The Little Lie We Tell About Taste

Dutch

So, uh, let me start off here with a, a kind of dangerous question for you.

Ama

Mmm, alright. I am listening.

Dutch

What is something you genuinely, truly love that you are, you know, apparently not supposed to like?

Ama

Oh, you want to put me on the spot right out the gate, huh?

Dutch

I do. I really do. Because, see, we all have that thing, right? A movie critics tore to pieces, a, a song that would get you immediately thrown out of somebody's meticulously curated vinyl listening party. Or maybe even a chain restaurant where you actually love the food, even while your friends insist you should only eat at that little place with three tables and no sign on the door.

Ama

Yeah, because if it has a sign, well, obviously it lacks soul.

Dutch

Right! Exactly. But, but think about what happens when somebody brings up a critically acclaimed project in a room full of people you respect. Someone looks around and says, oh, that new experimental record is just an absolute masterpiece. And everyone starts nodding along. Yes, brilliant. Transcendent. And you... you sitting there thinking it sounded like a garbage truck tumbling down a flight of stairs.

Ama

Uh-huh. And that is when that one specific word gets deployed.

Dutch

The ultimate social shield.

Ama

Interesting.

Dutch

Yes! It was... it was really interesting.

Ama

It was so interesting. That word has saved more friendships than honest therapy, Dutch. It is the polite little white lie that lets you escape the room without being branded a cultural bumpkin.

Dutch

But why do we do that? Nobody is holding a knife to our throat. Nobody is threatening us. But there is this, this tiny social micro cost to saying, actually, I thought it was boring. And that, that brings us right to the heart of what Solomon Asch was looking at back in, in nineteen fifty one with those classic conformity experiments.

Ama

Remind people about how those worked.

Dutch

So Asch put a real participant in a room with a bunch of actors. They held up cards with lines of different lengths and asked a simple question: which line matches line A? The answer was completely obvious. A child could see it. But the actors, one by one, all gave the exact same wrong answer on purpose. And when it came time for the real subject to speak... seventy five percent of them conformed to the group's wrong answer at least once.

Ama

Seventy five percent. On something they could see plain as day with their own eyes.

Dutch

Seventy five percent! They didn't suddenly become blind. They just... they couldn't bear the social friction of being the single voice saying, wait, are you all out of your minds? And if we do that with visual lines on a piece of paper, imagine how fast we crumble when it comes to subjective art, where there is no measuring tape!

Ama

Mmm. See, but I think there is a reason for that soft alignment, Dutch. When you are in a community, when you are sharing a creative space, you do not always need to throw a brick through the window just because your taste leans a different way. Sometimes saying it was interesting is just... it is grease on the wheels of human connection. It keeps harmony. It keeps the night moving without turning every single gathering into a courtroom trial.

Dutch

I hear you, but is it harmony, or is it just cowardice? Because when everybody nods along, the room gets flatter. It turns into this echo chamber where pretentious or unlistenable stuff gets elevated just because nobody wanted to be the first one to say the emperor has no clothes.

Ama

Oh, come on, cowardice is a heavy word. Look, I remember sitting in a tiny, packed room off Saint Claude Avenue in the Marigny years ago. It was this high concept, experimental spoken word performance. The artist was up there... um, making these long, dramatic gasping noises into a loop pedal for forty minutes, interspersed with reading excerpts from municipal zoning laws.

Dutch

Zoning laws?

Ama

Zoning laws! And the audience... oh, they were leaning in, cradling their chins, nodding like they were listening to the sermon on the mount. And I sat there, holding my breath, nodding right along with them, pretending I was touched by the raw brilliance of commercial zoning district B two.

Dutch

And what were you actually feeling?

Ama

I was thinking, Lord take me now, or at least let a street brass band walk past that window so I can hear a real bass drum! I wanted grease and sweat and three simple chords that hit you right in the gut. But I did not say a word. I smiled, I clapped when everyone else clapped, and I walked out into the night feeling like I had just sold a little piece of my own truth for the low, low price of not making a scene.

Dutch

See! That is what I am talking about! That soft conformity, it slowly dilutes us. It silences the authentic voice because we are terrified of the room turning around and looking at us funny.

Ama

Maybe. But it also kept me from being the rude stranger in the back ruining a night for forty people who genuinely felt something. There is a balance between truth and grace, Dutch.

Dutch

Sure, but when grace becomes a filter that hides who we actually are, we stop having real conversations about art altogether.

Ama

Which brings us right up against another ugly little habit we have when we talk about taste. This idea that if a lot of people like something, it must be trash.

Dutch

Ah, the classic cool decay. The moment your favorite underground garage band plays a venue bigger than a damp basement, suddenly they sold out.

Ama

Right. Think about Nirvana in nineteen ninety one, or Billie Eilish when she moved from making songs in a bedroom with her brother to filling arenas across the globe. The very same fans who called them visionary when they were obscure suddenly start talking about how their early stuff was the only real work.

Dutch

It is the paradox of popularity. As soon as the crowd gets too big, the original listeners feel like their secret key was stolen.

Ama

Because it was never just about the music for them, was it? It was about status. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu broke this down brilliantly when he wrote about cultural capital. He pointed out how the ruling classes and intellectual elites use complex, difficult, inaccessible taste as a weapon to distinguish themselves from everyone else.

Dutch

Right, if you have to read three books and study music theory to understand why an album is good, that album becomes an exclusive club. High barrier to entry.

Ama

Exactly. Bourdieu showed that taste is not just some pure, innocent preference born in a vacuum. It is often a flex. It is a way of saying, I have the leisure time, the education, and the social standing to decode this difficult art, and you do not.

Dutch

And on the flip side, masterclass pop craftsmanship gets completely dismissed! Look at Motown in the nineteen sixties. The assembly line arrangement formulas, the immaculate rhythm sections, the hooks designed specifically to punch through cheap car radio speakers. That is world class compositional genius! But because millions of teenage kids loved it and danced to it, critics back then called it commercial pop fluff.

Ama

Now hold on, Dutch, let us not swing the pendulum too far the other way. There is a real reason people protect niche art, local art, obscure art. When an artist stays rooted in a specific neighborhood or a specific community, their work carries the actual fingerprint of that place. It carries the accent, the regional rhythm, the heritage. The moment art gets processed through the mass market machine to appeal to eighty million people at once, those sharp, unique edges get sanded down so nobody chokes on them.

Dutch

Sometimes, sure. But automatically assuming that obscure equals profound and popular equals shallow is just elitism wearing a faded vintage band shirt.

Ama

It is not just elitism! It is defense! When global commercial culture flattens everything into a single homogenous blob, holding onto the weird, local, difficult thing is how small communities preserve their soul against being swallowed whole by corporate money!

Dutch

I agree that local roots matter, Ama, I really do. But when somebody uses obscurity purely to feel superior to their neighbor who happens to love a top forty pop song, that is not preserving culture. That is just gatekeeping to protect your own ego.

Ama

Well, maybe if top forty pop songs did not drown out everything else on the airwaves, people would not feel the need to build fortresses around the small things they love.

Dutch

Okay, but let us talk about who actually controls those airwaves now, because the game has completely changed. If you go back to the nineteen seventies, the gatekeepers had human faces and names. You had legendary radio program directors like Frankie Crocker at WBLS in New York, who could single handedly break a record just by putting it on the late night rotation.

Ama

Or film critics like Pauline Kael at The New Yorker. One sharp, searing review from her could make or break a director's entire career.

Dutch

Right. They were human beings. You might disagree with them, you might hate their guts, but they had a distinct point of view, a history, a taste profile you could argue with. Now? The gatekeeper isn't a person sitting in a studio or an editorial office. It is a black box algorithm optimized for one single thing: watch time.

Ama

Mmm. Engagement metrics. Keeping your thumb scrolling for three more seconds.

Dutch

Exactly. Look at how Spotify structures music now with mood playlists. Chill Beats to Study To. Sad Girl Autumn. Deep Focus. Music is no longer framed by who made it, where it came from, or what historical movement birthed it. It gets stripped of its name and context and repackaged as a functional background utility for your immediate mood state.

Ama

It flattens regional identity into sonic wallpaper. You take a fourteen second snippet of a traditional song, turn it into a TikTok audio trend, and suddenly millions of kids are dancing to a rhythm stripped entirely of the ritual or protest that created it in the first place.

Dutch

Wait, but look at the other side of that coin, Ama. As much as we complain about algorithms, think about what it was actually like under the old gatekeepers! A handful of white male executives in Los Angeles and New York decided every record that got pressed, every movie that got greenlit, every story that got told. If you were an independent musician in Johannesburg or Jakarta or a bedroom producer in San Antonio, you did not exist to them unless you begged for a contract!

Ama

That is true.

Dutch

Now, an eighteen year old with a laptop can upload a track directly to the global digital ecosystem, completely bypassing the corporate middlemen, and find an audience of three hundred thousand dedicated listeners scattered across six continents. The algorithm can match hyper niche art with the exact human beings who will treasure it!

Ama

It can, Dutch. But at what cost? Because those traditional gatekeepers, as flawed and exclusive as they were, were still operating on human judgment, cultural memory, and aesthetic passion. The algorithm does not care about beauty, truth, or spiritual resonance. It cares about dopamine loops. It replaces deep, transformative art experiences with frictionless consumer habits. You are not discovering your own taste anymore; you are being fed a pre packaged aesthetic identity based on a data profile!

Dutch

So you would rather go back to five executives deciding what the world hears?

Ama

No! I want human beings to take responsibility for their own discovery again! I want people to dig through crate bins, talk to their elders, go to live shows where the sound is messy, instead of leaning back and letting a machine feed them audio porridge designed never to disturb them.

Dutch

Audio porridge is harsh. Some of those recommendation engines have introduced me to incredible underground jazz records I never would have found in a local shop.

Ama

A broken clock is right twice a day, Dutch. It still does not mean the clock has a heart.

Ama

And that feed think brings us right into the trap of turning every single taste choice into a grand moral statement. Have you noticed how on the internet today, liking the wrong movie or buying food at the wrong spot gets treated like a character flaw?

Dutch

Oh, it is exhausting. People act like your consumer choices are a direct diagnostic test of your ethics. If you watch a blockbuster action flick, you are supporting mindless corporate militarism. If you like a song by a problematic artist from nineteen seventy four, you are complicit in their sins.

Ama

And then we invent this ridiculous phrase: guilty pleasure.

Dutch

I despise that phrase so much.

Ama

Why should anyone feel guilt over enjoying a simple, joyful, unpretentious pop song or a cheap burger? Guilt is what you ought to feel when you harm somebody, when you lie to a friend, when you break a trust! Not when you turn up the volume on an eighty's synth pop track in your car where nobody can hear you!

Dutch

Well, wait, let me push back on you just a little bit here, Ama. Because what we consume, what we support with our money and our attention... it does have real political and social weight. If an artist uses their platform to harm marginalized people, or if a massive fast food chain spends millions lobbying against living wages, spending your dollars there isn't just a neutral sensory choice. It funds those outcomes!

Ama

Dutch, come on. Nobody is saying ethics do not matter at all. But when you turn every single everyday preference into a purity test, you crush the joy out of life! You make people so anxious about being judged that they start hiding who they are. They pretend to read dense political manifestos while secretly reading trashy romance novels under the covers!

Dutch

Alright, fair point. But art isn't just bubblegum either. Art carries ideology whether we like it or not.

Ama

Sometimes it does. But sometimes... a cheeseburger is just a cheeseburger, Dutch! It is not a worldview. It is greasy, salty, delicious sustenance when you are tired and hungry at eleven o'clock at night.

Dutch

Um... speaking of which, I suppose this is where I have to make a confession.

Ama

Oh? Do tell.

Dutch

You know my reputation, right? The audio purist, the guy who spent two years hunting down analog vinyl pressings of West African afrobeat records from nineteen seventy three, the guy who preaches about pristine soundscapes and cultural authenticity...

Ama

Yes, the distinguished sonic storyteller.

Dutch

Every few months, when I get homesick for the Midwest... I drive into a fast food drive through at midnight and buy a giant, ridiculously sweet strawberry milkshake in a paper cup that probably contains zero actual strawberries.

Ama

Ha! I knew it!

Dutch

It tastes like pure corn syrup and artificial food coloring, Ama. And in that moment, sitting in my car under the fluorescent streetlights, I do not care about artisanal craft or cultural preservation. It takes me straight back to being ten years old sitting on the hood of my uncle's car in Indiana. It makes me happy.

Ama

And there is zero guilt in that! That memory, that simple comfort, that is human. Weaponizing taste until people are terrified to admit they love a drive through milkshake... that does not build a better world, Dutch. It just builds a colder one.

Dutch

So where does that leave us? How do we actually rebuild a healthy, honest relationship with taste without either falling into groupthink or becoming obnoxious snobs?

Ama

It starts with learning how to separate technical craft from personal resonance. You have to be willing to say: I can see the incredible skill, the labor, the genius that went into making this... and it still does absolutely nothing for my soul.

Dutch

That is a huge liberation right there. You don't have to hate an artist to admit their work isn't for you. You can respect the architecture without wanting to live in the house.

Ama

Yes! And the flip side is true too. Back home, we talk about the lagniappe, right? That little extra bit given with love, that extra surprise in the bag. When you look at art that millions of people love, instead of snickering from the sidelines and saying, look at those sheep, try asking a generous question: what are all those human beings finding in this that I am missing? What need is this fulfilling for them?

Dutch

Curiosity over contempt every single time.

Ama

Every single time. But to do that, you have to cultivate real cultural confidence. You have to be willing to stand completely alone in your preferences, rooted in your own ears and your own heart, without needing three critics and twenty internet comments to validate what you feel.

Dutch

See, now that is where I think we differ slightly, Ama. Because I do not think taste is meant to be lived on a deserted island. I think taste only gains real depth when it gets brought into the room and tested against other people! The debate, the friction, the late night arguments on the porch where you explain why a chord progression made you cry and your friend explains why it drove them crazy... that back and forth is how we sharpen each other.

Ama

Friction is fine, Dutch, as long as the goal is understanding, not conversion. You do not need to win the argument. You do not need to bring me over to your side.

Dutch

No, but I want to feel the spark when our perspectives collide!

Ama

And I want you to give people room to let their preferences marinate without having to defend them like a lawyer in a courtroom. Independent thinking isn't about disagreeing with everybody just to prove you are smart. It is about giving yourself permission to land wherever your true experience takes you.

Dutch

And letting everyone else have that exact same freedom.

Ama

Even when their taste is absolutely terrible.

Dutch

We were doing so well!

Ama

I said what I said, Dutch!

Dutch

And honestly... I think that is the whole point.

Ama

Alright, good chatting with you, man. Go get yourself that drive through milkshake.