PCM-
D40 - then uploaded the resulting files onto his blog. Here are some excerpts from the
comments section, which I’ve copied just as they were written:

“The Zoom H4 slighly softer approach but muddled - lost focus at certain points. The
Sony Sounds very digital to my ears not to harsh and neither muddled - Very balanced
and enjoyable. SONY WINS”

“Sony delivers it in much better fashion and H4 seems very disjointed. Sony wins”

“Sony has pro approach very like studio finish - frequency is very balanced across the
full range. Zoom H4 is not even worth talking about; to describe this is that its lost in
somewhere in space !! Now, I can see why Sony is expensive.”6

These commenters were unaware that the blogger had accidentally uploaded the same
exact file (the H4 recording) twice, labeling it as Sony the second time. Several
comments praising the Sony DC50 over the H4 came from self-identified sound
engineers.

Just as with wine, listeners preferred the recorder with the fancier label.

It’s easy to laugh at oenophiles and audiophiles. They’re snobs with money, and those of
us who aren’t (or think we aren’t) enjoy seeing that kind of person taken down. But what
these examples actually reveal is a facet of human nature. Extra-sensory associations
affect aesthetic appreciation. The enjoyment you get from a song may have more to do
with the associations built up around it than they do with the music itself.

The way our tastes change over long periods of time (decades) also reveals this point.

Paternity  testing  

For historical examples of the way tastes change we can look to the Baroque period.
Today the name “Bach” is shorthand for Johann Sebastian Bach, but when Mozart
proclaimed “Bach is the father. We are the children!” he was referring to Johann
Sebastian’s son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel.

Right.

Who?

6
Shouldn’t that be hear why Sony is expensive?
Why would CPE Bach be so beloved then but almost unknown today? And what about
his dad, whom we now acknowledge as a genius? Why wasn’t he the dad? The music
hasn’t changed, only the appreciation of it.

Maybe it has something to do with labels. CPE Bach was the godson and namesake of
JSB’s contemporary composer Georg Phillip Telemann. Telemann was highly regarded
in his own time and in ours, but fell out of favor in the 19th century. Two writers on
music, Phillipp Spitta and Albert Schweitzer were openly critical of him at that time.
Confusingly, however, they both praised some of Telemann’s music in their respective
biographies of JS Bach. Why? Because in their time those particular Telemann works
were mistakenly attributed to JS Bach. In other words, they judged the music by the
composer, or at least the person they thought was the composer. Just as with wine and
digital recorders, they were paying more attention to the label than the product.

Does it still happen? Of course.

Different  labels  

Tastes change in our time as well. One can track the trajectory of a band’s esteem by
comparing current reviews with older ones. 2012’s Rolling Stone Top 500 Albums of All
Time list is a place to start. One thing becomes notable just by examining the list:
everybody loves a golden era and for Rolling Stone consumers it is the mid-60s to the
early-70s. Except for London Calling by the Clash (1980 in the US, 1979 in the UK)
every album in the top 10 is from between 1965 and 1972. Only one album in the top 20
was recorded in the 80s (Thriller) and one in the 90s (Nevermind). It seems we like the
old-time religion, though this might also reflect a practical concern of the editors: giving
high marks to established bands is hedging the bets. Public appreciation can be fickle.
Pick an album that’s too recent and you run the risk that it will eventually fade in respect,
as most popular music does, making you look foolish in retrospect. As a result the Top
500 is a long safe list of albums that are too old to be controversial.

Imagine if you’d heard one of your favorite classic albums when it first appeared. Would
you still like it? Critics detested Led Zeppelin at the start of their tenure. Led Zeppelin I,
Led Zeppelin II, Led Zeppelin IV, and Houses of the Holy were savaged by Rolling Stone7
when first released. And now? Houses of the Holy was #148 in the Top 500. The other
three were in the top 100, which is also home to all three of Jimi Hendrix’s studio
albums. The most highly rated of these is Are You Experienced?, which made it in at #15
despite being originally received as mostly “insane” and not in a good way8.

7
So was Led Zeppelin III, which is actually my favorite LZ album.
8
The reviewer was future Springsteen Svengali Jon Landau, writing in the very first
issue. The fact that it was a debut album might have had something to do with his review.
As with the Top 500 list the Landau may have been playing it safe, hedging a bet. (The
original review for Nevermind was positive but not overwhelmingly so - the critic
neglected to even mention Smells Like Teen Spirit.) By contrast, overly positive reviews
can seem pretty dumb in retrospect. How many new groups have been called the “next
Beatles”?
Those albums were and have largely remained popular with listeners, so perhaps we
could argue that the reviewers just got it wrong in these cases. Critics are meant to be
skeptical and provocative. They can overdo it. I read the original Led Zeppelin reviews
and indeed I think they missed a lot, but there are a few points that I agree with. Robert
Plant does sound silly on Bring it on Home and his lyrics generally aren’t stellar. Jimmy
Page can fairly be accused of valuing style over substance and the songs are sometimes
formulaic; soft, acoustic verses contrasting with heavy, electric choruses.

Thanks to a human tendency for hero worship, those flaws are no longer mentioned.
Recent write-ups err on the side of hagiography. Zeppelin are slobbered over by Rolling
Stone for Page’s “white-blues devilry” and Plant’s “misty-mountain howl.” I suspect that
kind of praise creates a positive-feedback loop; new listeners and critics inherit
established icons and the reverence gets driven even higher. It’s become a bottle with a
very expensive label.

What changed? Time.

1) Eventually Led Zeppelin was no longer compared to its peers but also to what came
afterward, and when making this kind of judgment the older work has an advantage.
(Quick, who’s better: The 2012 Miami Heat or the 1992 Chicago Bulls?9) That fact is
also evident on the 2011 Rolling Stone 100 Greatest Guitarists List; the Top 10 has only
one guitarist, Eddie Van Halen, that didn’t record before the 70s. It is partly due to
nostalgia; we usually remember the past as better than it was, and our estimation of art
benefits by association.

2) We like what we perceive as original. Led Zeppelin was on the other side of that
equation in reviews of their first albums, in which they were unfavorably compared to
Cream and the Yardbirds. When other bands started copying them it became easier to see
Zeppelin as innovators.

3) Led Zeppelin exerted its biggest appeal on geeky teenage guys - the kind that grow up
to be music critics. (Who else really cares about reviews?)

4) Denying the value of an overwhelmingly popular work eventually appears out-of-

touch or deliberately contrarian. Neither of those is an endearing quality for a critic to
have.

What about an album that isn’t a widely-loved and long-term commercial success?
Something not everybody just agrees on? The original Rolling Stone review of Black
Sabbath’s Paranoid is a longish nonsensical gross-out story meant to parody the band’s
horror-film aesthetic. They aren’t actually mentioned until the last paragraph, and then
only to say that Ozzy (misidentified as Kip Treavor (sic), the singer for another band)
“sounds like [Yardbirds singer] Keith Relf whining about the tampons stuck up his

9
Answer: ask again in 20 years.
nostrils.” Contemporaneously, Paranoid was given a C- by Village Voice critic Robert
Christgau, who admitted “I suppose I could enjoy them as camp.” Over a decade later, a
review published in the 1983 ROLLING STONE RECORD GUIDE gave the album one star
and remarked that “[t]hese would be English Kings of heavy metal are eternally foiled by
their stupidity and intractability.”10

Within a couple of decades things had changed. In 1999 Paranoid was listed in Vibe
magazine’s 100 Essential Albums of the 20th Century, which may be particularly notable
given that Vibe is published for a primarily African-American readership and taste. The
2004 NEW ROLLING STONE ALBUM GUIDE gives the album five stars, calling the music
“something so unholy and beautiful that it would take lesser bands years of back-to-the-
drawing-board grunt work to achieve such badassed symmetry.” That sounds nonsensical
but it’s clearly positive. Black Sabbath was criticized in 1983 for their stupidity and
praised in 2004 for towering over “lesser bands.” Paranoid was listed as #131 in the Top
500 albums list.

Why did it take so long? There were 12 years between the first ugly review of Paranoid
and the 1983 review, which is plenty of time for nostalgia to kick in and a young nerd
reviewer to step up. Kurt Loder’s 1983 Rolling Stone review of Coda called the 70s the
Zeppelin decade, but Sabbath was still getting slammed. It isn’t a question of
unrecognized influence; the 1983 reviewer acknowledged Sabbath as “would be English
Kings of heavy metal,” so he knew they were in contention. Something else was affecting
his estimation of the album.

On a second reading of the negative reviews it becomes clear that they aren’t critiques of
the songs but the band. They’re dismissed as campy and, in one of rock criticism’s most
exquisitely-crafted takedowns, called stupid. I suggest that the reviewers were unable to
appreciate the music because they were hung up on the spooky aesthetic and the audience
it attracted11. It was a bottle with a cheap label.

There’s a happy ending for Black Sabbath. Their innovation and mammoth influence
finally became undeniable by the late 90s12. For me the relevant point is that over that
timespan the music never changed. Only the appreciation of it.

10
Seriously, “would-be kings”? Here, lemme just cut that down a bit: “These… English
Kings of heavy metal are eternal[.]”
11
The horror-movie aesthetic didn’t make Black Sabbath. Plenty of other bands, metal
and otherwise (The Misfits and The Cramps, for example), have used similar imagery. In
fact an American contemporary of Black Sabbath called Coven was explicitly satanic.
These groups met with less commercial success and long-term impact. That isn’t
necessarily to compare them in quality to Sabbath, just to point out that the aesthetic
wasn’t enough.
12
It really did take that long. A review of Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut album in the
1992 ROLLING STONE ALBUM GUIDE called it “Stoned-out, dumb, clumsy, soulless,
overamplified and ugly: surely rock was sinking to an all-time low with this satanic
But  really.  Is  it  good!?  

Like wine connoisseurs and audiophiles, misfiring rock critics can help to illustrate
something about our own taste. We are guilty of unfair judgment all the time. Think
about all the music you’ve dismissed as lousy because the musician/band was cheesy or
overly popular.

Here is an excerpt from an interview with Mastodon guitarist Brent Hinds in which he
was asked to complain about a song he dislikes. He chose Smooth, a duet between Rob
Thomas and Carlos Santana that was a massive hit at the end of the 1990s.

“The thing I hate about this song is that it got way too much attention for sucking that
bad. It’s just like someone taking a carrot peeler and gouging it into your ears and
skinning your ears. It’s just—ech! Just talking about it I’m cringing… I loved Santana—
loved Santana… I just hate that he made this really horrible album. Obviously the
musicians can play and everything is in tune and all that, but it’s just the integrity of the
music that grates me. Or maybe it’s not; maybe it’s that it was shoved down my throat for
so many years. I haven’t really come to terms with how, other than it was just always
there. I mean, at first you hear Santana’s guitar playing and that was never bad. He’s a
great guitar player…”

What is most clear that he isn’t sure what it is about the song that he hates. Later in the
interview he acknowledges that it could be any song really, and pins his dislike of Smooth
on “the media,” which allowed it to become so pervasive. I think he probably gets closer
when he notes that “[Certain music] just dates you, puts you in a time or period that you
don’t forget for some reason when you hear some songs. It’s very nostalgic, and
sometimes the mood that it puts you in is a bad mood because of what was happening at
the time that you first got to know the song.” So maybe in this case nostalgia is working
against the song. Anyway, his reasons for disliking it don’t seem to have much to do with
the actual music.

And I think that probably happens all the time.

So  now  what?  

The crux of the biscuit.

So. You might not really like what you like. You might not even dislike what you hate.

If it was wine you could just take the label off the bottle and find out. That’s harder to do
with music.

claptrap.” Black Sabbath earned 5 stars in the 2004 guide. Also, the band wasn’t satanic.
Ozzy’s a Christian.
Could be worth a shot.
References  

Complexity in taste discussed in Levitin D, THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC, Atlantic

Books, 2006

Status in taste discussed in Pinker S, HOW THE MIND WORKS, Norton, 1997

Teenage years discussed in Senior J, “Why You Truly Never Leave High School,” New
York Magazine, Jan 20 2013, http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/

Vodka pricing analyzed in Moeller LH et al, “The Superpremium Premium”

strategy+business issue 37, 15-19, Winter 2004

Digital Recorder comparison at http://www.bradlinder.net/2009/03/testing-zoom-h4-h4n-

and-sony-pcm-d50.html

Cable comparison at http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/general-av-discussions/2512-

speakers%3B-when-good-enough-enough-3.html#post15412

Past Rolling Stone album reviews discussed online at

http://rateyourmusic.com/lists/list_view?list_id=331798&show=50&start=0

Brett Hinds interview at the A.V. Club by Marah Eakin January 4, 2013,
http://www.avclub.com/articles/mastodons-brent-hinds-hates-santanas-smooth,90403/