Taste Wars with Céline Dion
Can schmaltz be cool?
Asked to write a book about your favourite album, or perhaps the one that influenced you the most, what would you choose? I might pick Taylor Swift’s Red thanks to its association with my late teenage years. Or possibly something a bit cooler, maybe a moody Phoebe Bridgers’s album to show off my sophisticated, complex, and multifaceted taste.
When making the decision there are plenty of tactics to employ. You could pick an album that made an indelible mark on The Culture; or one that punctuated a personal heartbreak.
I think one strategy to avoid when making this high stakes choice - remember that you have to write a whole book about this record - would be selecting a work you deem worthless from an artist you loathe.
And yet, critic Carl Wilson - who makes no attempt to disguise his aesthetic contempt for his fellow Canadian - wrote about Céline Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love. With all of the cultish, the countercultural and the classic albums available to him, why did he opt for the saccharine, the middle-brow, schmaltz-personified Dion?
“Her music struck me as bland monotony raised to a pitch of obnoxious bombast—R&B with the sex and slyness surgically removed, French chanson severed from its wit and soul … a neverending crescendo of personal affirmation deaf to social conflict and context.”
In his attempt to understand the Céline phenomenon, Wilson ended up writing one of the seminal treatises on taste; what it means to possess it; why we deride others for their lack of it; and how to open our minds to competing examples of it.
The latest edition of the book is playfully titled Let’s Talk About Love, Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste.
What motivates our taste?
Demographic considerations are obvious: race, class, gender and sexual orientation informs the music we listen too. So does where we live. Broad analysis of Dion fans reveals them to be middle-aged women from flyover states. Wilson says it’s hard to imagine a group who could confer less cool upon a musician. The fact that Prince himself saw Dion’s Las Vegas residency show three times is a seismic exception proving an otherwise hard and fast rule.
We are social creatures: we like to belong to groups and we like to have things in common. If all my friends listened to Céline I probably would too. If you’re a millennial woman living in the UK or the US I bet you’re aware that Adele released an album yesterday. It’s what we talked about at dinner last night, at least.
We are insecure: we want to assess our judgements against others’. If I found out that you all thought Adele was actually really lame, I would probably lie to you and say I thought that all along too.
Taking these things together we end up with a sort-of multiplier effect. As Wilson points out, “when we think something’s great, we want everyone else to think it’s great too.”
So within our chosen or designated social groups, taste reproduces and multiplies. Certain aesthetic judgements naturally begin to accompany others. It’s why punks are identifiable not just by their attendance at a Clash or Ramones concert, but also by their mohawks and chains and denim vests.
If your favourite U2 album is Joshua Tree you might also regularly declare Jonny Sexton to be the best rugby outhalf in the Northern Hemisphere. And if this is true of you then you’re probably also friends with my Dad.
So what about Céline? What kind of aesthetic faculties are required to derive enjoyment or value from the mawkish display of schmaltz? Isn’t she just, well, uncool?
Of course she is. And that becomes part of the fun of expressing our disdain.
Sociologist Pierre Bordieu - who Wilson leans on heavily throughout his book - says none of our taste-judgements are disinterested, or solely motivated by a pure appreciation for beauty (whether that be a Jonny Sexton drop goal or a Zaha Hadid building).
No, the primary driver behind all our declarations of taste is a pursuit of cultural capital, a means to amass social esteem and to separate ourselves or our group from the rest. Hating Céline Dion, writes journalist Sam Anderson, “is not just an aesthetic choice, but an ethical one, a way to elevate yourself above her fans.”
There is a paradox now that Céline might hope to benefit from: the uncool is now ironically cool. And appearing insouciant in matters of so-called high brow taste is a way to distinguish yourself as above the rabble, not part of it.
American Sociologists Richard Petersen and Roger Kern in the mid 90s suggested the “upper-class taste model” had changed - where we once separated the world into the high-brow and the low-brow, we now benefit in the taste wars by masterfully combining the two. (“Middle-brow” is to be avoided at all costs. Middle-brow and kitsch, says Wilson, are the “enemies of culture.”)
Only liking Bach or American Realism and failing to derive any enjoyment from The Spice Girls or cheese on toast would locate you in the realm of snobbery, which is the last place you want to be.
But no one is a “true omnivore”: we cannot forgo all aesthetic judgements and consume everything. To have taste means to exclude, says Wilson. The task of the “no-brow” conoisseur becomes deciding what low-brow products are deemed worthy of mixing with high-brow interests. Maybe Taco Bell has a whimsical edge but Burger King is actually just bad. Perhaps Girls Aloud have a kind of charm but Little Mix are just bland. These are perfectly fine judgements to make, but they’re still exclusionary. In our bid to have good taste we have to separate the actually-bad from the ironically-bad.
Maybe somewhere in here there is space for Céline Dion.
But what about the people who really don’t care? Those who just like what they like and get on with it? Writer Will Storr’s book Status Game might contend that such a group do not exist.
If we accept that taste is a status signifier, a means to distinguish and elevate ourselves or our group, then opting to not care about clothes or celebrities or music or food is participating in the grift as much as anyone else. You are just after the approval of a different group.
Storr mentions his friend. He isn’t short of money but he drives a banged up old car with its wing mirror hanging off. When he drives his kids to school he scoffs at the other parents with big, expensive cars. He doesn’t care about that stuff he claims. “But of course he cares” Storr says, “he keeps talking about it.”
Storr’s friend is simply using a different metric, trying to access status via a different route, or status among a different group - namely those who think big fancy cars are stupid and a waste of time and mercilessly uncool. I often think about this anecdote when my boyfriend proudly claims he only wears one type of all-purpose jeans.
Historian Tom Holland once said that - because of Christianity’s foundational role in contemporary life - “the risen Christ cannot be eluded simply by refusing to believe in him.” We might wonder if this is the same for status signalling, obsession with demonstrating our superiority in some form or another, and the endless bid to be the coolest most disinterested anti-taste taste maker.
Towards the end of Wilson’s exploration of the Céline, he writes up an encounter he had with a super-fan.
Stephanie tells him that she’s fine with her obsession, whether that makes her cool or less cool. But “even she admits there’s a streak of snobbery in her anti-snobbery. ‘I just don’t like being told what I want… I do admit to having a bit of a hate-on for people who have hipster hobbies, hipster tastes.’”
This sounds not dissimilar to Storr’s friend with the car.
But all of this sounds terribly cynical. Whether we can escape the taste wars or not is secondary.
Wilson concludes with a celebration of the various sources of music’s appeal: foreigness, sentimentality, nostalgia, popularity.
“When all these varieties of love are allowed taste can seem less like a bunch of high school cliques or a global conspiracy of privilege and more like a fantasy world in which we get to romance or at least fool around with many strangers.”
Or as superfan Stephanie said herself:
“Even if it’s not cool, even if it borders on the ridiculous in a lot of ways, and you can’t imagine why people would ever cry to a Céline Dion song, I think we should probably have more respect for people’s lack of guile…. I think it’s good to have things that you can’t explain.”