I think something simpler is also going on. The college-age years are when we typically have the most time to search out and consume music. I still feel a vestigial crick in my neck from hunching over record bins. Now I barely have time to scroll through a playlist.
During a period of life when most of us do not have fancy watches or cars, music becomes a cheap, socially important signal of distinction. We are trying on, like silk-screened T-shirts, various identities. My high-school notebooks were filled with band logos, while an old cigar box held countless concert ticket stubs, like fetish objects, clues to my soul. Arguments over bands were arguments over who we wanted (and did not want) to be. How could these fierce attachments survive the transition to adulthood? In the documentary film Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, Matt Stone, the creator of South Park, talks about being the sort of person who would try in vain to impress upon his skeptical peers—whose taste ran to more “critically accepted” acts like Elvis Costello—the virtues of the Canadian progressive rock trio. “Now it’s like we’re all so old,” he said, “even if you hated Rush in the ’70s and ’80s, you’ve just got to give it up for them. You’ve just got to.”
And indeed, when I now hear a song like Rush’s “Spirit of Radio,” damned if I do not derive a certain pleasure from it. Was I wrong about Rush all those years ago? Is my new appreciation itself unadulterated or leavened with a dash of ironic distance? Or is it that not only do I not have time to figure out what music to like (all over again), I do not even have time to maintain my dislikes.*7 I am “losing my edge.” I am suffering “taste freeze.” What is the opportunity cost of hunting down the latest band when it sounds to your ears like some rough derivative of a band you heard in your youth? It is hard to escape what has been called the “reminiscence peak,” described as follows: “The events and changes that have maximum impact in terms of memorableness occur during a cohort’s adolescence and young adulthood.”
By this analysis, one suspects the reason Woodstock loomed so large in the culture is not the music itself but an almost statistical outcome of the largest birth cohort in American history suddenly hitting that age bracket of maximum impact. But why do we all—and not just The Big Chill generation—seem to insist that the music of our youth was better? As Carnegie Mellon’s Carey Morewedge points out, because everyone basically has this experience, it cannot be objectively true. He suggests that in the same way we tend to remember positive life events more strongly than negative events, only the “good” music from our past tends to survive in our memory. In the raw and unpolished present, meanwhile, we hear music we think we like and music we know we do not like. Memory, as he describes it, is like a radio station that only plays what we want to hear. Given that we had devoted so much time to thinking about the music, it is no surprise that it still so easily fills our memory and that we seem to have a hedonic soft spot for it.
So how do we move beyond the safe perimeter of our typical foraging ground into promising, if terrifying, new vistas, filled with new, unknown pleasures? We look for someone to take us there. As Westergren had joked to me, “We allow the lazy middle-age man to get back in the game.”
—
Before coming to Pandora, I had a rather anguished back-and-forth with the people in its public relations department. The sticking point seemed to be the word “taste.” They wanted me to know they were not “tastemakers in any sense of the word.” Rather, they strove to “provide each and every listener with a unique experience.” It seemed another hint of how much the notion of Taste with a capital T had fallen since mid-century, as if prescribing taste were some old, outmoded habit, like drinking martinis at lunch.
People now talk in softer terms, floating words like “discovery” and “curation.” The Book-of-the-Month Club, upon its launch in 1926, promised that any title that survived the “differing tastes” and “good judgment” of its panelists was “bound to be an outstanding book.” Nearly a century on, the club more demurely promises “our favorite new titles that we know you’ll want to read” (note the shift in focus, from objective standards from above to playing upon your personal preference).
But is this not still imposing some kind of selective criteria? Westergren tried to sound wholly catholic about Pandora’s playlists. “We don’t want to be judgmental about any of this,” he said. “Some people want to hear the same ten songs over and over again; that’s what we should give them.” That raises the question of whether they need an army of music analysts and fancy algorithms. A moment later, he added, “We curate our collection. We turn down an awful lot of music, because it makes the other side more satisfying.”
I put the question to Michael Zapruder, for many years the company’s head music curator. His job was to pick which recordings—most of which he was unfamiliar with—would enter the Music Genome. He had wrestled with the problem of democratic inclusion versus the elitism of curation, comparing it to being a judge at a baby beauty contest (a not uncomplicated problem I will return to later in the book).
He called it a “paradox” and paraphrased Orwell: Some songs are more equal than others. There was taste at work here, even if it was not Pandora’s per se. But it seemed to be working: As Westergren told me, more than 95 percent of the service’s million-plus songs were played every month.
Pandora had created a giant musical sandbox. There was a lot to play with, a lot to discover, but there were still boundaries. As Steve Hogan, the company’s manager of music operations, told me, “That’s the reason we have one million songs.” Other services may have eighteen million songs, he said, “but we have human beings making judgments. If a label sends us a bunch of karaoke music, they’re going to pass on it.” Rather, says Hogan, Pandora analysts will “try to pick the songs they feel best represent the artist and have the best chance to succeed in their opinion.”
But where radio could only play one song at a time, typically in a format that listeners expected, Pandora was trying to use math and musicology to create an army of invisible DJs, each serving up a mix of what you liked and what you might like. In one story I heard, Tim Westergren was at a town-hall-style meeting where someone told him he had no idea there were so many fans of marching band music in the world. Indeed, Pandora has a marching band music channel, and to that listener that was what Pandora was for. Tom Conrad, the company’s chief technical officer, told me, “We want people to feel like it’s really theirs, and for our musical taste—or other people’s musical taste—to not impinge upon that.”
The question of what music people might potentially play was only a small part of the problem. By trying to create stations tailored to individuals, Pandora was opening the Pandora’s box of taste. For our liking of music, like food, is open to a staggering amount of influence. Heard too much of one thing in a row? Sensory-specific satiety can set in. What did you listen to beforehand? A sad song might seem less sad after a succession of happy songs. Where are you listening to the music? In college, I used to visit a well-regarded local record shop, a shrine of obscure erudition where you felt vaguely blessed if a clerk gave a nod of tacit approval to your purchase. I soon realized that no music could ever sound as good as what those reedy, severe sages had on the turntable behind the counter.
—
And there is the idea that like food, music may comprise basic “tastes”—instead of saltiness or sweetness, think of syncopation or vocal breathiness or drum snare—but it is the “flavors” we learn to like and discern. A few years ago, Pandora listeners seemed to be lodging particularly negative feedback in the electronic dance music genre. “We had analyzed about forty-five thousand tracks, and we realized a lot of the club dance music was indiscriminately mixing together,” Hogan said. “To the genome, they all have the same ‘boosh boosh boosh’ beat.” But fans were hearing techno on their trance stations. Techno, says Eric Bieschke, “means something very specific if you’re into electronic music. If you’re my dad, everything I’ve ever listened to is techno.” So Pandora, Bi
eschke said, added a dozen or so new “attributes” into the genome. “How much reverb and ambience is on there? What sort of eq’ing effects or filter sweeps are being used?”
Even an individual band can represent many different pathways of taste. Sometimes it’s the people who change, while the song remains the same. Take the hit song “We Are Young” by Fun. The year prior, Conrad told me, Fun was “just one of the countless kind of semi-faceless bands that put out a record and get a review on Pitchfork and no one in any mass scale hears about them.” The song, he noted, had been on Pandora “for years,” played by a “core of people who felt like they had discovered this band.” Then, suddenly, the song appeared on the soundtrack to the popular television show Glee. “Overnight this song had a huge new audience, who I think had a different set of expectations when they came to listen to it on Pandora. They wanted to hear other songs that had been on Glee.”
The whole world of recorded music, Zapruder had suggested to me, is like an ocean. “Every recording is an entry point. So you might get into the water at the Beatles, and once you’re in the water, you can end up anywhere.” Some people hug the shore; others brave the open ocean. At its most incisive, Pandora might make a serendipitous connection, the way a free-form DJ might, following the Beatles with, say, “Lemons Never Forget” by the Bee Gees. The sound is quite Beatles-esque. But for many people, their mental model of the Bee Gees as a disco act would not permit them this connection. Bieschke says the “holy trinity” at Pandora is “variety, discovery, familiarity.” It has a mathematical model of where you sit on that axis—from “active” to “passive” listening. The stations you create are shorthand for the breadth of your taste. “If you’ve ever created a jazz station, you probably have stations all over the map,” he said. “If you ever typed in ‘Coltrane,’ you’re likely to have a very wide umbrella of interested listening habits.”
In the end, the thumb rules. In early 2015, someone’s up or down vote was the fifty billionth thumb on Pandora. The thumb is the clearest signal it has, stronger than the skip button. But even here there is room for ambiguity. Are you saying you do not want to hear that right now? Do you not like that band, or is it not quite right for this station? “We actually ran a test,” Bieschke said. “We took half of a percent of people listening to Pandora. When they hit thumb up or thumb down, we’d ask why.” Listeners could list reasons why in a text box. “The tricky part was that the things people wrote in were all over the map. They would write things like ‘I thumbed this up because it was the first dance at my daughter’s wedding.’ As an algorithm guy, I was like, what the hell am I going to do with that?” The feature was scuttled, and that particular Pandora’s box—trying to learn why people liked or disliked something—was closed.
“They say there’s no accounting for taste,” Hogan told me. “But we can account for it, en masse. We can say there’s an 84 percent chance that this song is going to work for people listening to Rolling Stones radio. It’s a good bet; we’ve accounted for the taste of this big group of people.” He paused, looked briefly into space, then added, “Maybe there’s no accounting for why they didn’t like it.”
* * *
*1 When I met Liu, the site was on the verge of being bought by eBay and has since been closed.
*2 This message exists today in organs like the Financial Time’s suggestively titled weekend supplement, How to Spend It.
*3 This recalls the scene in Ghost World in which the protagonist Seymour declares, “Maybe I don’t want to meet someone who shares my interests. I hate my interests.”
*4 Though in late 2015 there was talk, not without controversy, of adding one—but this was only meant to show empathy with others (that is, “disliking” someone’s bad-news posting).
*5 In 1996, at least. Like every former “outside” genre, there are signs that metal has been brought into the mainstream fold; for example, the pianist Lang Lang performing with Metallica at the 2014 Grammy Awards (and, arguably, both genres were looking for some form of legitimacy in this pairing).
*6 For the record, Every Noise at Once does not include this as a genre, but it does have one called, simply, “juggalo.”
*7 In the film While We’re Young, Ben Stiller’s highbrow Gen X character, upon being played, with seemingly pure appreciation, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” by a hip young omnivore, says with wonder, “I remember when this was just supposed to be bad.”
CHAPTER 4
HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE LIKE?
THE ECSTASIES AND ANXIETIES OF ART
WE LIKE WHAT WE SEE; WE SEE WHAT WE LIKE: WHAT PEOPLE GET UP TO IN MUSEUMS
On the morning of April 9, 2008, on a drab pedestrian corridor in the Belgian city of Antwerp, an image was quietly unveiled: a black, white, and gray painting, applied directly to concrete, that depicted monkeys copulating.*1
The painting was by Luc Tuymans, a Flemish painter of considerable import and renown. It had been “commissioned” by a Belgian arts television channel as a subtle way of answering a simple question: Would people, especially those who were not already devoted consumers of contemporary art, know art if they saw it?
In the short film about the experiment, one sees, ahead of the painting’s debut, a variety of curators from major museums, all grandly declaiming the importance of Tuymans, most confidently betting that people would notice the work—that they could virtually not help noticing. The unsuspecting people of Antwerp, one curator predicted, would be “forced” to think “why that work had come into their life.” “I think it will stop people,” another said. “Make them think, wake them up.”
In forty-eight hours of observation, despite the painting’s arresting subject matter and its visual prominence, less than 4 percent of nearly three thousand passersby stopped to examine it. Whatever the artistic merit of that particular Tuymans work, it was escaping most of the populace of Antwerp. “Can experiments like this help people to take more interest in art?” the station had wondered. People voted with their feet—and kept walking.
There are many objections to be raised to the experiment’s methodology, perhaps to its entire premise. The first is equating people’s failure to stop at an unheralded image on a random street with some lack of aesthetic appreciation. The average urban pedestrian is assaulted by a huge range of sounds, smells, and, especially, sights. Is failing to notice a Tuymans on a wall any more a lack of appreciation than failing to notice a paving pattern on the sidewalk or the unusual bird perched on a wire overhead? As W. H. Auden once observed of Brueghel’s famous painting of the fall of Icarus—in which no one, arguably even Brueghel himself, seems to pay much notice to the downed wingman—even suffering happens “while someone is eating or opening a window or just dully walking along.”
So already, Tuymans’s painting is dwelling in the cognitive shadows, relying on some scrap of neural surplus to even be seen. Then there is “expectancy.” Images appear on city walls all the time—graffiti, wheat-pasted advertisements. The one thing we are generally not expecting to see are original paintings executed by eminent contemporary artists (with the exception, of course, of an artist like Banksy, whose work people actually look for on urban walls and still miss). The things we are not expecting to see, we are less likely to see.
What if you did, in the busy course of your day, cast a glance over to the painting? (It is unclear how many people who did not stop for the painting actually might have seen it.) What if you did register it as an interesting, provocative, or even beautiful image? So what—the world is filled with such images. Content swims lost without context. How would a person, even one who recognized the style of Tuymans, know it was an original? How would this single image, outside the gallery walls, lacking wall text, announce its importance to the viewer? Surely, a row of Tuymans’s work, advertised as being “real” works—for we get a measurable neural charge from originals—would net more viewers.
Last, some people might have seen the painting and decided they simply did not
like it and thus did not stop. “Liking,” particularly in contemporary art, is a rather discouraged word. It is not uncommon to read, for example, sentences like “The question of ‘liking’ Nauman or not seems impertinent” (note the deadly quotation marks).
The mistrust of pleasure has, of course, long pervaded aesthetic thinking. Kant, in The Critique of Judgment, termed the base-level hedonic response the “agreeable,” or that “which the senses find pleasing in sensation.” This was not to be trusted: To the hungry man, everything tastes more or less good. These were, furthermore, “private judgments,” the sort of thing we talk about when we say, “There’s no accounting for taste.” Kant was after bigger fish: the “disinterested” aesthetic response. Not only would you not know it was a Tuymans; you would not even think of it in terms of its style, its technique. You would not think of it as a painting at all. You would just let your faculties freely range over the thing’s ineffable beauty. The empiricist David Hume, the other member of the heavyweight tag team of Enlightenment aesthetics,*2 might counter that it did not really matter whether you liked Tuymans—whatever the reasons, you would be “blameless”—for this would just be one of a “thousand sentiments.” He was interested in an enduring standard that would confirm that Tuymans was more than a mere pleasure.
Kant and Hume had in mind ideal critics, not busy passersby on an Antwerp street, who are more likely to follow the injunction of the art critic Clement Greenberg: “Art is first of all, and most of all, a question of liking and of not liking—just so.” The power of liking or disliking, or what psychologists call “affect,” should not be underestimated: It not only informs what we feel about something like art but influences how we see it.
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