Does your favourite song sound the same to someone who doesn’t like it?
“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” – Unknown (N/A – N/A).
I had my first existential crisis when I was eight years old, sitting in a McDonald’s. In a classic role reversal of child-parent interplay, my father removed the gherkins from his burger and handed them to me. Rather than sling them back like juvenile oysters as usual, I paused first and asked him why he didn’t like them. “I just don’t,” he said. It was a simple response that plunged my tiny mind down a psychological rabbit hole too tangled for my unripe brain to fully reconcile: Do gherkins taste the same to my dad as they do to me?
Now, as a music journalist, that same confounding thought crosses my mind almost every day—only in the world of music, the gloopy web of subjectivity is even trickier to wade through. Although gherkins are, of course, slimy, and if cut to the right carpaccio thickness could even be considered translucent, they are a physical entity. Can the same be said for music? In the world of pickled cucumbers, the chemical makeup is tangible—are songs just as solid?
Well, if music is mere structured vibration, then yes, in a way, it is physical, and our ears should largely hear it in the exact same way. So, why is it that I can slap a one-star review on some awful new release and have 100 people instantly reach out to ridicule my reckoning? If the music is unchanging, why are we hearing it differently? Well, in short, the computation of sound waves is one thing, personal taste is another matter entirely. The same sound enters your ears, but what you hear is underpinned by who you are.
“Taste being our own is a myth”
When I recently spoke to the anthropologist Nick Seaver, he even argued that taste being ‘personal’ is a fallacy in itself. “In any context where we have taste, we have taste in a world with other people in it,” he suggests. “No matter what, we’re always learning about music from outside of ourselves. The music is made by other people. Then, we decide what kind of person we want to be in a world full of other people. There’s a lot of sociology work about how taste maps to social status. I don’t think it makes sense to think of taste as something that is uniquely our own.”
If this is true, then taste isn’t a solitary instinct. It is a social inheritance, and that inheritance can rejig the brain’s biological wiring. In essence, upper-class people don’t inherently prefer classical music in a biologically hereditary sense, but their social status makes them more receptive to it, so they dominate the market. And because they dominate the market, they also dominate the dopamine response. While their preference might not be hard-wired, it does become that way over time.
As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggests, ”Nothing more clearly affirms one’s ‘class’, nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.” If you’re raised in an environment where positive associations can be made with classical music, the dopaminergic system reaffirms those positive associations biologically—the brain is primed to buzz off the familiar joy of it all. The music doesn’t change, but your mind’s response to it does.
In other words, how unless you’ve reached paralytic oblivion in a dinghy indie club at 2am could you possibly hope to understand the beauty of ‘Born Slippy’. Unless your nan has spent countless evenings stuck to the floor in Gotham Town, her experience of the song will be entirely different. Our experiences and social circles determine our outlooks on art. And to make matters trickier, those outlooks can shift depending not just who we are, but also the when, the why, the how, the pretext, and the aftermath.
“Taste being our own is a myth,” Seaver thusly concludes. To frame this in the context of the gherkin conundrum: do I really like gherkins inherently, or as a child, did I simply like the concept of eating my father’s gherkins owing to the comical ‘fussy eater’ inversion of the scenario? Did he idly present them when I was starving and fresh from a cartoon that sang their praises? Was my father fresh from a cartoon that likened them to phallic green snots? Were all my friends big into gherkins? Were all his friends equally wary? This would mean that the gherkin remains the same, but it’s the pretext that affects how they taste to both me and my father.
“The mood of the moment“
In this regard, you can see how certain songs might sound different to different people. For instance, if you have an eclectic musical taste, from hardcore to ambient folk, you may well adore blasting some thrashing Bad Brains when you’re in the gym, but the very same song might repulse you and have you racing for a soft Fairport Convention record if you’ve got a headache and tax return to fill in.
You can even see this play out on a less personal level. There is no feeling more deflating than putting on a film for a group of people who haven’t seen it with ‘you’re going to love this’ enthusiasm, only to have them react in a nonplussed manner. The experience literally impacts your own enjoyment of the movie—suddenly, you can feel your favourite flick falling flat, and you want to turn it off just as much as everyone else. The irony is that one of your friends may rewatch the film themselves three years later under different circumstances and say how brilliant Over the Hedge truly is, conceding that his initial critique came from “the mood of the moment“.
So, the problem wasn’t the excellent film; it was the fact that you tried to inflict it upon people at 3am at a party. Similarly, you and your neighbour might have the exact same music taste, but if you blare an epic track through the walls at 4am, they are unlikely to smash on your door and ask you to turn it up. Even gherkins are similar—after a three-course Sunday roast, the very same pickle you’re offered when you’re ravenous might now taste truly awful.
In defence of ‘good’ taste
Alas, even when context has coloured your opinion of it in the moment, surely great art helps us see beyond that. Surely music is also, to some extent, objective. As a music critic, I at least have to hope so. Thankfully, this isn’t just wishful thinking: the difference between Pet Sounds and Party Time by the Cheeky Girls isn’t just in the eye of the beholder. Though musical quality is subjective, it isn’t entirely arbitrary.
The reason someone might not like a song as much as you is not just because of their life experience, social status and the myriad other factors discussed; their understanding of music also shifts their attention. Some people barely make note of the lyrics as they listen to a song, and that would certainly skew their opinion on someone like Randy Newman, for one. Like the fabled old gherkins, to some he’s a delight who makes sense of the shit sandwich of society, and to others he’s just slimy and bitter.
He is, however, objectively good. As a result, many people may opt for one of his songs as their favourite. So, maybe taste isn’t just personal—it’s partly learned. The fact that more people prefer Pet Sounds to Party Time isn’t just a cultural coincidence. It’s because as we explore how our taste interacts with society, we gain a greater recognition for the depth, prescience, artistry, competence, skill, innovation and sincerity behind Pet Sounds and prefer it as a result. Beyond the whims of how our brains interact with sound, our ears can be trained to hear more—and hear better. In that way, taste might begin in subjectivity, but it doesn’t end there.
So, does your favourite song sound the same to someone who doesn’t like it?
In short, yes, insofar as the sound waves remain the same from one ear to the next. But whether the song sounds the same in a literal sense barely seems to matter—just like gherkins, it’s what we bring to the table that determines their taste.
