Death Disco 2012

[koganbot]

Embedding this just because I think it's brilliantly great, and to see if it gets a rise out of arbitrary_greay. Also, the Dead Lester thread is getting close to where LiveJournal does that horrible thing of collapsing subthreads on us, so if you have any more responses to what's on that thread, I suggest you do so on this one.

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Re: Don't call it a new thread; I been here for years

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I'm usually underwhelmed by survey research into tastes, from Bordieu forward, for the ways that the approach oversimplifies the frameworks we might understand how to interpret how people respond to those surveys.

An example from my own practice -- we have a measure called "active reasoning," which literally is a measure of how children write about the music, TV, movies, etc. they like. It's a "0" or "1" measure. If students write something reactive ("it's funny" or "it's cool" or "I like it"), they get a "0"; if they write something relating to the construction of the media ("it has a good beat" or "I like that the message is 'never give up'") they get a "1."

What this measure mostly tells us is that students who score well on standardized reading and writing assessment also tend to use more "active reasoning responses." But as an observer of kid behavior, I also know that when a kid says "I like that! It's so cool!" there may be depths of analysis happening that the student simply can't articulate yet (especially in writing, which is in many ways a separate measure).

I don't think survey data has really told us much about the "guts" of taste -- much of it is tainted before it begins with the assumptions it brings to texts it uses in the first place, as in Bordieu's experiments with music and social class, which explores what (e.g.) working class respondents listen to and then analyzes it without asking good questions about "how" and "why" of those respondents' listening habits of the respondents themselves (very difficult using survey methods). Or when someone codes "My Humps" as "highly sexualized" and then uses it in an argument like "kids respond positively to highly sexualized music." More of it just can't say very interesting things in the format. Free response, interview, and ethnographic observations get you something else entirely, and ethnography and anthropology are sets of practices that I think lots of music critics, myself included, would do well to think more about even when approaching their "home" tastes.

That's something that keeps me returning to music criticism, as messy and sporadic as it often feels. The flashes of analysis, insight, and feeling that emerge in it are often far closer to what I seem to "get" out of music than what data tells me about (e.g.) group behavior. Duncan Watts's recent experiments are very useful in tracking social behavior, but he's not judging anything about what people say to themselves about popular music they like, merely observing which songs are popular in particular settings and how popularity spreads. (And he argues more forcefully in his books, Six Degrees and Everything Is Obvious, that it's a serious error to try to read any individual motivations into these group behaviors.)