The Taste That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Devin Friedman
HERE’S SOMETHING I’M AFRAID to say out loud. I like Feist. I know I’m not
supposed to like Feist. I’m not even sure how I know that, but I do. Her voice
is too pretty, edgeless, located only in the most harmonically pleasing
register. Saying you like Feist is like not having an opinion, the greatest offense
in certain Internetty precincts of our contemporary culture. You might as well
say you like chocolate or potato chips. It says nothing about you. It’s not curated. It doesn’t say what we most
want our music to say about us: I used to
read Pitchfork.com until it got lame. You can’t like Feist, in other words,
because it’s middlebrow. And loving the middlebrow is an unforgivable crime
against taste. Loving something makes you interesting –in some ways the lowbrow
is actually higher-brow than highbrow. Watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta or being into shitty peasant sandals
from Vietnam or low-res porn– that you
can sing from the rooftops. But if you like Feist, it’s like you might as well
tell people you’re having a wonderful sexual affair with your mother. Because
you know who likes the middlebrow? The unacceptable. Boring people. The easily
manipulated. But fuck it. I was in Le Pain Quotidien the other day
(middlebrowest chain of them all), and some Feist came on, and my mood
brightened a little bit. Because you know what? I like potato chips. I like
chocolate. And if Feist isn’t middlebrow enough for you, I will offend your
fashionable sensibilities by saying that I, from time to time, enjoy hearing
songs by Sting. I’ve never admitted that, even to myself. But (as long as it’s
not from Ten Summoner’s Tales) I
would gladly listen to Sting while I consume a three-pound fajita burrito at
Chipotle wearing a J.Crew suit and reading Jonathan Franzen with Friday Night Lights on in the
background. These are all things that make me happy to consume. And they are
all middlebrow.
It’s not totally fair, of course, to classify Sting with J.Crew. They
really belong to two different species of middlebrow. Because the middlebrow –having
been subjected to the marketing genius of a generation that’s obsessed with the
niche and constitutionally opposed to the middlebrow– now knows how to disguise
itself as something else. Anyone can admit to liking J.Crew and Franzen
(Chipotle is more polarizing, I don’t know why), because J.Crew and Franzen are
really a new kind of middlebrow. The high middlebrow. Again the point here isn’t
to put down anything listed above, except Sting, whom I hate even when I like
him, like an unpopular girl you’re attracted to in junior high school. Pulling
off the high middle, that takes enormous skill. The high middlebrow is
middlebrow product for folks who say they hate the middlebrow. Which they
probably don’t.
People tend to hate the middlebrow because of its embarrassingly earnest
desire to be liked, its scientific and successful approach to hitting people’s
pleasure buttons. It points out the obvious fact that you’re not as much an
individual as you’d like to think, that human beings are designed to like
chocolate and potato chips and Jack Purcells. That’s where the high middle
differs… If you’re still having trouble classifying all this stuff, it may only
be because you possess a durable sense of logic. What the high middle does is
further mess with and already totally whacked-out logic of what’s high –and lowbrow
now. I mean, is a T-shirt highbrow just because it costs $345 and says Maison
Martin Margiela on it? Part of the anxiety here is being able to figure out at
any moment what brow anything is.
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