This is reposted from The Specifics Hardly Matter, the movies blog I have with my friend Dave.
So as you probably know from my Facebook wall, the last few weeks I’ve been totally obsessed with this album:
Like most music I like, I’m not going to make the argument that Rye Rye’s mixtape is objectively good. It just happens to hit a lot of my personal preferences: It’s loud, fast, cacophonous and utterly unserious. I like music that sets a tone, regardless of what it is, and Rye Rye makes whatever I’m doing feel shabby and frantic.
You know I have really weird taste in music, and that I don’t really defend my favorite bands on objective grounds. Fuck Buttons and Dan Deacon, for example, which I listen to by myself more than almost anything else, are banished from my ‘houseparty’ and ‘friends for dinner’ playlists. And stuff that’s palatable for when I have people over–Crystal Castles, Rihanna, Bon Iver–are usually bands I like but don’t love.
For some reason I think of music as an almost exclusively subjective taste. I’m not going to bother defending, say, Low Limit because I basically agree with the objective criticism that it’s overlong, stressful and contains an aura of ASBO-teen violence. I sort of like my music to be all those things, so I’m not going to argue that they aren’t true.
For some reason I feel almost exactly the opposite about movies. There’s still a subjective component, but it’s vastly overshadowed by objective characteristics like story structure, ‘invisible’ acting and coherent direction. I don’t know why this is, but I feel like lots of movies are seriously hella shitty, and I’m willing to defend my opinion in a way I wouldn’t be if they were songs.
And then there’s books. I feel like literature is on the extreme ‘objective’ end of the scale, especially in the public consciousness. There are novels that you are supposed to read, no matter what your personal or aesthetic preferences. Books get described as ‘classics’—an objective, not subjective, term—much more often than music or movies. You’re sort of contractually obligated as an educated citizen of a liberal democracy to appreciate, if not love, books like Moby Dick and Catcher in the Rye. Defending your argument about those works by saying something like ‘I prefer stories where the good guys win’ or ‘I’d rather have a story in the third person’ would mark you as a philistine.
I don’t know if I’m arguing for more subjective criteria in books, or more objective criteria in music. Or anything at all, actually. I’m just increasingly aware that my mind cleaves the world into two categories: Things I like, and things that are good. And the more confident I am in the former, the less I worry about the latter.
I think I can agree, at least in part, about the matter of “classics” in literary fiction. However, I also believe that there’s a definite line between something being good BECAUSE it’s a classic, and something being good AND a classic. For example, I’d have to say that while I don’t generally appreciate “Little Women” and “Moby Dick,” I’m still able to enjoy “Catcher in the Rye” (particularly, actually) and “To Kill A Mockingbird”. I choose fiction based more on writing style than plot, all in all.
I can definitely see your point, though.