I like your taste, girl

I’m having a philosophical problem. What the eff does it mean to say, “I like your taste”? Even more perplexing is, “You have better taste than me.”

Me being unreligious and liberal-y, it’s easy for me to advance opinions such as, “it’s, like, just your opinion, man, no better or worse than anyone else’s.” But then at the same time, I regularly find myself saying/thinking that other people have better taste than me.

A cynic might say that complimenting others’ taste is really just the same as complimenting your own. But I am cynical of those cynics. It might be partially true, but it’s certainly not 100% true. My friend Bob, for example, has excellent taste in music, but I don’t share much of it. I can respect his taste in Muddy Waters and Chambao, for example, but I don’t share it.

I think that when I compliment someone’s taste, what I’m really doing is saying that they are good at noticing/appreciating beautiful things. And I happen to take this stuff seriously, so this is no small remark.

Basically, I seem to think/feel that aesthetic “goodness” is in some sense objective, and capable of being skillfully evaluated. I’m okay with thinking/feeling that.

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What’s interesting to me is how I go about making judgments of other people’s taste. I’ll use some examples from music again:

If you tell me you like Bob Dylan, even though I love him, it will mean very little to me. I sense that a lot of people who like Bob Dylan like the idea of liking Bob Dylan more than they like the music itself. But if you add that you also like John Mayer, now we’re talking.

John Mayer is, to me, a very interesting example, because your like of him could either be a huge indictment or a huge [what’s the opposite of indictment?]. He’s a pretty boy and cliché-y. That was my perception of him for the first 5 or so years of his musical career. Then I learned that a friend of mine whose taste I really respect was in love with John Mayer, and that made me take a second, more careful listen, and now I will say unembarrassedly that John Mayer has some really, really good stuff (and also some songs that you’d be kind to call duds). So if you say that you like both Dylan and Mayer, then I feel like you are canceling out some of my prejudices, and are indicating to me that you find genuine goodness in their stuff.

Van Morrison is another interesting example. If you tell me that you *love* Van, that he is up there among the greats, then I’m sold on your taste. You don’t need to tell me anything else. This is because Van doesn’t seem to have the Bob Dylan problem where people like the idea of liking him, and also because I feel like I have seen in full glory the greatness of Van’s stuff, as if it has been empirically validated that his music is amazing.

You are also allowed to tell me that you hate Van Morrison. I can empathize with that. And you are allowed to tell me that you don’t really know / haven’t heard enough of his stuff. But if you tell me that he’s just meh, or that the song “Moon Dance” is pretty cool, then we’ve got problems.

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There seem to be what I am going to call aesthetic generalists and aesthetic specialists. Some people seem really, really good at picking out good music or good writing or good film or good comedy or whatever. These are the specialists, and I will admire their specialized ability, but a far greater compliment to me is calling you an aesthetic generalist—people who seem capable of recognizing goodness or beauty across pretty much all domains (albeit maybe to a lesser degree than specialists). That tells me that you are constantly on the lookout, rather than limiting your aesthetic appreciation to certain contexts or hours of the day.

If you are looking for examples of aesthetic generalists, then the two clearest cases to me (and I’ve said this before) are Mark Larson and Colin Marshall. I aspire to their aesthetically-general greatness, but I’m not even close.