Is there anything such as good and bad music?
Taylor Swift’s music is bland. Is it though? Read on.
Have you ever found yourself talking to someone and you mention a music artist and the other person immediately goes “Ewwww, I hate that artist!” or you’d be talking about your current on-repeat song and you’ll find your friends judging you. Well, I have. I’ve found myself stressing over the idea of sharing my Spotify Wrapped online, just because people might start thinking of me one way. Did that stop me, not really? The great Taylor Swift once said, “the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate”.
But we all know that our own perspectives have biases but we still tend to make associations off of those biases that in turn make up our opinion. Okay, let me give you an example. What image forms in your head if I ask you to imagine someone who listens to mainstream pop music, someone who listens to heavy metal, someone who listens to classical music? Chances are that you imagined very different people, very likely based on your past experiences and society’s general association of music genres with physical traits. And because of these different opinions, we often start categorizing something so vague and diverse like music, as good and bad. There is no such thing as good and bad music because music is subjective and depends on a person’s perspective.
Due to my speciality in this field, I’ve seen usually two kinds of people who often label music as good and bad- people who listen to popular artists calling the more obscure artists bad, or people who listen to the obscure artists calling the popular artists bad. Both have their reasons, one would say “oh mine has more than just 4 chords”, while the other would counter by saying “the same 4 chords that make up the majority of the industry worth 28.6 billion dollars”. I want you to think simply here, music at its rawest form only has two elements- the artist and the audience. If there is no artist, there is no music. If there is no audience, well is it really music? Thinking simply removes all surface level theoretical arguments and we get to work with the basics. Artists create music to achieve something, whether that is to evoke a certain emotion or to convey a message. If a piece of music fulfills its intended purpose, would you say it’s bad music? Because of the vagueness, or should I say the subjectivity of this topic, everything goes back to the question of what is good and what is bad? What counts as good music? Does it have to be the artist’s intended purpose that must be achieved for it to be considered good? Let’s say, a song is about a broken friendship, but the audience misinterprets it to be about a breakup. The intended purpose was somewhat similar, right?, but it wasn’t the same so how does that work out? Again, because of the subjectivity of music, different perspectives lead to different interpretations. So many things make up our perspective- our culture, surroundings, geography, our parents, our friends, our enemies, our social media and even our gender. There has been this widespread notion among girls and women for a while now that not liking Taylor Swift stops making you a “girlie”, “girlie” ending with an “ie”, and this leads to potential stereotyping problems because the perception that Taylor Swift is the artist for women, generalises and creates an association that all women are Taylor Swift lovers even though there is a possibility that some aren’t.
Tying it all together, our perception of something, that being music, people, a situation, basically subjective matters, all depends on these factors that lead to our own interpretation. This is why there are musical comfort zones that people try to not go out of just because of their perception of a kind of music and then they justify these borders created by them by saying that they find the other type “bad”.
I’d like to end by being a bit more philosophical. Me saying that there is no such thing as good and bad music, is in itself, my opinion, just as it is an opinion to think of something as good or bad. This is paradoxical because if everyone has opinions and each opinion is shaped by an individual perspective with biases, then no one is right, ever, so then what’s the point of all this? The point of this is to realize that it is a necessary skill at today’s diverse age to acknowledge our differences without acting on it. Acknowledging that there are differences in musical tastes, because of our perspectives, without voicing any opinions is key. If someone enjoys listening to a certain kind of music, and it’s not causing them or other people any harm, then what’s bad about that? It is important to be open and understanding towards everyone, not just about their music tastes but about everything, because in the end, music is just music and we as humans are the ones who give meaning to it.
