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In my writing, I often ponder the psychology of devotion, or the overlap between
taste and personality--put plainly, WHY people like the songs they like. But this
is the most elusive kind of criticism, because it delves into subconscious
motives and associations. Marketing scholars enumerate the components of what they call "extrinsic preferences"--rational factors like durability and price which cause us to buy one brand of coffee maker or detergent instead of another. But their pursuit of "intrinsic preferences" leads them to a tautological tangle, in which people explain that they like a product because they like it.
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Unlike detergent, pop records have no utility (unless you believe the bachelors'
legend that a Marvin Gaye CD greases seduction). Taste is the dulled expression
of primal desires we keep buried in our subconscious, along with thousands of
other "hidden thoughts": the things we want but can't say, the people we'd
rather be, or be near, or fuck. To not scrutinize your own cultural preferences
for responses and repulsions is to ignore a postmodern fact: we are all in the
test market.
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