When I was growing up (around like 12 or 14 maybe?) I listened to a lot of Nu Metal. I played in a band in a friend's garage that covered Slipknot and KoRn and System of a Down, and I generally positioned my own teenage difficulties inside that ultra-specific USA-masculinist-performative malaise (a lot of hip hop from this period was confulent with Nu Metal).
When I got older (around 18/19), I went to art school and started meeting people from way outside my lower middle class networks; kids my age who had grown up with parents who were painters or photographers or novelists or architects or whatever, and who had a fine-grained, excluding taste that understand that Nu Metal was bad, populist, shallow, and most of all (it was the early 2000s, we were still in the hangover of the 90s sellouts and posers) unforgivably commercial. For many reasons I was a sort of chameleon back then, and I immediately understood why, for example, Burzum or Sunn O))) were the correctly worked-through version of what I had been listening to until then. I had tutors at art school who made noise music and had celtic cross and black sun tattoos, because we hadn't yet hit the moment when the dominant white, middle class, edgy, counter culture would be first challenged and then comprehensively dismantled by a series of timely (overdue!) and forceful observations on the hypocrisy of white virtue.
Now I'm a bit older, and I think often about the distinction between a correct, borderline aristocratic, excluding taste, and a vulgar, popular, commercial enjoyment of the product, which you're forced to do as a sort of abject consumer. These days I listen to as much Slipknot as I do Burzum, and listen to both more than Sunn O))). I have an ongoing fascination with the strange toughness, slickness, sharpness, of massively popular cultural products - I suspect that Burzum will remain of interest to people who are into metal over a longer period than something like KoRn or Slipknot (Burzum is less historically and culturally specific, potentially more timeless), but the energy or the moment of Nu Metal palpably spoke to or channeled or triangulated a specific dissatisfaction in the early 2000s. There is an enormous excitement in watching a genre (which is really a sort of techne) getting summoned into being from practically nothing. I suspect that watching Halloween drop in cinemas would have had a similar propulsive energy to it. As a (very) different example of something similar, I have a fascination with the earlier Marvel films. Something about the 2010s, post financial crash, post War on Terror American culture (wealthy, quippy, charismatic, militarist, tech-assisted) found its genuine expression in this new form, and for a while it had palpable propulsive energy (then it didn't, just as quickly).
In art school, when I was growing up, the concept of 'having taste', was itself frowned on, even taboo. I was once got told off for using the word in a one-on-one tutorial. It was unavoidably contingent, based only on vague personal attachments; a shield for conservative ideas about art as decoration, or (worse) as an appreciating investment or a vehicle for tax avoidance. In the place of taste, an artist was expected to cultivate a facility with research, a set of discursive principles, a critical perspective, etc. etc.
After my first art degree I started getting into Chanel (looking at it and drawing and thinking about it, not buying it, lol, lmao). This was by absolute chance. I came across images of one of the 2004 Lagerfeld collections online, and had the most extreme 'I want to look like that' moments of my young life till that point (before this it was Sevigny in Gummo). Couture is, famously, a nearly perfected vehicle of 'pure' taste - micro distinctions in cut, fabric, and contextual/social positioning that combine to allow a jacket (for example) to sell for 15k. Oddly, my discovery of my great love for the Chanel sensibility coincided with me rediscovering the 'vulgar' metal that I used to listen to as a kid.
A bit of history about Chanel: Coco, the woman who founded the house and who is responsible for its legacy, was a fascist and a nazi (as in literally a nazi agent), but she also had some strange (for the era) ideas about taste. She was a believer in the democratisation of taste; she liked costume jewellery (she said correctly that no one could tell the difference), she liked things to be cheaply available where possible, her designs were simple ('Modern') in comparison with other couture of the era, and also queering - one of her many techniques was the masculinisation of the female figure. The Chanel suit creates androgynous bodies, (relatively) cheaply, at scale. A wonderful technology.
This is obviously not true of the Chanel house, which has been skilfully managed (by Chanel, and later by Lagerfeld) as a marker of wealth and taste that you don't have to think about or develop yourself - it is simply handed to you. If you wear Chanel you are such and such a person; the taste is built into the price tag. You can track this in the Lagerfeld staple of including the double C logo directly into the pieces; for Chanel it was mostly sufficient for the logo to stay on the label. Lagerfeld introduces a doubleness in the way the pieces are perceived - you know that you have taste, because Chanel means taste. Coco was always only a bad collection away from losing that essential truth, but Lagerfeld actively reifies or inscribes it, and the individual collections cease to matter as much. A good move if you want to stay desirable as a fashion house that costs what Chanel costs, a bad move if you want to keep developing a personal relationship with your output, which Lagerfeld, as a custodian, does not, or at least not in same way. This is not necessarily bad or wrong; the best artists need places to hide or rest inside their practice - you can develop screens to hide behind, that's part of the techne.
What Chanel invented - a series of forms for cheaply androgynising the body - is the original, propulsive idea that describes her taste. What she did with it, the way she managed its dispersion out into the world as an enormously effective money printing machine - is second order.
Slipknot, KoRn, et al had hold of a genuine innovation and were unsuccessful in managing it, I suspect because they did not understand their own projects in a sophisticated way - there are no good late Nu Metal albums, they got by on pure energy, and when it was gone they were done (the spectre of Kurt Cobain and his suicide are everywhere in this era of music).
Increasingly I am attracted to the energy of the innovation more than I am the successful management of its forms. Sunn O))) (and other music of this type, I don't mean to single them out unfairly, they have great albums) have a sort of preciousness, they cannot become genuinely uninhibited because they are reliant on always functioning as markers of a certain type of (eventually, upper middle class) taste. They can't do or make anything embarrassing, they can't make mistakes. KoRn and the like are endlessly, even famously, embarrassing. Chanel is not embarrassing (and if it is, it's in the bitchy, fashion, contingent way - the insider can say 'my god this season of Chanel is so embarrassing!' but it doesn't mean anything outside of the bitchy fashion set). Is Telfar embarrassing? Vetements certainly is these days. Is Yeezy? (yes, lol)
What a rambling set of thoughts. Taste is weird and I am endlessly fascinated by how it deforms and structures social relations. The idea of taste, and the (usually cruel) promise of taste: that it unlocks class mobility. For the development of art or writing I think that it is essential for the individual, and extremely corrosive for the set, and in relation. I like private taste and dislike public and relational taste. I like cheap androgyny and dislike £15000 jackets. I like Slipknot and I like Sunn O))) and I like Burzum, but I suspect Sunn O))) are kind of uptight and probably worried about how their 'experiments' are received by the aristo metal set. This is not based on knowing anything about them (I don't), it's a reverse read from the music.
I like Voyage to Arcturus (a profoundly embarrassing text) and I dislike the majority of contemporary 'experimental' fiction (The Drumhead, Headless, whatever - if the ghost of Curt Kobain is all over Nu Metal, then the various formal experimentation ghosts of Joyce and Stein and Pynchon and Oulipo are all over contemporary lit fic). They are fun for insiders and writers because they are sensitively and amusingly and skilfully done, but they are incapable to lasting because they never get beyond the boundaries described by the set they speak at. An address to your audience describes a kind of cage. Voyage to Arcturus never spoke to anyone except Lindsay and god/pain/nature, and you will never be Lindsay and you will never be god/pain/nature, and so the text is embarrassing and unselfconscious and insulated, and it survives. If it is an experiment, it is not a formal experiment - the experiment is the entire text, and it succeeds or fails on its own, non-legible terms.
