Music for most is a have your cake and eat it too objective-subjective thing. Have you ever had someone seize your i-Pod and wheel through the library? As though looking through your record collection is some shorthand way of knowing what kind of person you are. Perhaps it is. I'm not really sure. I threw my i-Pod away 3 years ago.
The "i-Tunes=You" theory seems a bit phrenologic to me; too convenient to be useful in real life. And utterly discriminatory. But discriminatory is exactly the word when it comes to taste. We can never lose sight of that; as soon as we do, culture desaturates into the bland grey of relativism. So we can't no-no the nosey i-Pod people on discriminatory grounds—but I'd argue with whose taste and personality is really being judged.
Take the interior of your house for instance. Nana and me (saying "so-and-so and I" when we're the grammatical subject of the sentence is not to my taste—it's a bit pretentious. Taste the irony!), as I was saying though, Nana and me have been looking for a house lately—and as a consequence, we've been peering into the living rooms and kitchens of other people's for-sale homes. We often find ourselves doing the equivalent of an i-Pod check on the sellers: God, look at those sofas; oh, here's someone who gets it, etc. It gives me pause to reflect on my own front room: what do the contents of that and the contents of my character have in common? I begin to think about that, and then I jerk to a halt: this question skips an important step. In asking it an assumption has been made—that we are fit to say something about our own taste and character. But, are we?
A surgeon researching a new surgical technique wouldn't practice on himself. Neither would or could a shoe-maker design a shoe to fit his own foot and expect it to fit everyone else.
Taste is a quotidian cousin of philosophy, and like (pre-analytic) philosophy it often takes the subject as its object. Almost all other professions, like medicine or shoe-making, take the object as necessarily different to the subject. Doctors need patients, shoe-makers need customers, car mechanics need cars, and so on. However, the art of philosophizing has always been different. Descartes wrapped up next to his crackling log fire came up with: I think, therefore I am. The cogito. Very good Rene, and we thank you for it; but your start point was yourself, so perhaps it isn't so profound that that's where you ended up. In a similar way, when it comes to taste, most people think all they need is themselves. We act philosophically, like R.D. I like, therefore it's good.
We beg the question .
I think we only understand something objective about taste when we turn the tables on our i-Tunes checking and living room rulings. Wheel through someone else's music library, or browse property thumbnails, and note your opinions: these say nothing about the person you're looking at, and everything about you. They give away something you perhaps couldn't arrive at by looking at your own records or furniture.
What does that mean for good interiors, good music—good taste? Buggered if I know.
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