Flattening of Taste

At some point, after writing enough In Defense Of pieces, patterns started to emerge. Individually, each piece looked like a defense of one misunderstood thing. A little cultural brief. A fond argument. A hand on the shoulder of something the culture had decided was embarrassing, unserious, tacky, corny, too sincere, too popular, too accessible, too broad, too joyful, too sad, too much, or not enough. But after a while, the pattern became hard to miss. We were not only offering defenses for the things, we were identifying the machine that keeps putting ordinary joys on trial.

That machine is the great flattening of taste.

Taste, at its best, is roomy. It is personal, contradictory, porous, unstable, funny, seasonal, nostalgic, aspirational, private, communal, and occasionally ridiculous. Ok, maybe more than occasionally. A person can love a perfect sentence and a dumb jingle. A person can admire fine dining and still want the appetizer sampler. A person can understand cinema and still enjoy a movie where the explosion arrives before the plot has fully introduced itself. A person can know the difference between art and product and still feel genuine affection for both.

Modern culture has developed a suspicious habit of flattening taste into evidence. A preference is no longer allowed to simply be a preference, it becomes a signal. It becomes a class marker and a personality test. It becomes a moral credential, content, and a brand position. It becomes a small public trial in which the prosecution asks, with exhausting seriousness, what your affection for this thing reveals about your intelligence, politics, sophistication, ethics, originality, seriousness, and soul. The inquisitor has entered the chat.

The courtroom filled up for a reason

The In Defense Of series began as a series of affectionate arguments, but it gradually became an archive of cultural overcorrections. The more topics we explored, the more obvious it became that many of these subjects were not hated because they had failed. Some were hated because they succeeded in the wrong direction. Some were hated because too many people liked them. Some were hated because the people who liked them did not need permission from tastemakers. Some were hated because they were useful, available, earnest, joyful, loud, familiar, convenient, or commercially obvious.

We keep acting like the issue is quality and sometimes it is. Quality matters. Craft matters. Standards matter. Not every defense needs to become a pardon. Some things are bad. Some things are lazy and others are exploitative.

But a lot of the time, quality is not the real subject. The real subject is permission. Who gets to like this without embarrassment? Who has to explain themselves? Who gets to call their taste eclectic, and who gets called basic? Who gets to be ironic, and who gets accused of not knowing better? Who gets to enjoy mass culture as research, and who gets treated like they were caught eating emotional nachos in public? The flattening begins when taste stops being a landscape and becomes paperwork.

The paperwork of liking things

We have started attaching disclaimers to joy. You can hear it in the little protective phrases people use before admitting they like something. "I know it is dumb, but..." "It is a guilty pleasure." "I only like the old stuff." "I liked them before they got popular." "I know this is problematic." "I am not saying it is good." "I am not defending all of it." "It is not my whole personality." "I understand the critique."

Some of these caveats are thoughtful. Context matters. Nothing exists outside history, commerce, power, or consequence. Adults should be able to hold complicated feelings about culture.

But sometimes the caveat is not thoughtful. Sometimes it is armor. Sometimes it is a little permission slip we wave before allowing ourselves to enjoy something in front of other people.

The phrase "guilty pleasure" deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. Guilty of what? Who was harmed by your affection for a pop song, a casserole, a comfort movie, a mall pretzel, a singing competition, a chain restaurant dessert menu, a reality show, or a very specific flavor of movie where the hero has one expression and a motorcycle?

There are pleasures that should be examined and there are most definitely industries that deserve criticism. There are fandoms that become ugly and there are artists whose behavior changes the way people experience the work. There are products designed to manipulate, extract, distract, and numb. We do not need to be naive but that is not what most people mean when they whisper "guilty pleasure." Most of the time, they mean "I like this, and I know someone will use that against me." That is a sad little sentence hiding inside a fun one.

At some point, the joy got separated from the person and entered the evidence locker. It became proof. Proof that you are trying too hard or not trying hard enough. Proof that you are corny or pretentious. Proof that you are too mainstream or you are too niche. Proof that you are old or you are young. Proof that you are from the suburbs or pretending not to be from the suburbs. Proof that you have not done the required reading or that you have done too much required reading and now cannot enjoy a sandwich without footnotes. This is exhausting, it is also boring, and worst of all, it is flattening.

Taste used to be a room. Now it is a resume.

One of the strangest changes in modern life is that taste has become increasingly visible. Once taste becomes visible, it becomes sortable. Once it becomes sortable, it becomes judgeable. Once it becomes judgeable, it becomes strategic. Once strategy is involved, the inevitable tragedy has a reservation at 9.

The internet did not invent judgment. People have always judged one another for what they loved, wore, cooked, watched, read, sang, drove, and served at parties. Humanity was petty long before it got broadband. But the internet gave judgment a dashboard. Your likes, playlists, follows, watch history, recommendations, reviews, shelf photos, reposts, comments, favorites, rankings, and algorithmic trails all create a public or semi-public taste profile.

Even when nobody is actually watching, it feels watchable. Even when nobody cares, it feels like they might. Taste becomes metadata and metadata becomes identity. Identity becomes performance and that changes the experience of liking things. The private shelf becomes the public shelf, the passing interest becomes a signal. The casual favorite becomes an implied endorsement. The hobby becomes a niche and the niche becomes a brand. The brand ultimately becomes a burden. Suddenly the thing you loved because it gave you a little oxygen on a weird Tuesday is expected to explain itself to strangers.

The class jacket of good taste

A lot of taste discourse is class anxiety in a nicer jacket. This is uncomfortable because nobody wants to admit it. It is much cleaner to say something is tacky, basic, cringe, cheap, corny, mainstream, suburban, fake, overproduced, lowbrow, or for people who do not know better. Those words sound like aesthetic judgments. Sometimes they are. Often, they are doing other work.

They are sorting people. The accessible vacation, the practical appliance, the sentimental decoration, the suburban ritual, the popular franchise, the broad joke, the family-friendly spectacle, the thing that does not require specialized cultural vocabulary to enjoy - all of it can get filed under "lesser" by people who are really saying something about the audience.

And yet, the world is full of tired people feeding families, making rent, driving kids around, finding comfort where they can, choosing the restaurant everyone will eat at, buying the thing that works, watching the movie that gives them a break, and singing the song that already knows the words for them.

The point is not that all popular things are secretly brilliant. The point is that popularity is not disqualifying evidence. Accessibility is not an automatic confession. Familiarity is not a crime scene. A thing can be common and still carry meaning. A thing can be silly and still be structurally load-bearing.

Sincerity got weird

One of the casualties of flattened taste is sincerity. Sincerity is risky because it gives people something to grab. If you like something ironically, you have a trapdoor. If someone mocks it, you can escape through the floor and claim you were never really there. Irony gives you plausible deniability. It lets you stand near joy without being photographed holding it.

Sincerity does not give you that cover. Sincerity says: yes, I like this. Yes, I know what it is. Yes, I know it is flawed, commercial, weird, sentimental, obvious, corny, loud, melodramatic, simple, overproduced, underproduced, or wearing a cape it may not have earned. I still like it. That kind of honesty makes people nervous.

It is why enthusiasm is so often policed as cringe. It is why earnest performers get treated like easy targets. It is why broad comedy is dismissed even when it takes real craft to make a room full of different people laugh. It is why happiness needs defending. It is why sadness needs defending. It is why anyone who appears to enjoy themselves too directly is asked to calm down, justify the volume, or prove they understand the sophisticated position.

The great flattening does not eliminate feeling. It makes feeling audition for legitimacy. You can like the thing if you wink, you can love the thing if you footnote, you can be moved by the thing if you prove you know its limitations. You can enjoy the big dumb chorus if you first show your credentials from the Department of Nuance. Nuance matters but nuance should expand experience, not strangle it. The goal is not to become a person who can only enjoy culture from a defensible crouch.

The problem with making taste moral

The hardest part of this subject is that taste and morality do overlap sometimes and we should not pretend they never do. Culture is made by people, funded by systems, distributed by companies, shaped by histories, and consumed inside unequal conditions. What we celebrate, ignore, excuse, elevate, and repeat can matter.

So the answer is not to declare all taste judgment invalid. That would be hella lazy. Some criticism is necessary and some discomfort is earned. Some nostalgia needs an audit and some favorites do not survive closer inspection. Some pleasures are built on harm, exclusion, manipulation, or cruelty. Adults can handle that but the problem is the shortcut. Flattening taste.

Flattened taste turns complex judgment into quick sorting. It treats preferences as complete identity statements. It skips the part where people are complicated, contradictory, changing, contextual, and capable of liking something without becoming its ambassador, lawyer, priest, shareholder, or hostage.

You can like a song without endorsing every choice made by the artist. You can love a movie and still see the seams. You can enjoy a restaurant without claiming it is the summit of cuisine. You can respect craft in something commercial. You can criticize something you love. You can be done with something you used to love. You can carry affection and critique in the same pocket without filing a conflict-of-interest form.

Flattening hates that. Flattening wants one label. Good or bad. Smart or dumb. Pure or compromised. Elevated or trash. Worthy or embarrassing. Highbrow or lowbrow. Problematic or permitted. It reduces the whole messy interior life of a person to a tag.

Human taste does not work that way. Human taste is a junk drawer with a philosophy section. It is memories, appetite, timing, family, geography, class, rebellion, comfort, aspiration, trauma, humor, accident, repetition, mood, and one mysterious key nobody can identify but nobody is allowed to throw away. This is not a flaw. This is the good stuff.

Unflattening taste

The antidote to flattened taste is not having better taste. Better according to whom? Better for what purpose? Better in which room? Better at signaling what? Better at hiding your actual life? Better at making sure nobody can accuse you of liking the wrong appetizer?

The antidote is having taste with dimension because taste with dimension can hold contradiction. It can be refined in one direction and gloriously unserious in another. It can love a museum and a drive-thru. It can quote poetry and commercial jingles. It can defend Batman, a power ballad, a weird kitchen appliance, a sentimental movie, a ridiculous mascot, a perfect hard-boiled egg, and a song that arrived, did its job, and left with the check.

Taste with dimension does not need every joy to become a public argument. It does not confuse privacy with shame. It does not require irony as a safety helmet. It does not treat accessibility as contamination. It does not make people apologize for being moved by something that was built to reach them. Taste with dimension lets people be multiple. That is the part the flattening cannot handle. People are not brands. They are weather systems with snack preferences. They are contradictions in shoes. They are serious about strange things and casual about important things and occasionally saved by something they would struggle to defend in a graduate seminar.

Good. Let them be.

Let taste be a room again. Not a resume. Not a deposition. Not a dashboard. Not a brand deck. Not a confession booth. A room. A room has corners. It has shelves. It has old things and new things. It has a drawer full of batteries and mystery cables. It has a chair nobody else likes. It has family stories, inherited objects, questionable decorations, excellent snacks, and one item that makes no sense to outsiders but explains half the household. It has taste because it has life in it.

That is what the great flattening removes. It takes the room and turns it into a profile. It takes the profile and turns it into a ranking. It takes the ranking and turns it into a verdict.

Closing observation

The In Defense Of series is, on the surface, a collection of arguments for individual things. But underneath that, it may be an argument for unflattened living. It is a refusal to let taste become only status. It is a refusal to let joy become only content. It is a refusal to let sincerity become automatically embarrassing. It is a refusal to let mass affection be dismissed as mass failure. It is a refusal to let every ordinary pleasure walk into the room already wearing a defendant's jacket.

The project keeps saying, in different ways: look again. Look again at the thing everyone laughs at. Look again at the thing that worked too well and got punished for it. Look again at the familiar object, the popular song, the practical tool, the corny ritual, the broad joke, the emotional support beverage, the local ad, the mall, the chain restaurant, the hobby pile, the movie with bad lighting and full commitment. Not because everything is secretly brilliant and not because criticism is bad. Not because taste should be abandoned but because flattening is lazy, and people are not flat.

The point is not to have taste nobody can question, the point is to have taste with enough room in it to be human.