Acquired taste
Might be kicking in open doors, but i think there is something to discuss here.
Let me explain.
Acquired taste is a well known phenomenon. Everyone knows how it applies to food and beverages; no one liked their first taste of beer or coffee and everyone frowned at their first olive or puff of a cig.
But it applies to music and art as well and is far more debated in that aspect.
My first question is: Looking at yourselves, do your consider some of the genres you currently like to be a form of acquired taste? Did you feel like you had to force yourself to like it and why?
I do remember the first time i listened to a melodic techno album, i thought it was incredibly dull en long-winded. Same goes for ambient. I forced myself to listen to it a couple of times before i was prepared to make a judgment though, and off course it started to grow on me. Now i wonder though, why did i want to like it so much? Was it because i knew many critics and peers that i looked up to would have liked the stuff, or was there something in the music itself that somehow still managed to spark an interest? It might have been a combination of those. Hard to tell now.
There's another issue as well, i am prepared to accept that some of my more recent tastes are definitely acquired. But then which ones weren't? Is there a form of music i liked from the first listen? A taste that came naturally?
Most of my teenage years i was metal-head and I'm pretty damn sure it was because i thought it was cool to listen to noisy stuff. I had no reason to like house music though, none of my friends or peers liked it. It wasn't a cool thing to do. Maybe some of my early encounters with gabber were influenced. But definitely not house and trance. So maybe these were natural. I could never say that with confidence though.
Now the question is, does it matter?
Wikipedia lists a more or less worrying passage on the subject:
“Intentionally changing one's preferences can be hard to accomplish. It usually requires a deliberate effort, such as acting as if one likes something in order to have the responses and feelings that will produce the desired taste. The risk in this acting is that it can lead to all sorts of excesses such as_self-deception_and_pretentiousness.[2]_The challenge becomes one of distinguishing authentic or legitimate acquired tastes resulting from deeply considered preference changes from inauthentic ones motivated by, for example, status or_conformism.[3] “
Hmm, positive or negative? Going back to the beverages, I do now consider a glass of whiskey or a cigarette to be one the finer things in life. But I am also well aware that objectively, they have not improved my life quality by a single bit and I'd probably have been better off without them.
Do you get the same feeling with music? Would i have been just as happy if is stuck to my original likings and not bothered much with musical exploration? Quite possibly. Sometimes it feels more like a hobby then anything else. Listening to a classic house tune that captivated me when i was younger gives me the same if not more satisfaction now as it does listening to my new more 'complicated and refined' music pieces. But there somehow also is satisfaction in enjoying something that was much harder to like in the first place, it feels like I've grown somehow.
Another interesting question: Can you go too far with it? Is it possible to get yourself to the point of identity crisis?
I myself have had moments were I was so determined to find new kinds of experimental music to explore I lost focus on what I was actually looking for: Musical satisfaction. It seriously took the joy out of listening to music for a while before I realized what I was doing. I wonder if I'm alone in this?
___________________
Mixes: Alaé (Conceptional ambient dub)
AOTSE (Experimental)
Listens:
http://www.last.fm/user/bierheld
Last edited by Bierheld on Aug-17-2010 at 23:49
|
