Taste, class, and irony

At the conservative culture/politics blog The American Scene, Reihan Salam has an interesting analysis of the relationship between class and taste. He first talks about sociologist Pierre Bordieu’s analysis of the concept of taste as an elite weapon:

By devaluing cultural styles embraced by the vast majority, and by embracing highly exclusive cultural forms that take a lot of time and money to fully appreciate (classical music, opera, etc.), elites create high barriers to scrappy strivers who want to reach the commanding heights of society.

But, Salam says, though this may have been the case of 19th century France, it is not true for 21st century America:

. . . in America, as far as I can tell, members of “the elite,” understood as people with the most occupational prestige, take great pride in their broadmindedness. Distinctions are important, but the distinctions aren’t classic high-low distinctions. I talked to this brilliant, brilliant kid a few months ago, an African American student at an exclusive Southern prep school, and he noted that the cool kids — the kids with the most cultural capital, so to speak — listened to a dizzyingly wide range of music, from extremely twee indie pop to the grimiest hip-hop. So in a sense the cultural code was actually more inscrutable: there was no stable canon one could master. Rather, you had to be sufficiently and continuously plugged in to sense which way the cultural winds would shift, which is exhausting for those trying to succeed at status politics. One could argue that this is at least as insidious as cultural elitism along the lines described by Bourdieu. There’s no denying, however, that it is different.

Actually, I think it’s only a little bit different. I agree that there’s a nominal distinction. Stanford doesn’t turn out huge numbers of fans of Brahms and Mozart. What Stanford does turn out, however, are huge numbers of people with distinct musical taste. There may no longer be a universal canon, but I refuse to believe that cultural breadth has simply replaced cultural height (as it were) as the indicator in membership of the elite. Rather, in my experience, what designates membership among “the cool kids” is not having one mandatory taste (e.g. opera), or a sufficiently large range of tastes (e.g. “extremely twee indie pop to the grimiest hip-hop”), but rather having any particular taste at all. It’s not what you like in itself; it’s how notable in any way your taste is. (And, to be fair I think one way of having notable taste is having a wide range of tastes, as above.)

So I’m a Jewish kid from the northeast, and I really like the blues, folk, country, and bluegrass. I simultaneously deeply, genuinely enjoy this music, and am aware that it lends me a certain funny cachet: my taste is unusual, the songs I listen to are often decades old and have a vague lumpenproletariat exoticism to them. In other words, I have a thing. Rootsy Americana. And I can’t help but feel that it inflects my relationship with the music with irony–part of why I like the music is the incongruity of the idea of myself as someone who listens to this music. In other words, I like it both genuinely and ironically.

And I think this basic idea is true of virtually anyone’s “thing,” because the cultivation of a taste is just that–cultivation. It’s conscious, it’s self-aware, and so it’s ultimately somewhat self-conscious. Hipsters know it’s kind of funny how they chase after obscure indie bands. You know the catchphrase: “You probably haven’t heard of them.” So while the taste may not be formally aristocratic in the sense that love of opera is, it embraces the same elitist ethic by its ironic character. It’s still self-conscious placement of self deep in the heart of a genre, where we know it will be both notable how deep in we are, and it will be difficult to follow us in.