✘ The reject arc: How taste gets built out of distaste

Taste, this word that everybody keeps banging on about but nobody seems to properly understand. When Coldplay first arrived lots of people loved them, but I was non-plussed. Their music was on in the background when I visited a friend and I heard it in the middle distance of a festival. I could not have told you whether I liked them, though, because I had never bothered to listen. Their music didn’t grab me.

My hate came later, and it arrived through argument. Friends of mine loved Coldplay, properly loved them, and every so often I would find myself explaining why I did not. At first I didn’t have much, just a shrug and a vague sense that the music was a weak version of Radiohead. Then I had to keep explaining, and the explaining did something. Each time I defended my indifference it curdled a little and I had to add reasons as my indifference became a genuine dislike to this band.

The dislike is what gave me my taste. Not the other way around. I didn’t start with a settled sense of what I loved and then listened and threw Coldplay into my reject pile. I built the sense of what I loved by working out, out loud and slightly combatively, what I could not stand about this middle-of-the-road band.

Pierre Bourdieu knew this back in 1979, and he was not talking about music blogs at the time. In Distinction, his enormous study of how the French bourgeoisie used culture to mark themselves off from everyone else, he wrote this:

“Tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance of the tastes of others.” (p. 56)

This builds on a perhaps even sharper Bourdieuian notion: in matters of taste, all determination is negation. You define the thing by drawing a line around what it is not. A preference asserted in the positive (”I love this”) is doing less than a preference asserted in the negative (”I cannot listen to that”), because the negative one shows you the edge.

Taste is a boundary, and a boundary is only visible from the thing it keeps out.

If taste is distaste, then the person who hates everything should have the finest taste of all, and we all know that person and they are exhausting. Pure contrarianism is never discernment, it’s a boring reflex.

The designer Emil Kowalski, writing about how someone develops taste, describes it as “a trained instinct,” the ability to see past the obvious and recognise what elevates a thing. A gut ‘no’ is not yet having taste. It becomes taste at the moment it can explain itself, when you can say what you are reacting against and why you might be having that reaction in the first place.

My Coldplay dislike only grew up when it stopped being a shrug. Once I could name the thing - that smoothness engineered to offend nobody - the rejection became useful. A dislike is only taste once it can tell you why.

Distaste does something social too. When I hardened my position on Coldplay I was also, without quite admitting it yet at the time, choosing a room to stand in and people to stand there with. I have written before that a counterculture is simply “something that counters the prevalent, mainstream, culture,” and that the clearest ones, from the punks to the gabbers, drew their identity by defining themselves hard against a centre. What a scene does out loud and together, a person does quietly and alone. You mark your edges by pointing at what you are not, and that’s an act of belonging as much as one of judgement.

Amber Atherton puts the mechanism plainly in her essay on computational taste: taste has always worked as “a tool of distinction, used to signal belonging to a class or culture.” Josh Dalton, arguing that streaming needs to become social, gets at the same nerve from the fan’s side when he writes that “music says as much about our personalities as any other cultural identifier possibly could, tattoos and clothing included.” The playlist you send, the band on your shirt, the act you refuse to countenance are all flags we plant and stances we take.

Taste is also always immediately a membership, and that membership also gets drawn in the negative.

Taste-by-distaste needs a shared wall to push off, a Coldplay that everyone can locate. That shared wall, however, is coming down. The monoculture that gave us a common centre to love or reject has been fragmenting for years. Tatiana Cirisano’s line for it is that “niche is the new mainstream.” As she puts it, “niche used to mean small; now, it just means specialised,” and the old category of mainstream fame has itself shrunk into just another niche. When there is no agreed middle of the road, what exactly do you define yourself against? The shared enemy dissolves into ten thousand micro-scenes, each with its own private thing to hate, but none of them legible to the others.

I don’t think this kills taste, but it changes what it could be doing. When the mainstream shatters, you have to build your own wall to push off. The centre used to be handed to you, ambient and unavoidable. Now the work of locating what you reject, and doing it deliberately falls entirely to you. That may be why taste can feel so hard to form in our age of infinite, frictionless, perfectly pleasant supply. Nothing is imposing itself firmly enough to be worth resisting. This is also why so many tasteless tastemakers exist right now.

This all forms a shape. Rejection is not a single verdict delivered once. It is a path you walk for years, bending as you go, and that Coldplay moment was just one visible kink among many in mine. I’ll call it the reject arc: the path of no’s that bends slowly into the shape that’s your taste. You are on one right now, whether or not you have already named it. You can probably feel exactly where it started if you sit with it for a second.

So pay attention to what you are pushing away from. Tend your rejections as carefully as your loves, because they are further ahead than those loves are, already out there at the edge of your map deciding where you end, where you just don’t want to listen. Your taste is not the pile of things you have gathered that you like. It is the arc you have been making, one rejection at a time, and it is nowhere near finished.

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