Who has better taste in music?

Critics have the best taste in music, so I guess my answer is the "technically tonedeaf".

Musicians are usually hung up on the technical skill of the individual players, and I rarely trust their judgment on music (Tortoise).

No, me.

Mark, is Tortoise an example or did you quote Tortoise? If the latter, excuse me... and laugh my phat ass off.

Tortoise was just an example.

...an example of a band that musicians love & I do not. I don't know anything about the tastes of the guys in the band.

...an example of a band that musicians love & I do not.

I don't. In fact, of the musicians I know who have heard them, the overriding opinion is that they're rather sterile and more than a little uptight in their playing. The latter is particularly disappointing given how much jazz background they're supposed to have.

I'd have to agree with Ned. Possibly because he just buys everything so CAN'T FAIL.

Well, being that I am The Arbiter Of Tase, it all depends on whether or not I count as being a musician. I play, of course, but have never met this elusive stranger known as talent...

The original question seems to be implying that musicians must have talent, be technically proficient- not so, say I. One thing, though: people who are famous have the worst taste, as they are no longer able to judge based on anything other than whether they are best buddies with the artist in question...

But I like Tortoise and I'm not a musician. I was an amateur one, but I don't think that has much bearing on what I like about Tortoise.

I really don't think there's that much of a difference, apart from the extra 10-20% that's tacked onto a musician's collection for those purely technical "I admire this person's playing" reasons. I suppose that in the most general sense, you could say musicians are maybe less statistically likely to have awful taste, because at least it's clear that as musicians they have some love of music and are presumably listening to it attentively (unlike the many people who have awful taste because they really don't care for music much in the first place). The flipside of that is that those musicians who do have awful taste are bound to be really, really passionate about it and then replicate it with terrible music.

But when it comes to Serious Listeners Who Are Musicians versus Serious Listeners At Large: pretty much the same, apart from that 10% wank (which can be good wank, incidentally).

I was generalizing with Tortoise, & I do like some of their stuff. Just have noticed more than a few guys in bands expressing admiration because "those guys can play."

Musician magazine is an interesting barometer re how musicians approach music. You have session guitarists coming out of the woodwork praising the Jeff Beck and Jan Hammer.

To have good taste in music you have to know & enjoy a lot of different music and always be open to new things. It probably doesn't help if you're tone-deaf but I don't believe you have to be all that technically adept, either. I'm sure a lot of people think that they have the best taste. I'm one of them. That doesn't mean I can't be right, of course... (I'm not a musician. But I could be. I just don't have the time.)

But I said it bigger than any of you!
http://www.theaskguys.com/%7Epics/thusiwin.jpg

IME there's been exactly the same proportion of people whose tastes overlap/correspond/differ with mine from both camps.

I'm a musician, and I will unabashedly admit that generally, I find that musicians tend to have better taste and more intelligent and fully-formed opinions, if only because they have a deeper and more thorough understanding of the actual whys and hows of what they're listening to.

That isn't to say, of course, that a world-class cellist can't be utterly oblivious to the virtues of, say, Mission of Burma, or vice versa. And there are plenty of tasteless musicians of every stripe out there, and sometimes it seems like the more technically proficient they get, the more tasteless they become. That latter part, though, is a red herring: the phenomenon of the "chops monster", who is irretrievably fixated on all things high-fast-'n-loud, is by no means evidence that technique = bad (one of the oldest and biggest lies out there). There are always going to be musicians who are under the mistaken impression that being able to play as quickly and showily as possible is a worthwhile end in itself; their music is occasionally exciting, but largely crap. On the other hand, without technique we would not have Charlie Parker, nor Coltrane, nor Wayne Shorter, nor...

It's yet another case where people turn a dialectical relationship into a false binary (i.e. claiming it's an either-or, when it's in fact both things at once). Music is partly a work of the intuition, and partly a craft. Part of it can be named with exact precision; part is totally unnameable and is a thing of the unconscious; a good deal of it is somewhere in between. People who lack at least a measure of technical knowledge simply don't have access to an entire aspect of music, and their criticism frequently ends up being one-dimensional or solipsistic. And people who try to reduce music to purely technical considerations often end up missing the forest for the trees.

Now, the definition of "technical knowledge" is very much open to debate, and to my mind, ought to be able to be formulated in a way that includes the performance-oriented skills of people like early jazz players and world musicians, and the timbral understanding of sometimes-great ambient groups like Datacide and Biosphere and Piano Magic. I find, personally, that much as he may protest that he's not a musician, the amount of technical knowledge that someone like (for instance) Josh has is more than enough for me to find his criticism consistently rewarding. I feel an awareness of the craft of music in his criticism, and that feeling makes me take his conclusions more seriously, and believe them to be the product of thought and analysis and reflection, or of leaps of intuition predicated on prior understanding. I guess what I'm really getting at is that these things make a person's writing seem less like solipsistic/aphoristic "self-expression", and more like an argument, a coherent train of thought with a strong element of intuition, one that might actually deepen my own understanding, help me to perceive subtle relationships I hadn't noticed, or make me aware of things that I wasn't alive to.

In a way, the fact that this question even comes up is very frustrating for me, in that it hints at the old insinuation that music, on some level, isn't really a thing of substance or depth, and thus that technical understanding is irrelevant at best, and a handicap at worst. Having come from a college where dilettantism was enshrined as the ideal has left me with a permanent distaste for that attitude. Rightly or wrongly, I feel that there is a statistical correlation between technical knowledge and depth of understanding, and that people who understand more deeply tend to have better taste (and when I say "taste", by the way, I don't mean "intuitive and entirely subjective personal preference", I mean the ability to identify good music, and perhaps why it's good as well -- since after all, to have "good" taste, there has to be something "good" to identify, right? Otherwise the notion of good taste is meaningless). Perhaps that's not a popular view these days -- it certainly wasn't at my college -- but it's what I believe, and has a fair amount of relevance to what interests me in music, and in all the arts.

Having said all that, I don't think Nitsuh's final line is too far off the mark, actually. I'd give the edge to musicians, but that's more a case of musicians being alive to things that are overlooked by the non-musicians.

But why do people with good taste make better music than better musicians? (...or it seems to me...)

Would Coltrane/Bird/etc. have made bad music if they were less technicaly proficient?

Okay, I guess I'm a musician too, but I think most musicians are living in a dork ghetto... "My God, you haven't heard Grappelli? Where have you been?"etc. So I would say non-musician's have 'better' taste in that they like purely what appeals to them, with no idea about what makes it work. However... a San Francisco karaoke bar has what I consider a very good policy: "Any song: $1. Any song from Grease: $3. American Pie: $10."

I'd have to agree with Ned. Possibly because he just buys everything so CAN'T FAIL.

It's the simultaneous repel/attract thing. I will always succeed in winning you over to my wise ways at the same time I'm driving you away screaming.

To clarify a bit more, the tendancy I'm thinking of is for musicians to focus on the individual instrumentalists over the composition, and the latter somehow seems more important to me when I'm talking about pop music. Jazz requires a different approach, obviously.

I don't think it's necessarily fair to even compare "taste" in that situation, Mark. The non-musician who turns his nose up at wankery is saying: "This is not very good music." The musician who loves that wank for, say, the drummer alone isn't necessarily saying "This is good music" -- he's essentially saying "This is crap, but I'm willing to sit amid that crap just in order to hear those great drums."

And you do get those qualifications -- opinions starting with, "Well he's obviously a great player, but..." or "Well it's obviously a terrible record, but..."

He who knows only his instrument does not his instrument know.

Alot of the musicians I know have absolutely shite taste. They're the people I know who think dance and hiphop arent "real music". Also I find musiciands say stupid things like "that's easy to play". It's kind of stupid really to suggest this, I'm sure some musicians have good taste and some have bad just like anyone else, you don't have to be a good footballer to appreciate the talent of a world class player, on the contrary if you were you're in a more compromised position from which to make a decision. As for Tortoise I love them but their album on Warp is fucking shite, possibly because David Pajo, the living legend decided to leave.

Georgia O Keefe said " I cannot look at a painting, i know how it is made" Maybe musicans are similar ...

KANYE WEST!