Lady Gaga?

[Reverend Joe]

I like steppenwolf...what I was saying is that the only actual taste is personal taste. Measuring the "worth" of a song is comparatively pointless and trivial. You can't have good taste in music, and cultural sophistication is something people make up to feel better about themselves.

I'm not attacking people who like jazz music, quite the opposite. I've heard sing sing live a few times and it was pretty good, live music is usually better though.

Well, if you argue that then you lose any ability to relate what might be good and bad music. Any time you try to say this or that is good or bad, someone else can just say, "well, that's just your opinion and it doesn't matter because it's all subjective." Therefore, there is no such thing as musical commentary or criticism, a person's musical success is meaningless because it's all relative and you can do whatever the hell you want and call it music.

I know, you don't mean to argue this, but it's the logical conclusion of your argument, and it doesn't work for the same reason that moral relativism doesn't work. Even if it's all subjective, it's still based on a generally-agreed social norm, and with music this norm is often quite pervasive, even going against what most people call the best. This norm is also based on mathematics, as Lemur pointed out, so it can be independently verified, and is not totally abstract.

Now, this doesn't mean that you have to pay a damn bit of attention to what people say is "good music." As I said earlier, I love a lot of really bad music. Hell, I spent several hours today idly drinking beer and listening to Foghat, Foreigner and Bad Company. (Most of it was Foghat; those guys are freakin' sweet.) The thing is, I don't try to justify my taste as being good; if I like crappy music, I don't care, because I like listening to it. If people lord their supposed superiority over you because they only listen to good music, then most likely they are either lying to themselves or they are total nerds with no lives who don't know how to enjoy the simple pleasures of lowbrow life. In other words, dude, you gotta recognize the mountain and the view from the top, but embrace your love of life at the bottom.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna eat fried chicken legs with a baked potato and corn on the cob with a Budweiser while I watch "The Blues Brothers."