"Was it good?" - a question to banish forever.
No, really, it's a big deal. And it's time to stop the madness.
It’s a familiar scene — a person goes to a concert or a movie, and afterwards a friend asks them, “Was it good?”
The friend later goes on to report to other people that “I heard it was really good” or “Eh, I heard it wasn’t that good.” Each person down the chain treats this bit of feedback as if it were reliable intel.
This is madness. And it’s time to stop.
If the first person went to a film, the inquiring friend and others down the line will partly base their decision on whether or not to see that film on that one initial person’s reaction. If these people are talking about a concert, the people who didn’t attend will file the artist away in their heads as a “good” or “not very good” live act. If the artist comes around again sometime later, folks along the chain who didn’t go the first time will similarly make their decision to go see that artist based in part on the first person’s arbitrary impression that has now somehow solidified into shared truth (not unlike the way gossip becomes real, in a sense, regardless of how accurate it is).
I often hear people who are fans of certain critics say things like “Well I trust that critic because s/he and I have similar tastes.”
Really??? Is that so…
How ‘bout we do some basic math here — so basic, in fact, that everyone already knows this math inside-out to the point that they could pass a test with flying colors in their sleep:
There’s no such thing as someone who shares your tastes 100%. Mathematically, this just doesn’t occur. You and another person can love many of the same things and yet still go to the same concert and walk out having connected to entirely different songs in the same performance. It’s not just possible that that’ll happen, it’s quite likely. Likewise, you can watch the same film and have diametrically opposing responses to it — or both love the film and still diverge when it comes to which scenes and acting performances you most enjoyed.
Say you had gone to the hypothetical show or film that the one friend asked the other about — the chances that your impression would line up with one single person out of the total number who attended is essentially random. Moreover, it’s something of a coin flip as to where your impression would fall on a graph that charted-out the impressions of everyone who was there.
Not to mention that if you were to ask the people who actually played the show to rate their performance, you’d likely get several different answers from people in the same band! Same goes for the cast / crew / director of a film.
We. all. know. this.
And since we all know this, for someone to form their impression on an event they didn’t attend based on what someone else reported is… baffling, to say the least.
So what is this charade all about? Why do people lead themselves around by the nose like this — as if they’d fastened a yoke over their own perceptions and then extended their arms and started puling on it, as if something else were guiding them? Or maybe Pavlovian dogs trained to walk themselves by holding their leash in their mouths…
It’s not that people are dumb. On the contrary — I will defend to the death the idea that there’s no such thing as dumb people. What makes this phenomenon so mysterious is that human beings are clearly armed with astounding powers of reason. I’m not sure how you, dear reader, would prefer to define “reason,” but for argument’s sake let’s just say humans are amazing at logic and equally amazing at empathy (or let’s call it “emotional awareness”), and so let’s say that reason is some blend of the two.
We’re also really, really good at suspending those powers and kind of shoving them to the side in spite of ourselves. Maybe that’s what “dumb” is — a choice, perhaps? Or maybe “dumb” is a decision to passively go along with a set of reflexes that we could pull ourselves away from if we tried. Or maybe this isn’t a matter of good or bad choices at all. Because maybe there’s something more powerful at work here, a deeper need that impels us to negate what our own senses tell us in favor of a collective… verdict. And maybe we’d have to try so hard to free ourselves of this reflex (and others related to it) that it just doesn’t feel worth it most of the time.
Because we give-in to a group verdict even when it doesn’t serve us in any way, and we do it even though we have to invent both the group and the verdict. Because if you didn’t go to show, you have no idea what the energy in the room was like. And even if you did go to the show, you have no way of individually polling each and every person who was there. And even your sense of the crowd’s response is going to be tainted somewhat by your own responses. Your read on the vibe in the concert hall may differ wildly from the person standing right next to you.
So it’s like we’re constantly fishing for something that slips out of our fingers if we try to wrangle it down and grab ahold of it.
Come on man, just tell me how the goddamn Aerosmith show was. Can’t you just answer the question? Why do you have to be so difficult and argumentative and make a dissertation out of everything all the time? This is making my head hurt. And you’re just saying this to be contrary anyway. I mean, can’t people just enjoy listening to “Dream On” and light their lighters and sing along? People listen to the radio and THEY LIKE IT. They like what they like. You can’t tell people that what they like isn’t valid. Besides, do we have to THINK so much all the time? Why do you have to act like you’re above it all, like you see something that no one else sees? My god, how arrogant. You’d think we were talking about something as important as state propaganda. It’s JUST music, for Christ’s sake!
Yep, I’ve heard it all — but what those protests actually mean is: Who the hell are you to tell me that MY opinion actually matters more than what The Narrative says? I don’t WANT to trust my own senses, okay?!?!!?
Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re going to a restaurant, and on your way up to the entrance you ask “Am I hungry?” to the people on their way out who’d just eaten there. To be fair, typically the question people ask is “What would you recommend off the menu?” But even that question becomes absurd when you stop and think about what it is you’re asking of someone else. Because the answer to your question simply cannot be provided by another person. As anyone who hasn’t been raised in captivity — or anyone who’s been around children for even a single meal — knows, everyone’s taste buds are different.
My daughter, who’s 4 years old, reminds me of this — every. single. time. I put something in my mouth that she’s deemed unappetizing. And she really leans into it, too:
“ILCH,” she’ll say in disgust, like I just put rat entrails to my lips. “GROSS.”
“You don’t have to eat it,” I’ll say, amused. (I actually love it that she does this.) And then I’ll explain: “Daddy eats this because he likes the taste of it.”
“Well I don’t!”
“Yes, I’m aware. I… got the memo.”
Now this is someone who knows what she likes and doesn’t like! (Even if she, like all kids, pre-judges food by its appearance and I have to really nudge her sometimes to convince her to try something I think she’s gonna like. I never force the issue but I am sometimes like “If you try a TINY BIT, you might just like it.” Lemme tell ya, she changed her tune real quick with Nutella. You could actually see the instant where the information from her taste buds reached the synapses that process flavor.)
So if everyone’s taste buds are different, and if we all know that everyone’s taste buds are different, why then do we slip past that basic truth as if it were somehow inconvenient? Is it just laziness? I don’t think so. First of all, we put too much energy into this behavior for it to be lazy. It would actually save you energy to just go with your own initial response. It takes work to tend to this sense of where you stand in comparison to everyone else.
Because if you observe the way people talk out loud about music, you’ll notice that people are constantly doing an internal reference-check to note their position relative to the opinion of the collective. They either show some kind of apologetic reflex for running afoul of the flock — “I know it’s unfashionable to like dubstep, but by George I’m sticking to my guns. So be it if that makes me a dork.” Or they might say “I don’t care what anybody says, I’m saying it in public: I LIKE JUSTIN BIEBER.”
Or — more amusingly — they might go in the opposite direction and start talking like conquering missionaries, expressing a flaming desire that the public share the same enthusiasm for the stuff they like. You can see the gears turning in their heads, with images of the masses finally acknowledging The Gospel Truth about That Truly Amazing Song, all of us better-off for finally receiving the Holy Spirit.
In both cases, though, the person is hyper-conscious of the judgment decreed by the Greater Collective. Calling this for what it is, people have this ever-present push to gaslight one another when it comes to art. What’s even more intriguing, though, is that they’re equally occupied by the desire to gaslight themselves. Music, apparently, isn’t meant to provide the grounds for an individual experience. No: it can only be valid — in fact, it can only be real — if others affirm that experience.
It’s like we’re performing the Asch Line Experiment in reverse — inviting a group into the inner sanctum of our most intimate sensations. And oh, by the way: that group doesn’t actually exist! That’s pretty heavy.
If we think about it, the entire infrastructure of arts journalism is designed to give people the impression that there’s an already-arrived-at judgment that’s been consecrated as the default position that the individual listener then measures themselves against. It’s important to note that music and film reviews are meant to be engaged with before one hears the music or sees the film. Which is why, as usual, I can point to music as a proxy for something deeper that lurks within our wiring.
What the Asch Line Experiment tells us about conformity and peer pressure is nothing short of horrifying. A quick primer: In 1951, psychologist Solomon Asch began the first of his now-famous experiments at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Subjects were placed in a room with 6-8 other people who appeared to be fellow subjects but who were all actually playing scripted roles. The subject was then asked to compare a series of line lengths, like “See this line on the left. Which line of the three on the right does it match in length?” The subject would typically answer last or second-to-last — after the other (false) “subjects” in the room answered.
This would go on for several rounds. At times, the false subjects would answer in a way what was quite obviously incorrect, and yet Asch “found that 76% of participants conformed to group pressure at least once by [also] indicating the incorrect line.” (You can find more citations, along with a thorough explanation of the experiment, on Wikipedia’s page for Asch.)
Critics who opine about music, film, literature and art give their audience a kind of shortcut to populate their heads with the false respondents Asch would put in the room with you if you participated in his experiment. If we use the experiment as an analogy, critics would be the ones who answer first, but because critics tend to convey a sense of authority, as if they speak for the public. That’s all it takes — one critic’s viewpoint — for the individual to then fill-in the rest, as if there are a bunch of other people “in the room” with them who have already weighed-in on the art in question. Of course, the internet, with its message boards and endless sea of comments, only exacerbated this (faulty, I would argue) cognitive leap.
This is not something trivial that we should overlook in the name of “just having fun” with music. It actually tells us something rather grave and alarming about the human condition in that we don’t give ourselves permission to have our own sensations. We don’t live with our most basic and fundamental perceptions, it turns out, as if they even belong to us. That’s a pretty big fucking deal.
I mean, I’ve always felt like every individual person’s musical taste is like a unique neuro-chemical galaxy unto itself — just like each individual brain is made up of a unique constellation of cells. (My understanding is that, even if you were to be able to clone that person, you couldn’t replicate all those brain cells exactly.) I suspect that if you took every person alive today and exposed them to, say, the same 5,000 songs, no two people’s sensations would map onto each other in exactly the same way. Sure, you could poll them to see how they rate the songs on a scale of 1-10, but the more fine-tuned you get, the more variance you’ll find. Even all the people who rate the same songs as a 10 out of 10 would be focused on different aspects of those songs.
For whatever reason, people have a (built-in?) reflex to set aside that uniqueness in the service of an imagined sense of shared transcendence. Apparently, when we’re moved by music, we want to feel like we’re not on an island by ourselves. It’s evident that we have a pressing need to feel like that experience connects us to others. I’d love to put this question before a panel of people who study social psychology, evolutionary psychology, tribalism, evolutionary biology, cognition, perception, transcendence, neuroscience, linguistics, etc.
Shy of that, though, I have a few hunches of my own: clearly, music mimics the intense thrall that human beings experience when they engage in certain forms of spiritual practice — or in other ecstatic states of transcendence — so there’s some kind of automatic need to congregate around songs as if they formed a kind of maypole. But I can’t begin to offer a definitive answer. I also wonder whether we can’t at least partially override this reflex and arrive at… a new destination where we would feel transformed (and somehow more whole) from having made the journey to get there.
When people seek affirmation for their opinions on music, what they’re doing is trying to find a consonance that’s very much like the liturgical unity that religious denominations find amongst themselves — songs are the hymnal, concerts are the church service, critical appraisal is something like a scriptural guidebook, the opinions of the fellow congregants is a measure of everyone’s devotion to the overarching message (a kind of reminder that it’s okay to buy-in because, well, everyone else is), and road-tripping to concerts is a pilgrimage.
This is more than just a working metaphor: centuries before the Glastonbury festival started in 1970, ancient people journeyed to a site near the modern-day concert grounds for a gathering. In a podcast that went live two days before this post, biochemist Rupert Sheldrake discussed pilgrimage and how it recurs throughout the human story:
So people are trying to get into social harmony with others based on a shared response to musical harmony. And, sure, there’s a glorious side to this feeling. Being in a roomful of people enraptured in unison by the same piece of music (or anything, for that matter) is, of course, an amazing experience. Rollercoasters, air shows, and scenic hikes are popular for a reason. Whenever I’ve traveled, for example, to Letchworth State Park, located in the western part of New York State, the experience isn’t diminished one bit when the trails are mobbed with people. If anything, my appreciation and awe for nature are amplified the more people there are.
But no one at Letchworth has ever stopped me in my tracks demanding that I acknowledge that a blue jay or maple tree is more appealing than something else. I’ve also never seen anyone practically beg someone else to step in for them and assign aesthetic value to their surroundings. And besides, do we need to live as ant-like slaves to this need to share in the experience of musical ecstasy? And why can’t we just be at-peace with the idea that others in the concert call or “out there” are experiencing ecstasy, only to different songs?
I haven’t done an investigation, but I can imagine there are scientists who propose that our appreciation of music is something we adapted in order to serve as a kind of social glue at a time when our survival depended heavily on group cohesion. That would make sense, but then my question would be: “Why is there so much variety, then?” After all, we’re not just passengers in the experience of music. As far as we can tell, ants don’t have the same kind of individual variation among them when it comes to their hard-wired responses. For whatever reason, we do.
Which means there’s a built-in tension between compliance with group will and self-assertion of one’s own will. Maybe, as far as nature is concerned, those things aren’t “supposed” to reconcile. Maybe we’ve just evolved to live in a constant state of push-pull between those two poles of our being: with cooperation and individuation eternally at odds. At the very least, though, it isn’t too much to ask for each person to reserve an inner space for themselves, to draw a circle around their sensations as their own property.
And I do wonder, if we were to start navigating this self-checking impulse more consciously, whether we might not give rise to something new and beneficial. I wonder if we’re able to hold our balance better, and it’s just that we don’t give ourselves a chance. Earlier, I mentioned “something deeper that lurks within our wiring.” I say “lurks,” but I wonder if there isn’t something beneficial hiding in there too.
It may sound pie-in-the-sky, but I wonder what would happen if we all circled the maypole of music but allowed for each person to bring their individual “galaxy” of sensations to the greater flow. What could we unlock within ourselves if we still engaged in the wonderful bonding effect that music gives us, while at the same time relinquished the need to be so rigid in our demand that others hear music in quite the same way? Could that lead to a form of temperance and equilibrium that would spill-over into other areas of coexistence and community-building?
Needless to say, at the time of this writing, we’re moving quite determinedly in the opposite direction. In the U.S. (my home country), one simply can’t deny the feeling of tremors emanating with more and more intensity from fault lines around various hot-button issues: race, gender, abortion, ecology, war, etc, etc. The dialogue around these issues (if it can be called dialogue at all) appears to have reached a state of irreversible polarization, as if every issue we face has become an example of an unstoppable force bashing against an immovable object.
It goes without saying that I’m hardly the first person to point this out. But is it possible that each and every human being has an utterly unique perspective to bear on any subject they encounter, much like they do with music? That premise by itself isn’t such a leap — I mean, it’s pretty obvious that the answer, more or less, is yes. But is it also possible, then, that all social challenges are best approached by layering as many of these unique outlooks on top of one another as we can, like transparent sheets over a light source that, when combined, reveal a new picture?
Do uniqueness and divergence become useful when applied in combination with a group-conscious outlook? I don’t know if that’s possible, but I know we could give it a try with music and see what happens. Each person would at least claim a space for themselves where the outer group collective has no dominion whatsoever. Hell, doing so might even improve group cooperation if people felt that music was something they could claim as theirs and only theirs.
People would be able to come step forth from out of their sacred, inviolable inner circle back into the light. They could feel more invested in the greater good because group will wouldn’t be forced on them in such an invasive way. Music, alas, may hold the key to our group survival after all.
It’s worth a shot, no? And don’t you owe it to yourself anyway?
<3 SRK