Cold Pizza Friday XLVIII

On Liking Things, Not Liking Things, And Talking About It

Hi everyone. Cold Pizza Friday is back (if you know/care what that is/was), but not as a mix of leftover songs that I didn’t get to talk about this week or as a mix of new songs from new bands posted on other blogs this week. At least for now, I think I’d like the 2011 version of CPF to be more of a loose-topic kind of thing, not as personal as the Monday Mix Tapes but not necessarily focused on nitty-gritty ‘reviewing.’ My vision (Ha! I have visions for my dumb little blog!) is to have it be more like a weekly column where I can toy with ideas or share and react to things I’ve read/heard about music lately. We’ll see, though. It may prove too much work for me and I might just have to start posting cool break dancing videos from YouTube or gratuitous pictures of myself or something…

That video over there is a half-hour talk that Malcolm Gladwell gave a few years ago at some TED wannabe conference. Now, I should tell you that I don’t even really know enough about Gladwell to decide whether I am a supporter or detractor of his. From what I can tell, people who know about modern thinkers are sort of split on him and many see him as a kind of hokey pop-sociologist, etc. So just in case you have your own notions about him and his work, please remember: I’m not trying to position myself as a ‘Gladwell guy’ in any way. I happened across this video a while back and I think it touches on some really interesting ideas about preferences, that’s all.

And of course, preferences are what this whole ‘music criticism’ thing is all about: sharing and trying to understand and explain why we do and don’t like things. Gladwell uses illustrations from the realm of manufacturing and product testing, but I think a lot of this could apply just as readily to talking about music. Instead of focus groups or taste tests or sales margins as measures of success, we have blogs and year-end lists and comment sections. The job of a music critic—or at least one way we might understand it—is to be the guy/girl perpetually taking sips of Coke and Pepsi or watching “All in The Family” (those will make sense if you watch the video) and publishing our reactions, right? I transcribed a few choice quotes and I thought it’d be good to put them up here for posterity and/or discussion.

“What we think of as a really good way—objective measure—of telling whether someone prefers one drink to another isn’t very good at all. There are all kinds of subtle flaws to the blind taste test. The first flaw is that there’s something wrong with a sip…it looks objective, it’s not. Why? Because you’re only taking a sip. If you only take a sip of something, you will almost always prefer the drink that’s sweeter. If you drink the whole can, your preference will shift and you’ll prefer the thing that’s not so sweet because sweetness becomes cloying when you’re forced to drink more and more of it. Pepsi understood this. They had the sweeter drink. So what did they do? Did they give people a whole can to drink and say ‘Which one do you prefer?’ Oh no. They went out to the malls of America and put this much in the bottom of every cup and said ‘Just take a sip and tell us which one you prefer.’ There’s another kind of testing that people in the drink business use called ‘home use,’ and that is: I give you the whole can; in fact, I give you two whole cases and I say ‘Go home with these two cases, drink it for three weeks and tell me which you prefer.’ And the thing about ‘home use’ tests is they invariably come up with a different answer than sip tests. If you have someone experience something a different way they’ll come to a profoundly different conclusion.”

He’s talking about the famous ‘Pepsi Challenge’ there, but it also makes me think about immediacy/accessibility in pop music. Do very straightforward songs lose their appeal with repetition? And how much does context (the ‘rules’ of the ‘test’) dictate our perception of quality? People still complain that music from the internet isn’t as good because it’s not imprinted on a physical object—do we give an mpFree lower consideration because it’s basically a PR tool? Do we give a ‘Best New Music’ rated album a closer listening than a 7.8?

“Asking people to think about what they want causes them to change their opinion of what they want. In fact, it screws up their ability to understand and recognize what they want.”

“Why, when you ask someone to explain their preference, do they gravitate towards the least sophisticated of the offerings? Because it’s a language problem. You know in your heart that you prefer the impressionist [poster] but now you have to come up with a reason for your choice. And you don’t really have the language to say why you like the impressionist photo. What you do have the language for is to say ‘Well, I liked the kitten [poster] because I had a kitten when I was growing up.’ So forcing you to explain something when you don’t necessarily have the vocabulary and the tools to explain your preference automatically shifts you towards the most conservative and the least sophisticated choice…The act of getting someone in a room and asking them to explain their preference causes them to move away from the more sophisticated, more daring, more radical idea.”

This is a tough one to square with because it suggests that, by even talking about music we like at all, we’re clinging to safer, more complacent, and less vital works. I don’t know if that’s true (I hope for my sake that it isn’t), but it would certainly explain a lot of the criticisms about ‘hive-mind’ and everyone’s year-end lists all having the same stuff on them, no?

This last bit, though, is the one that really hits below the belt: the idea that regardless of your knowledge or experience or cognitive ability or proficiency with language, you aren’t really capable of telling the difference. Is personal preference—keeping our discussions civil and individual and whatnot because, hey man, this is just my own take on things—our only way of coping with this futility?

“So what does this mean? Does this mean we can’t trust people at all? Uh, maybe [laughs]. What it really means, though, is that there’s a class of products that are difficult for people to interpret. Some things really are ugly and when we say they’re ugly they really are ugly and we’re always going to think they’re ugly. They’re never going to be beautiful. But there’s another class of products which we see and we don’t really know what we think. They challenge us. We don’t know how to describe them. And we end up—if we’re forced to explain ourselves—in calling them ugly because we can’t think of a better way to describe our feelings. And the real problem with asking people what they think about something is that we don’t have a good way of distinguishing between these two states. We don’t have a good way of distinguishing between the thing that really is ugly and the thing that is radical and challenging and simply new and unusual. So often when we use the evidence of what people say to determine what we ought to do, we end up throwing out not just the things that ought to be thrown out, but the very things that are most meaningful and have the potential to be most revolutionary.”