Carl Wilson > Quotes

“And the places she turns up in Jamaica are all the more curious. I remember being at sound-system dances and hearing everyone from Bob Marley Kenny Rogers (yes, Kenny Rogers) to Sade to Yellowman to Beenie Man being blasted at top volume while the crowd danced and drank up a storm. But once the selector (DJ in American parlance) began to play a Celine Dion song, the crowd went buck wild and some people started firing shots in the air.... I also remember always hearing Celine Dion blasting at high volume whenever I passed through volatile and dangerous neighborhoods, so much that it became a cue to me to walk, run or drive faster if I was ever in a neighborhood I didn't know and heard Celine Dion mawking over the airwaves.”
― Carl Wilson, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

“Bourdieu's interpretation was that tastes were serving as strategic tools. While working-class tastes seemed mainly a default (serving at best to express group belongingness and solidarity), for everyone else taste was not only a product of economic and educational background but, as it developed through life, a force mobilized as part of their quest for social status (or what Bourdieu called symbolic power). What we have agreed to call tastes, he said, is an array of symbolic associations we use to set ourselves apart from those whose social ranking is beneath us, and to take aim at the status we think we deserve. Taste is a means of distinguishing ourselves from others, the pursuit of distinction. And its end product is to perpetuate and reproduce the class structure.”
― Carl Wilson, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

“...this midlevel cultural-capital audience is not as far from the average white pop critic as we might have expected. We usually make middling incomes or worse, and while most have university degrees, our expertise is usually more self-taught than PhD-certified, a pattern believed would produce an anxious, fact-hoarding intellectual style in contrast with the relaxed mastery of a fully legitimated cultural elite.”
― Carl Wilson, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

“...God's love is unspeakable, implacable, its gaze matter-of-fact. But human love is something else: We love in excess of God's love if we love at all. We love by heaping meaning on objective fact. If I believed in God, I might imagine this is what He created humans for, to give things more tenderness than He granted them, amid nature's unblinking harshness and the cruelty of fate...”
― Carl Wilson, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

“Suck said that Gummo evoked “the vertigo we encounter when people discover and make up new standards of cool and beauty,”
― Carl Wilson, Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

“This is what I mean by democracy -- not a limp openmindedness, but actively grappling with people and things not like me, which brings with it the perilous question of what I am like. Democracy, that dangerous, paradoxical and mostly unattempted ideal, sees that the self is insufficient, dependent for definition on otherness, and chooses not only to accept that but to celebrate it, to stake everything on it. Through democracy, which demands we meet strangers as equals, we perhaps become less strangers to ourselves.”
― Carl Wilson, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

“that coolness is a social category, not a natural attribute (with the possible exception of Keith Richards)”
― Carl Wilson, Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste

“This is what I mean by democracy – not a limp openmindedness, but actively grappling with people and things not like me, which brings with it the perilous question of what I am like. Democracy, that dangerous, paradoxical and mostly unattempted ideal, sees that the self is insufficient, dependent for definition on otherness, and chooses not only to accept that but to celebrate it, to stake everything on it. Through democracy, which demands we meet strangers as equals, we perhaps become less strangers to ourselves.”
― Carl Wilson, Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste

“I realized my easy scorn had betrayed an ignorance I did not want to live with. The epiphany was ethical, but it led to musical enjoyment.”
― Carl Wilson, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste