Flattening of Taste

I noticed the pattern because the defenses started stacking up on the desk. Andrew Silverstein. The Bee Gees. Chain restaurants. Local commercials. Weird Al. Batman with the bright colors and the sincere punchlines. Each piece looked separate at first, another odd little case file from the cultural lost-and-found. Then the stack leaned over, and the real subject showed itself.

We had not only been defending the objects. We had been defending the right to like things without entering a plea. That, to me, names the great flattening of taste.

Taste should have corners. A person should get to love a good sentence, a dumb jingle, a diner booth, a museum room, a power ballad, an old commercial, a clean knife cut through a tomato, and a movie where the villain explains the plan while standing near unnecessary fire. Human preference does not move in one lane. It cuts through alleys. It makes sentimental stops. It buys the mall pretzel. It keeps the ugly mug because Aunt Carol gave it to you in 1998 and somehow the thing survived six moves.

Flattened taste hates all of that mess. It wants every affection to report for inspection. It turns liking into evidence. You enjoy this song? Interesting. What does that reveal about your class, politics, education, seriousness, originality, intelligence, media literacy, and soul? Please answer in complete sentences. The prosecutor has entered the group chat.

The little court of public preference

The courtroom fills quietly. Nobody wears robes. They wear better sneakers and carry the tired confidence of people who know the correct restaurant before anyone asks. They do not need a gavel. They have eyebrows.

Some things get mocked because they deserve a little heat. Lazy work exists. Cynical products exist. Empty nostalgia exists. Whole industries turn comfort into bait and then ask for a monthly fee. Fine. Criticism has a job.

Plenty of the time, though, the argument does not really concern quality. It concerns permission.

Who gets to like a broad thing without embarrassment? Who gets to call their taste eclectic while someone else gets called basic? Who can enjoy a chain restaurant as anthropology, and who gets treated like they got caught eating emotional nachos in public? Who can say, I grew up with this, and have that sentence sound charming instead of provincial?

Taste used to wander around like a room full of odd furniture. Now it gets treated like paperwork. Name, date, category, reason for enjoyment, level of irony, required disclaimers, known limitations, moral exposure, audience notes. Initial here. Sign there. Do not admit affection without counsel.

The disclaimer before the joy

Listen to people confess a harmless preference. They often tuck the pleasure behind sandbags.

I know this is dumb, but… It is a guilty pleasure. I only like the early stuff. I am not saying it is good. I understand the critique.

Sometimes those caveats do real work. Context matters. History matters. Money matters. Power matters. Adults can hold a favorite thing with two hands and still see the grease on it. Other times the caveat just functions like a little shield. A person wants to say, This makes me happy, but the room has trained them to wear a helmet first.

The phrase guilty pleasure still bothers me. Guilty of what, exactly? Liking a chorus? Ordering the dessert with the ridiculous name? Watching the competition show because it lets your brain take off its shoes? Keeping the holiday movie on while folding towels?

Some pleasures deserve scrutiny. Some artists complicate the work. Some fandoms turn ugly. Some products manipulate people with a smile and a points program. No need to be precious about any of that. Still, most people who say guilty pleasure do not mean, I have ethically examined this and found a conflict. They mean, Someone might laugh at me if I enjoy this plainly. That sentence carries more sadness than the joke lets on.

The public shelf

Taste became easier to see. That changed the temperature. The internet did not invent judgment. People judged casseroles, lawn ornaments, clothes, haircuts, books, cars, beers, songs, and wedding centerpieces long before broadband showed up and asked everybody to choose a password. Humanity had pettiness in stock.

The difference now: judgment has tools. Likes, follows, playlists, reviews, shelf photos, watch histories, reposts, screenshots, algorithmic trails. Even the quiet favorite leaves a footprint. Even the passing interest can look like a statement.

A shelf once belonged to the house. Maybe a guest noticed it after dinner. Maybe not. Now the shelf can become content. The hobby becomes a niche. The niche becomes a brand. The brand becomes a cage with better lighting. You liked a thing because it gave you oxygen on a weird Tuesday. Suddenly it needs to explain itself to strangers.

That pressure changes enjoyment. People start liking defensively. They learn to place irony between themselves and the thing, like a folding chair held against a loose dog. They stand near joy but keep one foot near the exit.

Class anxiety with garnish

A lot of taste talk carries class anxiety under a nicer jacket. Nobody wants to say that out loud. It sounds rude, and it ruins the little performance. So the vocabulary does the work instead. Tacky. Basic. Cringe. Cheap. Corny. Suburban. Lowbrow. Mainstream. Fake. Overproduced. For people who do not know better.

Sometimes those words describe an aesthetic. Often they sort people. The accessible vacation. The sentimental decoration. The practical appliance. The family restaurant where everyone can find something. The popular franchise. The broad joke. The thing that does not require a password to the cultural lounge.

A tired parent chooses the restaurant where six people will eat without a dinner mutiny. A worker watches the movie that does not demand a graduate seminar after a twelve-hour day. A family sings the song that already knows the words for them. A person buys the thing that works, not the thing that photographs better on a concrete counter next to an oat milk latte. None of that automatically makes the choice brilliant. It also does not make the choice small.

Popularity does not count as a confession. Accessibility does not equal failure. Familiarity does not arrive covered in fingerprints at the crime scene. A thing can sit in the middle of the culture and still hold weight. A thing can be silly and still carry somebody through a Tuesday.

Sincerity without an escape hatch

Flattened taste punishes sincerity first. Irony gives people a trapdoor. If someone mocks the thing, you can shrug and say you never really liked it that way. You only enjoyed the costume of enjoyment. You stood close enough to borrow warmth, not close enough to get caught.

Plain affection offers no such escape. It says, yes, I like this. Yes, I know what it is. Yes, I see the flaws, the commercial seams, the sentiment, the volume, the cape, the fake smoke, the key change, the absurd mascot, the sauce cup shaped like a tiny plastic chalice. I still like it.

That kind of honesty makes people twitchy. No wonder enthusiasm gets policed as cringe. No wonder earnest performers become easy targets. No wonder broad comedy gets treated like lesser craft, even though making a mixed room laugh requires timing, nerve, and a willingness to look stupid on purpose. No wonder happiness needs a defense. Sadness, too. Anything felt directly attracts someone with a clipboard.

Nuance should make the room bigger. Flattening uses nuance as a choke collar. Enjoy the big dumb chorus, sure, but first present your credentials from the Department of Complication. Love the movie, fine, but demonstrate that you know where it fails. Be moved, but not too moved. Laugh, but from the correct distance. Cry, if you must, with a footnote. What a miserable way to attend your own life.

When morality enters the snack aisle

Taste and morality do touch. Pretending otherwise would be lazy in the opposite direction. Culture comes from people. Companies fund it. Systems distribute it. Audiences reward it. Harm can hide inside nostalgia, polish, glamour, and fan service. Some old favorites deserve a second look. Some deserve retirement.

The problem starts when moral attention becomes quick sorting. Flattening skips context and reaches for a label. Good. Bad. Smart. Dumb. Elevated. Trash. Pure. Compromised. Problematic. Permitted.

People do not live that cleanly. They carry critique and affection in the same pocket. They can love a movie and see the seams. They can enjoy a restaurant without crowning it the summit of cuisine. They can respect craft inside something commercial. They can outgrow a favorite without rewriting their whole past as ignorance. They can say, I do not defend all of it, and still mean, something here mattered to me.

Flattening hates mixed feelings because mixed feelings slow down the sorting machine. Human taste has too many ingredients for that machine. Memory. Appetite. Geography. Family. Class. Mood. Rebellion. Comfort. Accident. Weather. Timing. One song from the back seat of a car. One meal after a funeral. One movie watched on cable while home sick from school. One jingle lodged in the brain like a bottle cap in a couch cushion.

Call it junk drawer taste if you want. I mean that as praise. The junk drawer knows the household better than the formal living room does.

Unflatten the room

The answer does not require better taste. Better according to whom? Better for which room, which audience, which class performance, which bio, which shelf photo? The better answer: give taste its dimensions back.

Let a person love the museum and the drive-thru. Let them quote poetry and commercial jingles. Let them defend Batman, a perfect hard-boiled egg, a silly kitchen appliance, a power ballad, a local ad with terrible lighting, a dessert menu that behaves like a minor theme park, and a song that did its job and left with the check.

Taste with dimension does not need every joy to become an argument. It does not confuse privacy with shame. It does not treat accessibility as contamination. It does not use irony as a safety helmet every single time. It lets people be multiple, which makes the flattening machine extremely uncomfortable.

Good. Let people be multiple. Let taste be a room again. Not a resume. Not a deposition. Not a dashboard. A room. Rooms have corners. They have shelves. They have old things and new things. They have one chair nobody else likes. They have snacks. They have a drawer full of batteries, mystery cables, expired coupons, tape, a key to no known lock, and one object nobody throws away because somebody would notice if it disappeared. A room holds life. A profile flattens it. A ranking flattens it further. A verdict finishes the job.

The defense underneath the defenses

The In Defense Of pieces may look like arguments for individual things. Underneath, they argue for unflattened living. Look again at the thing everyone laughs at. Look again at the popular song, the local commercial, the chain restaurant, the mall ritual, the broad joke, the emotional support beverage, the hobby pile, the movie with bad lighting and full commitment. Not because everything hides secret genius. Not because criticism ruins fun. Not because all taste deserves applause.

Look again because flattening gets lazy fast. It saves time by turning a person into a tag. It saves complexity by treating joy as evidence. It saves the tastemaker from having to ask a better question. What did this thing do for somebody? What memory does it carry? What need did it meet? What room did it belong to? Why did people gather around it? Why did they keep coming back?

Those questions do not pardon every object. They simply restore dimension. The point does not require taste nobody can question. That taste probably does not exist, and if it does, the owner sounds exhausting at brunch.

The point asks for taste with enough room in it to be human. Room for critique. Room for delight. Room for the refined thing and the ridiculous thing. Room for the memory that refuses to justify itself. Room for the ordinary pleasure that helped somebody make it through a day and did not ask to stand trial for it.

Keep standards. Keep criticism. Keep the right to say no, that thing actually stinks. Just stop turning every affection into a witness statement.

Let taste breathe. Let joy have corners. Let people keep a few unbranded, undefended, unflattened shelves.