The Accountants of Taste

Mother always said that there's no accounting for taste. But despite her naivete, there are still plenty of accountants of taste out there honing their craft. Bless them. Generally speaking, these accountants take the shape of your friend that - at one time, back in the day - introduced you to your favorite album precisely like they might've introduced you to a mutual friend. This is a wonderful thing, this process of recommendation, and each playing of the album perforce has forever an extra voice devoted to that friend in some subtle overtone just above the human range of hearing that only you can hear.

But your friend is typically not a scientist, and so many of these accountants of taste are not just simple givers. No; they aren't just satisfied (as your friend likely was) with introducing you to the frontiers of human expression in their medium of expertise as you can currently understand it, i.e. their current favorite bands. No, the accountants have science on their side, and therefore have to go further: They have to shove aside what you already have passion for, in its banality, overwrought lyrics, and generally gauche sound, i.e. your current favorite bands.

They're nearly always right, and their process is fairly straightforward: To perform these budget cuts on your existing budget, the accountant of taste - often certified and public and loud - has an established methodology rooted in the great tradition of rhetoric dating back to the Greeks. The accountant of taste first tells you that your present budgetary projections are awful, at least on your current course of emotional investment. This is presented with sound and solemn and indefensible reasoning about taste, sometimes taking the shape of a political, social, or ethical critique:

e.g. "The Beatles are so middlebrow" or "That's a great song... that is, if I were a fascist sympathizer in the Weimar Republic. I'm not, by the way."

More often, an accounting of your current trajectory takes the form of attacking the person that would like something so awful, i.e. you when you listen to that bullshit you listen to. It's embarrassing, Steve. Really, I'm embarrassed that you enjoy that crap:

e.g. "You still read what? Ew, s.f. is such a pulp genre, and genre fiction is for kiddies." or "Seriously, what is up with this My Little Pony crap? I don't get it, honestly."

Now, ignoring the question of what, precisely, is up with My Little Pony (because I'm not such an accountant of taste and wouldn't want to be), the accountant of taste acts with merciless reasoning based on their complete understanding of the human condition and the human reception of art. It's not enough for you to say, "But I just like it! I don't have a reason!" The accountant of taste realizes that we're not dealing in feelings, but in cold, hard facts. And so: A) There must be a reason you like or dislike something, and B) they are going to find out what it is. Taste (or, more generally, the subjective experience) is a matter of science, cold and practical, which is what my mother could never realize (though her cooking is excellent and she actually went to culinary school).

You see, people only like things because of specific, measurable reasons in their immediate scope. If you like a song about a girl or falling in love, you must have someone special in mind. If you like a song about music, you must have a desire for introspection or a desire for more music. If you like a novelty song like Allan Sherman's "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah," you obviously have some unresolved childhood issues that you're dealing with with crudeness and farce. And once the taste-maker has gotten to the bottom of why you like your awful favorite band (i.e. what about your objective person is flawed), they will strike with the fatal sentence.

"They're so overrated."

Once your taste has been proved overrated, all hope is lost. You must hand in your passport as a traveler of sound or film or literature. You have been destroyed. You might as well not bother showing up to work anymore. You are a non-entity. Oh, you can still go right on living, breathing in and out, eating food and expelling waste, and, if you're young, perhaps not physically dying for several decades. But you should know that - as Martin Luther King Jr. once said - this is merely the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. I'm pretty sure he was talking about people still listening to In Utero in 2013. Listening to an overrated series of bands is not just gauche, thoughtless, and demonstrative of a directionless, careless attitude towards the culture one receives; it is instantly fatal to the spirit. At the very least it should make you feel insecure; if you're not insecure about listening to an overrated band, then there is simply no reviving you. The conversation is over. You are lost, and no one knows whether to heaven or hell. Perhaps you go nowhere. Plenty of theories abound about where the soul goes when it dies and can no longer abide shame at its awful taste. But that's above the pay grade of a typical accountant of taste. Personally, I'm inclined to think your soul is forever lost as your limbs deadly join the over-30s in a hellish eternal decay of reflexes and upper registers and hearing.

But, luckily, from the shame on your face, the accountant can tell that all hope is not lost, and, indeed, this is where the accountant comes in, yet again. Doubling as a physician, the accountant of taste lays the facts out for you as plain as day, and, if you're a bit slow on the uptick, can carry every "1" and explain every extra "0" in their ruthlessly sharp calculations. The only way to get back to the world of the living is through one of these taste-makers assuaging your taste with a slow-but-effective method: The underrated antidote.

Much like antibiotics, the underrated band becomes less and less potent as an antidote to terminal unhipness as it is the more ubiquitously applied. The cancerous strains afflicting deadened souls develop resistances, and soon even Peter Travers is exhorting the fucking Velvet Underground. Which is why the accountant of taste is not out there peddling these bands. You nod your head at the jargon-laden medical rants and wish to hear which bands they feel would be effective. Often a cocktail of underrated bands is recommended, just in case you're - in the doctor's words - one of those people that are going to blast the Pixies' "Where is My Mind?" because you heard it on Fight Club.

After receiving the antidote for a few hours, one's immune system - that is, one's natural disinclination for the new - is first broken down. The foreign sounds and kitschy lyrics need time to worm their way into your consciousness until at last they seem as deep and as well-regarded as your former favorite bands, they of the overrated type. You shudder to think that the overrated scourge will ever breach your library again, and every once in awhile your accountant calls asking how you like that record. You respond that you can hear some good things about it, and your accountant seems pleased that you seem to be making a partial recovery. You admit that you go back to your overrated disease occasionally, but you think it's winding down, and at the very least won't metastasize into a pathetic future. Your accountant gently scolds you and you hang up, your soul expanded a bit and your guileless former taste impugned.

Of course, plenty of accountants do not double as physicians of the soul. They are the dismal scientists of their field. Unfortunately, the medical practice of discovering underrated antibiotics would distract from their research; instead, they tend towards abstract conclusions. They tend to find excellent and empirically sound reasons why the viewers of a certain film are terrible, and which overrated diseases are the most deleterious, and the lines of health and disease at which an average taste moves into the realm of the admirable or the insufferable. These physicians release their solemnly researched end-of-year rankings, dispute the rankings of others, and monastically exclude (or decadently include) themselves in the origins of their own taste, be they deep or fickle.

And plenty of patients and clients are unreceptive to financial or medical advice. My mother (as I've mentioned) being one of these, I've learned how to avoid openly disrespecting these people while still maintaining the integrity of my subjective experience. Tilting my head indifferently from her as I borrow her car keys for another day of indoctrination at my educational institution, I plan out my day to maximize my time with the accountants of taste, preferably at an ethnic establishment within a sensible range of prices.