Bad taste, class identity, Nina Hagen.

All my ideas are middle-class. You can tell because my sense of what’s great is inseparable from the illicit thrill of bad taste.

(in this case, Taste (n): The 19th-21st century, middle-class concept of the social appropriateness of a given aesthetic piece.)

Probably, this has been helpful to me. It’s important to get that good art is usually tasteless, and great art is always tasteless, and I didn’t always understand that. But, yeah, I know that point of view isn’t really a rebellion. Of course the highest artistic ideal of an intelligent middle-class person is something that’s both good and gauche; it’s the most agonizing contradiction we can think of.

For some reason, it made sense to begin a post about the great freak sirens of New Wave and early goth -Kate Bush, Hazel O’Connor, Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich, and so on down the cliff- with that little commentary. These artists have never done what you’d think for me. The explanation is very different for each, and I don’t think it’s either a lack of talent or a question of taste, though at sad moments, I worry that I’m just too damn boring to appreciate something quite as tasteless as, for example, Hagen. At these times I find myself caught between the overwhelming boredom of most music, and the sense that most music that is trying to be interesting is “a bit too out-there.”

But is it? Is this woman shocking?

I know that this song (“Naturtrane,” 1978 ) is very strange, and it gets my attention in a good way (Hagen probably comes the closest of this loose constellation of artists to working for me) but I really don’t know if it offends my taste. It offends my sense of song construction, yes, because I can’t engage with something that has no melody (and that’s not middle-class, that’s just centuries of Western music, but really, the mainstream of Western music has drifted away from melody, so let’s give the academic agony a break and just say it’s me). But the song doesn’t offend the way I want; it doesn’t injure me. I can admire this kind of cry of big modern horror, but doesn’t grasp my thought and emotion in a way that shouldn’t happen in public. It’s a highly-stylized voice moaning in a void.

I think, most of all, that I would like to hear strange music made by people with mainstream influences – strange music with the audacity to look at the mainstream, want it, and try to beat it over its own head.