Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste

by Carl Wilson

For his 2007 critically acclaimed 33 1/3 series title, Let's Talk About Love, Carl Wilson went on a quest to find his inner Céline Dion fan and explore how we define ourselves by what we call good and bad, what we love and what we hate.

At once among the most widely beloved and most reviled and lampooned pop stars of the past few decades, Céline Dion's critics call her mawkish and overblown while millions of fans around the world adore her 'huge pipes' and even bigger feelings. How can anyone say which side is right?

This new, expanded edition goes even further, calling on thirteen prominent writers and musicians to respond to themes ranging from sentiment and kitsch to cultural capital and musical snobbery. The original text is followed by lively arguments and stories from Nick Hornby, Krist Novoselic, Ann Powers, Mary Gaitskill, James Franco, Sheila Heti and others.

In a new afterword, Carl Wilson examines recent cultural changes in love and hate, including the impact of technology and social media on how taste works (or doesn't) in the 21st century.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Essays, Criticism, Biography, Art, Philosophy

312 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 13, 2014

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Carl Wilson is Slate's music critic.

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly a good read, with the author's willingness to follow this thought experiment all the way almost a great idea. The attempt to place Dion in some sort of context is all very entertaining, as are the chapters about taste and culture, but eventually Wilson has to actually listen to the record. Unfortunately, so did I, which made his attempt to find some sort of worth in the album seem like he'd just succeeded in brainwashing himself (also the fact he clearly wasn't over his divorce seems to have put him on the edge emotionally).
I realise that by saying that 'Let's talk about love' (the album) is unlistenable trash is playing into this book's hands, but honestly, it's terrible. It doesn't matter that lots of people like it - lots of people liked fascism in the '30s - and a nuanced understanding of why 'taste' exists can't convince me that the problem with this sort of music runs deeper than the fact I am pre-conditioned to prefer Autechre. This album is the most cynical record I've ever heard, fitting in all the right genres, languages and guest spots to cross over into any demographic that might have the slightest interest in giving Celine/Sony some cash. I know naked avarice is behind the decision to publish most popular music, but you can't always see the strings like you can here.
And in fact, that unwillingness to be anything other than the bottom of the barrel horrendous cash monster that it is, is perhaps LTAL (the album)'s greatest strength. If nothing else, this record knows what it is and doesn't care if you know, too, an honesty that is refreshing when, even still today, 'indie' bands are Trojan horsed into the scene as something organically successful, when in truth the algorithm has everything planned out months in advance (*cough* Wet Leg).
Anyway, if you want a laugh, listen to 'Treat Her Like a Lady', a bizarre attempt at dancehall reggae, so strange that I don't think anyone could declare it good or bad. It just is.

[Tim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tedious tripe. I had my doubts about this book, initially because of the presence of halfwit Hornby. I should have trusted my doubts.

It's one of those texts that spends inordinate amounts of time and agonising to reach dazzlingly trite conclusions.

In this case, that just because you don't like Celine Dion it doesn't make her a bad person or her fans contemptible.

Give the boy a medal!

[Andrew]

Not sure where to stand here. I read the original 33 1/3 book back in college (or at least most of it, I was stoned, it was my buddy’s dorm room), and I remember enjoying it, little twerp with a head full of Bourdieu that I was. And Wilson is a fine social observation writer, and makes his case well.

But I can’t reconcile the fact that while Wilson’s argument is extremely entertaining and well-made, my hackles are still raised. Poptimism is bullshit – capitalist propaganda masquerading as egalitarianism, the exact sort of thing that Adorno raged against, even if he was a bit too aristocratic even for my nose-in-the-air tastes. It makes sense that this was published juuuust as the social justice wave was starting to build momentum back in the early 2010s, and Wilson’s prose smacks of the sort of privilege-checking that was refreshing at the time, but would quickly become a grating orthodoxy, grating not just because it’s annoying, but because it chooses to take aim at attitude rather than capital.

And even if I recognize the degree to which taste is shaped by circumstances and signifiers of distinction – all of which is true – I have to ask myself how much I need to care. When I write about shit I care about, on the occasion I’m asked to provide commentary in periodicals of record, they are of course from the perspective of me as I am, but I don’t think that makes either my praise or my criticism any less valid. Simply put, I know I have good taste buds, and I like being a bitch. Taste is objectively subjective, but if you like Five Guys more than a classical Kyoto kaiseki dinner, I can dismiss your opinion. Sorry.

It doesn’t help that when he’s actually writing about the music, it’s the kind of awful jaded Gen X prose that I associate with Ain’t It Cool News articles I read as a teenager. No thanks.

[Megan]

A warm and thoughtful analysis of cultural influences on Celine Dion, as well as the cultural influences that shape how we view her. I hate the subtitle to this edition, but everything else is pretty great.

The original edition of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, was recommended in Nick Hornby's More Baths, Less Talking. I wanted to read it, but lbr, not for the answers it promised. Like, I fully expected the answer to "Why do people hate Celine Dion?" to be "Because humans are classist and sexist, I mean, OBVIOUSLY, haven't you met a human being before??" And that's all here, definitely. And of course Wilson explores the flipside, "Why do people love Celine Dion?", but he admittedly can't completely pierce through or communicate that joy when it's not his, when he comes to the appreciation he does only after study and argument and some letting down of his guard. My favorite parts of this book were Wilson putting Celine Dion in her cultural context and in our cultural consumption context, and his exploration of the history of schmaltz. That was A+ stuff there, and I was hanging on every word as I was learning more about things I hadn't known I hadn't known. And being a political theory nerd, Wilson's use of democracy as a lens for understanding our relationships with cultural consumption were also pretty exciting and thought-provoking.

And Wilson, spoiler alert, advocates a generosity that I find heartening and that I connect with. My favorite passage of the book:

You can't go on suspending judgment forever--that would be to forgo genuinely enjoying music, since you can't enjoy what you can't like. But a more pluralistic criticism might put less stock in defending its choices and more in depicting its enjoyment, with all its messiness and private soul tremors--to show what it is like for me to like it, and invite you to compare. This kind of exchange takes place sometimes between critics on the Internet, and it would be fascinating to have more dialogic criticism: here is my story, what is yours? You might have to be ready, like Celine, to be laughed at. (Judge not, as the Bible sort of says, unless you're eager to be judged.) In these ways the embarrassment of having a taste, the reflexive disgust of distinction, the strangeness of our strangeness to one another, might get the airing they need. As Marx once wrote, "Shame is a revolutionary sentiment." Obviously, reforming the way we talk about music is on its own no way to fix social injustice or the degradation of public life--but if we're going to be talking anyway, we could at least stop making matters worse.

All that said, failed art and (one hopes) great art do exist, and it is worth continuing to talk about which is which, however compromised the conversation might be. It is probably totally subjective whether you prefer Celine Dion or the White Stripes, and a case of social prejudice that Celine is less cool than that band's Jack White. But it seems fair to guess neither of them can rival the Beatles or Louis Armstrong--based, for example, on how broadly (one might say democratically) those artists appeal to people across taste divides. When we do make judgments, though, the trick would be to remember that they are contingent, hailing from one small point in time and in society. It's only a rough draft of art history: it always could be otherwise, and usually will be. The thrill is that as a rough draft, it is always up for revision, so we are constantly at risk of our minds being changed--the promise that lured us all to art in the first place.

And because I'm as terrible of a human being as any, I admit that part of my motivation in reading this book was smugly seeking validation. I fully expected to have my own omnivorous ways of media consumption validated, to get pat on the back for not being a snob and for having outgrown being an insecure teenager fretting over their public self-identification. My attitude? I like Harlequin romances and country music and Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals! Unironically! And I like other things! If you dismiss me for that, it's your loss and your problem, I ain't fussed! I place value and experience joy in being able to enjoy a wide range of media!

But Wilson ably discusses where our culture is re: omnivourism, too, and how that kind of taste and the belief of how it's reflective of me~~~ is just as sideeye-worthy. Jonathan Sterne's essay ("Giving Up on Giving Up on Good Taste") also made me consider my practices of exclusion and inclusion. That my own feelings of "My taste is uncontained! It's uncontainable!!" is just as socially constructed and maintained, and there's nothing to do for that except to continue following and finding my own connections and joys, to remember to be thoughtful and open to connection. The conclusions that Wilson and Sterne and the others draw might not be mind-blowing, but they still helped frame my own thoughts and were a kick in the pants to remember to be thoughtful and open and weirdly human. Humanly weird.

Aside from Wilson's excellent half of the book, my favorites of the supplemental essays (Sterne's, Daphne A. Brook's "Let's Talk About Diana Ross" [which omg I hope she expands into its own book I want it I want it], and James Franco's "Acting In And Out of Context") look lucidly at the concepts of performance and self-consciousness and other-consciousness and internal connection as well as external connection. Which is Celine Dion as hell, frankly, and while I wish I had read the Wilson book earlier, I'm glad I did read this edition, with its additional voices--even if some were boring and added little value to the conversation.

[anna ✩ · Rating 4 out of 5]

decided to read an entire book about an album I’ve never heard by a musician I don’t like. it was good!

edit: this book is less about one album and more about the concept of "good" and "bad" taste, which is a topic I find fascinating (I need to re-read Notes on Camp). I also read the essays from other authors featured in the updated edition (including Sheila Heti, James Franco, Nick Hornby, and Mary Gaitskill), which were hit-or-miss. James Franco's essay was actually pretty interesting, albeit a little self-congratulatory. Too Much Sociology from n+1 is partly about elitism among educated classes, which I think is funny considering that it's the most inaccessible essay in the book (the Diana Ross essay also assumes a lot of knowledge, but at least it's legible). my favorite essays were by Mary Gaitskill, Ann Powers, Drew Daniel, and Sukhdev Sandhu.

[Alex Sarll]

For all its renown, I was always a little suspicious of this as a 33 1/3; there are other books in the series where the album the writer is addressing might not be their favourite by the act, but getting a Celine Dion entry from someone who outright disliked her felt like a bit of a Pitchfork dick move. So I'm glad they separated it out from the imprint in this rebadged and expanded edition, not least because otherwise I might not have read it, and it's a brilliant effort in...well, all sorts, really: detective work, empathy, self-examination, even before we get to cultural criticism. Wilson explores Dion's background and his own, the lives of people who do like her work, her ability to connect with fans in parts of the world where other acts we think of as massive don't go over at all. Sure, in a one-line summary his findings would be something trite like 'wouldn't it be a dull world if we all liked the same things?' But a) the one-line summary of almost any book would be trite, that's why we have books instead, and b) even then, there have been people convinced we all ought to like the same things - and if Kant is mercifully dead and gone, his heirs do persist. Along the way, Wilson casually tosses hand grenades into many givens of reviewing: why is being subversive necessarily a virtue? What's so bad about sincerity in art anyway*, and why is the one emotion where it gets a pass rage? Hell, "punk rock is anger's schmaltz" might be my favourite line here, if only there weren't so many other contenders: "It's always other people following crowds, whereas my own taste reflects my specialness."

Crucially, though, Wilson doesn't let this collapse wholly into mushy relativism, either fully buying into Pierre Bourdieu's argument that taste is just a matter of background and social positioning, or the less academic version where someone describes their favourite music as 'Oh, anything, really', and it sounds like another way of saying 'nothing'. For all his determined getting his head around Celine, when he sees her live or listens to the album, he still only likes bits here and there. It's an exercise in empathy and understanding, not (bar one or two really dark moments) annihilation of the self. He is, thank heavens, a music writer, not a sociologist, so the connection with art can never be entirely reducible; a spark remains. One of his suggestions is that a better way for music critics to work might be to present a sort of autobiography of taste, rather than either issuing categorical judgments or throwing their hands up at the responsibility of assessment; those of us who grew up with the Melody Maker, rather than what mostly passes for music journalism over the fishpond or now, are of course aware that this promised land sadly sits in the past rather than the future.

Time intrudes elsewhere, too. The original book came out 16 years ago, in a bizarre world where mentioning R. Kelly or Kanye conveys credibility, whereas Billy Joel and Michael Bolton are as irretrievably uncool as Celine. As for the idea that "Eurovision traffics almost exclusively in major-key, upbeat tunes"... But this edition includes as much material again from 2014, a world where the Internet's impact on music listening and discussion thereof is really starting to tell - yet still, of course, a historical document now. Most of that is from other writers, many of whom were at least worth asking, and one of whom is Nick Hornby. There's a certain amount of trying to smuggle the canon back in while claiming that's the real radical gesture, aaaah, and a few of the contributors just use the excuse to get on their hobby horse, not least Krist Novoselic, who mainly exhorts readers to be more involved in local politics. I think my favourite was Mary Gaitskill who, knowing a thing or two about the inadmissible recesses of the human heart, plays the fond yet exasperated mother, pointing out some of the things Wilson's apparently comprehensive examination has still managed not to even realise it was missing. Finally, Wilson returns with an afterword, adding a little to his own story and Celine's, but where, as with the book proper, I think the key bit is the one that applies more widely: "While publishers clamor for tomes that boldly forecast the future, the bestseller lists are more often populated by unwitting elegies to modes of thinking."

*One act sadly unmentioned in this context, by Wilson or the contributors of the supplementary essays, is Dexys - perhaps because outside the UK they're a one-hit wonder (indeed, such is American dominance of online discourse that now you even see Brits parroting the statement when it's demonstrably false here). Definitely someone where I'd love to see what Carl Wilson said about their oeuvre.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whoever first said there's no accounting for taste was clearly not inclined to be a critic, maybe not even a music lover. De gustibus non est disputandum is, of course, a Latin expression, but then who wants to get in a fight with a Roman? Never mind three chords and the truth, the Republic's kitharists didn't do harmony and may not even have bothered with truth. You gonna argue with a proven lyre?

Aesthetics evolve. Tastes and traditions change. What once seemed outre or out-of-bounds can quickly become old hat, vulgar, nostalgic, or ironic. It's all in how you perceive it. Here Carl Wilson and a handpicked set of commentators including Nick Hornby, James Franco, and Ann Powers debate the meaning of abstract taste using Celine Dion, her album Let's Talk About Love, and its Titanic tentpole track "My Heart Will Go On" as foils. Wilson assumes general audience contempt both for Dion and her work, and sets out to discover why it should be thus. Does room remain for discrimination in a heterodox world or are we left merely with description? Have we so acknowledged subjectivity that we can only identify works relative to genre classifications rather than single out those which are subpar?

I don't think so. Strictly from a technical standpoint, intentionality, craft, and competence remain objective criteria. In music, you can hear if someone is off-key, off-the-beat, too loud, inaudible, or playing a spray of fumbled notes. In art, you can see if a painter otherwise striving for photorealism has smudged up the thumb of a hand holding… is that supposed to be an apple? In writing, a sentence fragment. I don't get it.

Incoherence and accidental inconsistencies may not themselves destroy the value of a work, but most works can benefit from a bit of second thought, effort, and care. Any art thus improved is by definition "better" than its earlier version. Neil Simon defined writing as "rewriting." Beethoven's symphonies passed through multiple drafts before reaching their final state. No grand consensus is required to legitimize this hierarchy. You have only to stroll along the boardwalk to see that some velvet Elvises are more satisfying than others.

Sensitivity matters, also. The qualia of any work is tunable to taste since taste relies on intersecting axes of sensory recognition and acceptability that vary from person to person. As the optician flicks through the diopters ("Better A or B? A? Or B?"), so too exist thresholds at which changes become noxious. Consider Goldilocks trying to find the right temperature porridge and the short order cook who knows her regular customers. People like their art like they enjoy their breakfast, and it's possible to have too much sugar or salt.

Certainly we can find reasons to admire Celine Dion: her global success, indicative of popularity; the power and range of her voice; and her embrace of sentimentality. Paradoxically, these can also be reasons to be dismissive, suspicious, or even contemptuous of her achievements. As for popularity, Wilson delves at length into sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's argument that matters of taste are primarily about social signaling: the overt display of aesthetic preferences used to distinguish oneself from others whose tastes differ in order to earn cultural capital in a desired peer group. Disliking Dion can separate you from the herd and make you seem cool.

And feel free to dismiss Dion's herd as a self-generating phenomenon, the result of effective global marketing and self-promotion that makes her work and persona more familiar than that of others. A Columbia University sociology experiment found an effect they dubbed, "cumulative advantage,"

a rule that popularity tends to amplify exponentially…. [W]e're social: we are curious what everybody else is hearing, want to belong, want to have things in common to talk about. We are also insecure about our own judgments and want to check them against others…. When "early adopters" help make a Picasso famous, his reputation becomes self-inflating; the mutation becomes the mainstream, even though few people immediately like his paintings. (page 81)

In this way, taste may be defined both by adherence and opposition to groupthink.

Must something popular be bad? No, popularity itself does not imply vapidity, although appealing to the least common denominator can get you both. In Dion's case and notwithstanding her demonstrable vocal talent, it happens that she does not employ her instrument in surprising or nuanced ways (at least not when she sings in English). Per Wilson at page 70, her singing "makes for an unusual absence of musical tension. As her songs rocket to their predestined apexes, she does not resist, she goes along for the ride, leaning on the accelerator and seldom the brake, emphasizing intensity not difference…. Today's metal has no power ballads,... [s]o Celine is singing them instead." Wilson therefore argues compellingly that whether you're a dopamine junkie or simply someone in search of greater variability in the culture you consume (something one might reasonably expect of experts and/or critics who are constantly sampling cultural output and thus more attuned to and bored by self-similarity), you're probably going to dislike Dion's efforts and her portfolio of cliche. Her oeuvre is been there, done that to extremis.

As to authenticity, Wilson asserts that Dion's brand of sentimentality epitomizes democracy in both its universality of appeal and its rejection by snobs (read "cultural elites"). In this, the author classifies Celine Dion as a purveyor of "schmaltz," by which he means a literary genre encompassing parlor songs, mariachi, and nostalgia, one that is marked by exaggerated expressivity and melodrama (contrast drama, which is essentially conflict with less hyperbole). Sentimental works tend to be straightforward, easy to ingest and understand. We modernists sneer at schmaltz.

Wilson poses a Marxist critique of Dion's critics, challenging as inherently classist any rejection of schmaltz as a stand-in for rejection of its disempowered audience: immigrants, women, and the working class for whom overt displays of passionate emotion are more permissible if only because any associated controversy carries less risk. Presumably, downtrodden audiences are freer to give their hearts away since those with less position or status to lose have less to fear from the threat of attitudinal backlash. It's a thought-provoking take, but one that I think overgeneralizes the way sentimentality is publicly perceived. There's nothing wrong with art that stimulates an emotional response: farce and tragedy are classic genres for which extreme scenarios are intended precisely to elicit the feels, and many of the most lauded works from Shakespeare to Billy Bragg can be described as tear jerkers, rabble-rousers, or odes to joy. I would consider sentimentality's directness alone sufficient to explain general acceptance.

Wilson digresses briefly to consider nostalgia in the form of kitsch (effectively, any object designed as a collectible or whose acquisition serves as a souvenir of a specific place, time, or event). Kitsch is the cultural ephemera that when assembled, evokes a bygone era. Kitschy knick-knacks form the fascinating collection of the Geppi's Entertainment Museum in Baltimore, and it's well worth your time. (If you can't go, you should definitely pick up Arnold T. Blumberg's illustration-rich museum catalog, in which you will find plenty of tin toys, dishware, election buttons, and other claptrap alongside nifty facts about the golden age of radio (Tom mix rings! Dale Evans comics! Flash Gordon click pistols!), the origins of Ronald McDonald (originally Archie, with shoes shaped like hamburger buns and a soda cup for a nose), and oodles of classic comic original editions. Encountering this material is endlessly fascinating and occasionally psychoactive (a trip to Geppi's is always an intimate experience, so be sure to go either with a loved one or a therapist). Geppi's collection is proof that the promotion of anything will generate its own share of kitsch, but unlike Wilson I don't see the relevance of this fact to an appraisal of Celine Dion's (lack of) appeal. Folks like me dismiss Celine Dion's hits not because they are emotionally manipulative per se, but rather because their sentimentality is cheap: unearned and instantaneous, typically marked by lyrics simultaneously nonspecific and banal.

For example, the ubiquitous number "My Heart Will Go On" dilutes its comforting recollection of a love that so transcends time and space as to convey a sense of immortality with typically inane redundancies and idiomatic turns of phrase. "Far across the distance and spaces between us," Dion croons, braying out the age-old rhyming "once more you open the door" a phrase that was played out long before REO Speedwagon found the wisdom to take this ship, perhaps the Titanic, back to the shore and throw away the oar forever, until closing on the tautological assertion that "love was when I loved you." Not even the choir is convinced, entering to mock the singer's insistence on cardiac perpetuity by asking "why does the heart go on?"

Celine's performance ignores the question. Carl Wilson et al. have reviewed the problem thoroughly here, but ultimately sidestep any attempt at justification. I wonder if the Romans knew?

[Bertrand Wilden · Rating 4 out of 5]

It turns out that the question raised by Rob in High Fidelity, "How can it be bullshit to state a preference?" was not rhetorical.

This book is an excellent exploration into what musical taste is - or should be. Probably well-worth a second read at some point, but I would skip the guest essays next time around.

[Sneezle McGee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed the first half (the original 33 1/3rd Let's Talk About Love) and the cultural context Carl Wilson provides for the Quebec entertainment industry, but got stuck on the second half (the guest essays added for the reprint) for months. It seemed like most of the guest writers weren't aware they were supposed to be writing essays but instead believed they were writing the back blurb for the book. Most of them just summarize what Carl Wilson talked about and praised the text as if the reader had not already read the book and they were recommending it. Other than Mary Gaitskill's essay I would recommend just skipping the additional content entirely and only reading Wilson's original 2007 text.

[MasterSal · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a book I randomly picked up from Goodreads I am surprised at how much I enjoyed this and how much it made me think. Plus, I listed to Ashes on repeat, which I've decided is a great thing.

Despite the clever subtitle of the book, which made me think that this would an antagonistic read, this book is rather “about the inherent sociability of taste, the way we in isolation of taste, the way we cant in isolation understand our own aesthetics and therefore our own humanity, but can only make them our own when we share and compare.” (pg. 168 of 2014 edition). Surprisingly, this book is less about Céline; Let's Talk About Love is barely mentioned. It is a jumping point for a wider exploration of how we interact with music. Worth reading but take your time and if you can, look up some of the music referenced. I enjoyed that a lot, though it took me a while to get through the book.

I read the expanded 2014 edition which includes the original 2007 text as well as new essays published in response and expansion of the original text. If you have a choice, pick this expanded edition as it adds quite a bit to the context of the book. Thank you public library for carrying this since, upfront, I can say that this is an engaging read which makes one think about how our tastes are formed and what they say about us.

This is also a very Canadian text – not only in that the subject and the author is Canadian – but the inherent premise to take the other people’s tastes and opinions respectfully and seriously. It’s not enough to find a common love and empathy with others but sympathy. This is odd in the context of modern progressive culture until you realise that you cannot share a common love with everyone. The book argues that you wouldn’t want try to empathise with everyone since that is impossible and, therefore, is a false stance; nonetheless, you can listen and try to understand. To me, this is a particularly Canadian perspective – people would call it polite but I call it a celebration of difference without forcing integration. (Yes, I have a Canadian bias – what did you expect?!).

The original 2007 text has various chapter exploring different aspects of how we consume music, some of which are directly related to provided Céline Dion's music context. One of the things I learnt was that the correct spelling is Céline, not Celine. She is Québécois (hopefully I got all the accents right) and not American. I understand now what this means but didn’t when I first heard her a lifetime ago.

The new essays in the 2014 text were also generally strong. As with any collection there were a couple I didn't like or understand but in the spirit of Céline and finding common ground, let me mention the standouts for me:

If the girls were all transported by Ann Powers. This expands on the themes of the “feminine” and “domestic” which made me want to go hug my mom who has a MA in Literature and bought me books for my birthday which I still have.

The Easiest thing to forget by Mart Gaitskill who offered a critique of the original book. One of my favourites, this essay was very direct and made me stop. It was a little uncomfortable too, but the clearest statement of why we need to be all a little more human.

Compared to What? by Jason King who argues for the need to avoid cultural relativism. I didn’t understand some of his references but I agreed with him for the most part. His appeal to apply some standards to art and avoid giving a pass to everything based on taste was interesting to think about especially today.

Children of the Corn by Sukdev Sandhun who puts Céline Dion into an immigrant and international context. The Indian film references and the yearning expressed in those songs really got to me. This is why I love ballads - some of it doesn’t translate but exquisite sadness and longing connects us all and Céline is a good proponent of that tradition.

I'll end here with a strong recommendation again to read this.
----
PS. Bitch, I'm Celine and Celine is Amazing!! make for good soundtracks to this book as well. Cause they work for Céline - you know they do. Give in!

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another re-read (a running theme of this time in our history, perhaps), this is Carl Wilson's great exploration of what "taste" means and why some people have "bad taste." It's perhaps hard to remember how universal Celine Dion was at the close of the Nineties, when "My Heart Will Go On" was every-damn-where and her enthusiastic, bombastic style of singing drowned out anyone else trying to make a living at the time (hyperbole, but still). Wilson, using the perhaps low-hanging-fruit of her 1997 album "Let's Talk About Love," sets out to discuss what makes us listen to certain artists over others, and whether it's more a reflection of us than it is of the artists we claim to loath or love. It's a fun, fascinating read, and I have to say that I agree with him that, to some extent, it's all a matter of perspective. There are some great essays by other artists in this edition (an expansion upon the original 33 1/3 version), but the primary text is what sells it for me.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I could have read this book before I wrote a bunch of snarky music reviews for college newspapers, webzines and other publications. I could have saved a lot of time. I also might have gotten more sleep in my 20s, instead of wasting hours in bars and run-down apartments arguing about the merits of musician A vs. band B.
This book is a brilliant treatise on the nature of art and particularly art criticism. But really it is an extended argument against music criticism, and a defense of allowing any listener to enjoy his or her own tastes.
I particularly recommend this edition, as it essentially comes with its own graduate-level seminar — 13 essays analyzing the arguments delineated in the main section of the book.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a snob. This is not news, but reading Carl Wilson's book certainly verified that quality about myself. This book is fascinating as an academic study of taste and aesthetics, but also for placing Celine Dion in cultural and historical context, as well as Wilson's examination of his own biases and snobbery.

The 5 stars are for the original text of the 33 1/3 edition, as the essays in this newer edition did little for me (with the exception Daphne Brooks' contribution on Diana Ross/black schmaltz & the biting humor of Mary Gaitskill). However, I appreciate Wilson's desire to include more voices and interpretations of his ideas, even if at times that sentiment can seem ego-boosting (there are a number of inclusions that dispel that notion).

[Toni Rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tomé el libro esperando encontrar una dura critica hacia la música que regularmente escuchas en las estaciones de radio de moda, sin embargo el autor agradablemente me sorprendió mostrando como los gustos nos definen como persona y el porqué debemos de respetar y apreciar incluso los aberrantes.

Un excelente ensayo que toma como musa a Celine Dion(¿debería de usar la tilde?), donde no solo conoces sobre la cantante si no la forma en que ha logrado evolucionar con el tiempo y sobre todo conectar con su público. No debemos olvidar que tienen una enorme legión de fans.

Con citas a libros, filósofos, artículos e incluso uno publicado por si mismo, es interesante de principio a fin, seas o no fan de la señora Dion.

3.5/5

[Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is like porn for me.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars for Part 1 (the original 33 1/3 book). A piddly two stars for Parts 2 and 3, which do not offer anything nearly as captivating as Part 1, probably because all the supplemental content comes in small bites.

I had far more ease diving into reading this book than I did getting myself to listen to the Céline Dion album that gives the book its title. Which is, of course, the point. While two or more chapters of Wilson's book dig so deep that it wear down my patience, his aim is true: to analyze the concept of taste from every angle he could authoritatively write about, which we does through the lens of Céline Dion's music.

The same bafflement that plagued him about Céline Dion (simultaneously one of the biggest selling artists of all time and an artist wildly regarded as being tacky) plagues me about the consistently-viewed-by-millions American Idol, while similar bandwagon "it's cool to hate them" derision befalls Dion's fellow Canadians, Nickelback. Anyone with a big vocabulary and Warby Parker glasses can articulate why they don't like certain musical phenomena (and will likely volunteer to do so if you stand still long enough), but are they (we) aware of and honest about the influences, prejudices and blindspots shaping their (our) opinion? Wilson's aim isn't to turn his readers into un-opinionated automatons who have nothing to say but "everything is art and has its purpose for someone." Part of his aim is having us self-question if the tastes we hold are stubborn and, if they are, why they are so unshakable. And are the more acidic opinions we hold malleable? Can taste be broken down into a formula to be followed, producing likes where they were not before?

Note: For anyone resisting reading the book simply because they don't want to have to listen to the album, know that listening to the full album isn't required and only provides insight into the next to last chapter. The book focuses more on the artist than a specific album so a person need only have familiarity with her style through the more ubiquitous songs of her catalogue. Let's Talk About Love seems to be the Céline album the author chose to focus on for the 33 1/3 series primarily for its inclusion of the song from Titanic, which is of course a crucial section of the Céline Dion legend. But, to get the full experience, I do recommend listening to the album (or a large chunk of it) around people, loud enough so they can hear it, without explaining why you are listening to Céline Dion (nor labeling it "a social experiment," as I did to my roommate). Parts of it are still stuck in my head a few days later, but this too will pass.


- - -

These are some of my favorite passages:
"From the start, her music struck me as bland monotony raised to a pitch of obnoxious bombast...and repertoire as Oprah Winfrey-approved chicken soup for the consumerist soul, a neverending crescendo of personal affirmation deaf of social conflict and context." (13)

"the gap between critical acclaim and popular success never goes away...People often say it's just a matter of aesthetic education and exposure to greater volumes of material, but that seems to imply critical judgments are more objective and lasting, when the record shows us they're not." (16)

"I realized my easy scorn [of country music in previous years] had betrayed an ignorance of whole communities and ways of life, prejudices I did not to live with." (17)

"My aversion to Dion more closely resembles how put off I / feel when someone says they're prolife or a Republican: intellectually I'm aware how personal and complicated such affiliations can be, but my gut reaction are more crudely tribal." (18-19)

"If my disdain for her [Dion] extends to them [her audience] to them, am I trying to deny them a lifeboat?" (20)

"The unofficial rule [in Jamaica] seemed to be, 'If you hear Céline Dion then you're in the wrong place.' That's not to say that roughnecks (as gangsters are also called in Jamaica) are the only / ones who appreciate and publicly show their love for Saccharine Céline. It's just that, for some reason, they show her more love than just about any other group." (49-50)

"Today's metal has no power ballads...So Céline is singing them. It's been said that 'pro wrestling is soap opera on steroids,' so maybe Céline Dion is metal on estrogen...Metal is all darkness and rebellion and Céline all candlelight and communion, but note how hypermasculinity and hyperfeminity in this way can meet" (70)

Komar and Melamid's "'People's Choice' poll asking Americans what they liked and didn't like in art--sizes, styles, subjects, colors--and proceeded to make two paintings: 'America's Most Wanted' and 'America's Most Unwanted.'" (76)

"...as science journalist Jonah Lehrer says in Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007). There's a network of neurons in the brain stem specifically geared to sort unfamiliar sounds into patterns. When they succeed, the brain releases a dose of pleasuregiving dopamine; when they fail, when a sound is too new, excess dopamine squirts out, disorienting and upsetting us...But these neurons also learn. With repeated exposure, they can tame the unknown, tune 'noise' back into 'music.'" (79)

Who would be going to see Stravinsky's Rites of Spring a year after it caused riots? "it would have been the hipsters of 1914, lured by the success de scandale and eager to be shocked, to take the dopamine overdose. Their neurons were prepared without ever hearing the sounds." (80)

"Bourdieu's interpretation was that tastes were serving as strategic tools. While working-class tastes seem 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 if to perpetuate and reproduce the class structure...He made an analogy with economics: Imagine that capital comes in forms other than money and property, such as cultural capital (knowledge and experience of culture, ideas and references) and social capital (personal connections and influence), terms he coined that have come into common usage. As with money, cultural and social capital's value depends on scarcity, on knowing what others don't." (90-91)

"The most compelling indictment of sentimentality in art is that it distorts reality by expunging the darker side. In a famous passage in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes that kitsch is 'the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes from everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human experience.' But in much modern, critically certified art, what happens is a denial of nonshit, of everything that is acceptable in human existence. On a political level, one might ask if this equal and opposite distortion doesn't breed hopeless and passivity. As Robert C. Solomon says, "Why should we always be made aware of flaws and dangers?...Should we make it a point never to have a nice thought without a nasty one as well?'" (129)

Deborah Knight's 1999 paper, "Why We Enjoy Condemning Sentimentality": "Philosophical antisentimentalism, she asserts, is a sentimentalization of rationalism" (129)

"It's often assumed that audiences for schmaltz are somehow stunted, using sentimental art as a kind of emotional crutch. As Solomon points out, there's no evidence for this slur: isn't it equally plausible that people uncomfortable with representations of vulnerability and tenderness have emotional problems? Sentimental art can be a rehearsal, a workout to keep emotions toned and ready for use. This doesn't dictate that those uses will be appropriate ones, and emotions alone are not solutions to issues, but sympathy and compassion are prerequisites to charity and solidarity. So between the sentimentalist and the antisentimentalist, who is the real emotional cripple?" (130)

"My usual, more 'sophisticated' listening can help me reflect on such feelings, to scrutinize them from al angles, but I'm fine at that kind / of analysis on my own. I am probably less skilled at just feeling an emotion without wanting to mess with it and craft it, to bargain with it until it becomes something else. Feeling emotions fully, bodily, as they are, may be sentimentality's promise, one too readily mistaken for a threat." (130-131)

"songwriter Stephen Merritt argued that 'catharsis in art is always embarrassing.' It's a common belief , though seldom so drolly expressed...But like many of us, Merritt transposed that political caveat to a personal one, a matter of style. His enjoyment, he claimed only half-joshingly, depends on having the embarrassment built into the art as irony, which allows him to register emotion without the shameful loss of self-control involved in feeling it. Here we reach a crossroads where sophistication is just another word for paralyzing repression. It;s as if we've mangled one nostrum of craft, which warns against artists 'expressing themselves' by just blurting emotions out confessionally, into another (an)aesthetic principle that art should not be expressive or cathartic for the audience." (131)

"What self-conscious aesthetes such as Kundera, Merritt and I might be guilty of sentimentalizing is ambiguity, that shibboleth of our postidealistic age. Which can make us dupes of another kind, prone to taking surface complication and opacity for depth, and apt to overlook the complexity that may life even within the sentimental on more patient, curious introspection. It's a fault endemic, I think, to us antireligionists who have turned for transcendent experience to art, and so react to what our reflexes tell us is bad art as if it were a kind of blasphemy." (132)

"It's an increasingly common affliction. Cultural fields have always broken into style-based cliques (once known precisely as 'schools'), so they are bound to feel like reruns of teendom. But with current / western middle-class trends of prolonged education, delayed marriage and late childbearing, extended adolescence is becoming the norm. In pop culture, that means among other things that high-school-style identity subgroups have turned into permanent consumer-niche categories. I am not pleased about it, but I admit I'm part of it." (139-140)

"When this album was first released I assumed that it was shallow, that it was beneath me. A decade later I don't see the advantage in holding yourself above things; down on the surface is where the action is, the first layer of the unfathomable depths." (149)

"What would criticism be like if it were not foremost trying to persuade people to find the same things great?" (157)

"Bourdieu, for one, thought criticism should concern itself with context, with locating artists and their audiences socially, trying to outline for whom, to whom and by what channels an artwork speaks." (158)

- -
"Subversion is a cool look, but without action it is nothing more than a pose." Krist Novoselic's "With the Lights On, It's Less Useless" (181)

"Sometimes, though, I'll stumble upon a song that I need to hear over and over again. I'll listen to it a hundred times. It's like that song is ironing out part of my brain. It's un-confusing a confused part." from Sheila Hart's "Playlist: Let's Listen to Love" (272)

[Dave Simley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh. I thought some parts of this book were really strong, like the chapters on how class/upbringing and your current environment influence your personal taste, but I felt like there was a lot that was missing.

Celine fans are simultaneously celebrated and insulted, but both for what felt like the wrong reasons. I think that Wilson was unable to see that sometimes people don't really care about music (which I think is ironic, considering he's a music critic writing a book about understanding other people's points of view.) Overall, this book seemed more like a time capsule into the insular world of a music critic circa 2007 than a timeless critique of taste.

Really wish he spent more time talking about unconscious vs conscious choices in music taste and the cyclical nature of contrarian music tastes (i.e. liking a popular band "ironically", liking a band "before they were cool", etc.). Oh well.

[Ian Hamilton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked (sort of) Wilson’s source material, long essay, but it could have been equally as interesting at half the length and not so indulgent. Not every sociological observation needs to be a mastabatory philosopher name-drop. The supplemental essays from contemporaries don’t add much to the equation.

[Pedro João · Rating 4 out of 5]

a noção de que os omnívoros musicais são tão culpados de elitismo como os snobes… falta-lhe apenas a distinção operativa entre aqueles de quem gostam de uma música populista sem amarras (ou tentando soltar-se delas) e aqueles que selecionam uma única canção da Britney Spears ainda assim com pruridos (normalmente a “Toxic”). eu vs. o Sérgio Godinho!

[Ana Hein · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was reading Let's Talk About Love during the back-to-back weeks when David Bowie and Glen Frey died. Both artists were equally hugely important to me as a music fan but, quite evidently, not to the culture at large. If one were to believe the rhapsodies in the music press and the equally outsized personal testimonials from my friends, David Bowie single-handedly transformed modern music and modern society, electronic dance-pop and same-sex marriage springing fully-formed from his loins. Glen Frey, by contrast, received a few respectful tributes from fellow musicians, but, it seemed to me, mostly embarrassed silence from the hipsterati. I loved 70s-era Bowie sincerely and passionately. I had more David Bowie lps than records by any other artist (which was partly because Led Zeppelin had simply recorded fewer albums, but still...). Nevertheless, I was always aware that "Bowie fan" looked good on my rockist resume. Liking him made me cooler.
Not so the Eagles. I grew up listening to the Eagles because my father, who is more than a little OCD, loved them, and the things he loves he's not ashamed to love over and over and over again. We listened to the Eagles on every cross-country family road trip (my parents were both East Coast transplants to San Diego) for a decade or more and their oeuvre is inextricably bound for me to the landscape of the American West as viewed through a Winnebago windshield. I love those records with the uncritical ears of a child and for years (and years and years -their tenure as Most Despised Rock Band has had such extraordinary legs that Chuck Klosterman was writing in 2012 about being "contractually obligated" to hate them) the Eagles were a secret vice that I was more than a little afraid to have outed. Despite what I now have the confidence in my own critical judgment to call excellent songcraft and tight musicianship, despite the fact that the Eagles taught me to like country music twenty years before I had even heard of their beloved-by-every-hipster compadre Gram Parsons, despite the deep personal pleasure the music gave me, I stayed in the Eagles-fan closet because I was afraid that people would think I have BAD TASTE.
Let's Talk About Love is another book that would have blown my mind a little more if I'd read it back when everyone else did. It is, nevertheless, brave, humane, insightful and all-around excellent, . Criticism and meta-criticism about the Celine Dion record of the same name, it was originally published in the 33 1/3 series of pop music monographs, of which I had previously read the volume on Doolittle by the Pixies. While I was keenly interested (I'm a huge Pixies fan and was even more so then), it was rote and gossipy and eminently forgettable: the reading equivalent of a VH1 Behind the Music episode but without the obligatory drug meltdown. Let's Talk About Love, by contrast, swings for the fence. It is an erudite, sophisticated examination of What We Talk About When We Talk About Taste, which turns out to be all kinds of deeply personal, deeply political stuff like class and gender and fear and power. I read a reissue of Let's Talk About Love that included supplementary essays by writers and critics and other hep cultural figures. Most were eminently forgettable, especially after finishing such a fine monograph, but Mary Gaitskill, in the essay "The Easiest Thing to Forget," elegantly summarizes my takeaway from Wilson's book. "[R]eal humans all have personal touchstones that are "off the map" because there is no map. We are so maplessly, ridiculously uncool that whole cultures and subcultures, whole personalities even, have been built to hide our ridiculousness from ourselves. These structures are sometimes very elegant and a lot of fun, and fun to talk about, too. But our ridiculous vulnerability is perhaps the most authentic thing about us, and we scorn it at our peril - yet scorn it we do." Take that, haters. I'm takin' it easy.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review originally published at MADreads (madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads)

Celine Dion is an international superstar. Many music listeners are devoted fans of her powerhouse ballads, while others display intense hatred toward her overemotional warbling. Music critic Carl Wilson, finding himself in the “dislike” column of all things Celine, decided to approach her music with an open mind. The resulting book, Let’s Talk about Love, considers the social and cultural influences that make up Dion’s music, persona, and fanbase within the context of her 1997 album, also called Let’s Talk about Love, as well as the myriad cultural influences that make up personal musical taste.

To better understand Dion’s music, Wilson traces her career from her beginnings as a child star abroad, to her eventual acceptance as a Canadian national hero, to her status as a worldwide icon. He considers Dion’s upbringing as a poor Catholic from a large French-Canadian family as a major part of her early reception by critics and Canadians alike. Her upbringing could be seen as lower-class, as could her early recorded songs within the traditions of French art songs. This lower-class perception, as well as Dion’s determination and relentless work ethic, gained her an underdog reputation, and soon she had a following around the world, though not necessarily in America and Canada, at first. Her stateside fame came after following a model similar to Whitney Houston’s in the same era: recording singles for blockbuster movie soundtracks. Dion’s most well-known song is the Oscar-winning “My Heart Will Go On,” which rose to popularity hand-in-hand with the 1997 movie Titanic.

Wilson also uses criticism and sociology to explore why people like the music that they do, and discusses how different types of music become encoded with cultural groups and perceptions of status. He turns this on himself, and on all music consumers. Why do we listen to the music that we do? Do we feel better about ourselves if we like “cool” music? Why is music important to us? If taste is subjective, is anything really good or bad? With these things in mind, Wilson interviews a handful of Celine diehard fans to get their perspectives, and eventually makes a trip to Las Vegas to see Dion’s live show, A New Day.

Finally, Wilson actually reviews the album Let’s Talk about Love, complete with discussions of songwriters and production values, and finds that a handful of the songs are well done, and perhaps not terrible. After reading this book, I checked out a copy of Dion’s album to listen along. I found that I agreed with several of Wilson’s assertions, but by no means all. Listening to the album with an open musical mind and within the framework provided by Wilson was a fascinating experience.

Originally published in 2007, Let’s Talk about Love had such an impact on music critics, academics, and artists, that this new edition contains additional short essays by several notable people in conversation with the book and the topics that surround it. Nick Hornby, James Franco, Mary Gaitskill, Jonathan Sterne, and others engage with and critique Wilson’s text in various ways. Many of these essays shed even more light on the fact that good taste is indefinable, and stepping outside your comfort zone when it comes to music and art can have a profound effect upon you, while others address specific topics with greater depth.

Let’s Talk about Love is a fascinating glimpse at the making of a pop culture icon, and a broad depiction of the critical cultural world that all of us participate in when we make decisions about musical taste. Wilson’s book is calm in its well-researched discussion of pop music and exhilarating in its consideration of how people feel when we talk about the things we love.

[Bradley Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Using Celine Dion’s 1997 album of the same name as the focal point, Wilson dissects the concept of taste including its class, social, and ethnogeographic influences. Specifically, Wilson attempts to answer the question of how one of the top ten highest grossing musicians of all time can be universally hated by music critics and aficionados alike. Dion’s titanic single “My Heart Will Go On” serves as the quintessential litmus by which taste is judged. It his through his analysis of that song and Dion’s respective career that Wilson elaborates on his own journey of self-discovery about what makes taste good or bad, and why people have certain tastes.

Wilson’s exploration is extremely thorough. He approaches the topic from several different perspectives. With Dion’s music, he dives into the historical taste influences dating back to the immigrant-penned songs of Tin Pan Alley, modern music recording dynamics and techniques, and social relativism of taste between Americans, Canadians, Africans, Iraqis, Jamaicans, etc. (Apparently Dion is super big in Iraq and Africa). Wilson also critically dissects previous texts and journals from academia dating back 100+ years that also focus on the social and environmental influencers of taste and the cultural capital of such taste. These journals suggest that class determined taste and influenced one’s cultural status; wealthy people having more refined and superior taste for example. Wilson sees that this philosophy of taste dynamics across social classes has changed and even proposes a need for a define bad culture; that good taste needs bad taste to raise the value of good taste. He also suggests that today’s consumer can enjoy all sorts of taste and be more well-rounded because of the ease of access to new things via the Internet and the increasing globalization of society.

This book was an expanded edition of the original publication. The original version appeared as part of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series; a series of books where an author critically analyzes a culturally important album. Originally published in 2007, Dion’s “Let’s Talk About Love” initially seemed like a questionable entry. However, it quickly became the best-selling entry despite covering the worst album in the series. The expanded edition was published in 2014 and includes contributions by other artists and cultural critics including James Franco, Nick Hornby, Krist Novoselic, and other who either focused on Dion specifically or offered their own analysis of taste and what defines it.

The original publication became an important addition to many university courses focusing on cultural, pop, and social studies. The success and intelligent analysis has also allowed Wilson to moderate and participate on panels discussing mass media and culture. He has made a career discussing an artist and album he could not stand, but has since formed an understanding of Dion’s place in music. He notes how Dion's career has changed and the increased consumption of media online. Dion is still one of the highest-grossing earners in music, but it is no longer cool to make fun of her because she is so iconic and established. In fact, Wilson suggests we may soon get to a point where it will be cool to like her ironically. People have moved on and look for other outlets to validate their own elite sense of taste. Our society quickly churns out people who we declare "the worst," but few ever become as massive of a star as Dion.

Yes. I did read a 300 page analysis of Celine Dion and so should you.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I decided to read this because I'm approaching it from the opposite perspective of the author. I LOVE Celine Dion, and have since I was in middle school, with zero irony. I genuinely adore her voice and her music, I've seen her in Vegas, and I have a lot of fond memories of listening to her. She's not a guilty pleasure, she's a pleasure, full stop. The dominant critical perception of her, which was in full force at the time of this book's original publication in 2007, has always bummed me out, as has snobbery about music in general. It's only recently that cultural narratives have changed and she's started to get a bit more respect. So while the author of this book wrote it to try to understand why Celine's fans like her, I read this to try to understand why so many people who consider themselves music geeks/snobs don't.

And that perspective was, frankly, disturbing to me. The author does eventually come to appreciate her more, understand her appeal, and break down his stereotypes about who listens to her. I don't fit into those stereotypes, as I'm college-educated and not from "flyover country," and the implication that those who like her aren't worldly or educated enough to know what good music is bothers me. But there was one sentence towards the beginning of the book that stopped me in my tracks:

"My aversion to Dion more closely resembles how put off I feel when someone says they're prolife or a Republican: intellectually I'm aware of how personal and complicated such affiliations can be, but my gut reactions are more crudely tribal."

What. The. Hell.

He's seriously comparing liking Celine Dion to BEING A REPUBLICAN? I know this was written long before Trump was president, but even so...how does someone else liking her hurt ANYONE? How can you possibly compare enjoying music you dislike to supporting a racist, xenophobic party that advocates denying people affordable healthcare, banning Muslims, splitting up immigrant families, prioritizing gun ownership over violence prevention, and supporting the police even when they unjustifiably kill black people? When I hear that someone is a Republican, I assume that they're selfish and unintelligent. This author would assume the same of someone simply because of the music they enjoy? That's just...mind-blowing to me.

I read the newest edition, which includes essays on music and taste from people including James Franco, Nick Hornby, and Sheila Heti, but those are all kind of boring and don't really add anything. I am glad, though, that he included the Elliott Smith anecdote. One gripe that a lot of Celine-haters have is that at the 1998 Oscars, "My Heart Will Go On" won over Smith's "Miss Misery" from Good Will Hunting. But Elliott Smith himself once shared a story about how at those Oscars, where they were both performing, Celine had greeted him and been friendly, and when he said that he was nervous, she reassured him that being nervous would only help his performance. That was the only time they met, and he never became a fan of her music, but he DID spend the rest of his (sadly short) life defending her.

[Riley Haas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note: I am reviewing the reissue.
This is an engaging, thought-provoking and highly readable discussion about taste, what it is, and the philosophical and practical issues inherent in taste.
I have rarely read such a readable book that discusses deep philosophical issues. Yes, there are plenty of pop philosophy books out there, but rare is there one that manages to achieve a high level of sophistication (and introspection, in this case) with readability.
Wilson asks himself the kinds of questions I have been asking myself for a long time: can (good or bad) taste be objective? is my taste completely the product of my upbringing and culture and, if so, can it be defended as anything other than accidental? His discussion of these and other questions is entertaining, edifying and hits me on a very personal level. (I have long struggled with "guilty pleasures" I thought I wasn't supposed to like but liked anyway, among very other things.)
It is, hands down, the best book I have read about the subject of taste within popular culture. I will be thinking about it for a long time and I am thinking about buying the book so I can re-read it in the future, to see if I change my mind in terms of the extent to which I agree with Wilson. (I don't entirely agree, as I think we can come up with semi-objective if not entirely objective ideas about artistic genius, but I understand where he's coming from and I struggle with the same ideas he does.)

This edition contains a series of responses to the book, in the form of a series of "essays," running the gamut from a playlist to very thoughtful philosophical responses. Unfortunately, I feel like the essays are as hit as they are miss. The responses by the most famous people are self-congratulatory and barely concerned with the topic of the book. Some of the other responders seem like they read (or only remember) one very small part, and want to spend their time on that one thing.
That being said, a few of them are very interesting and thoughtful, even a couple that stray away from the idea of "taste" in art, and into wider social issues.
But I can't say that I recommend this book because of the responses, as they are too varied.

But read the book itself. Very, very worth your time if you have any interest at all in art or popular culture, or the more specific subject of the book, Celine Dion.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unbeknownst to me before this summer - I guess this Carl Wilson essay has a sort of cult following. I saw it mentioned on LitHub or some other site earlier this summer. I liked it well enough and highlighted a few passages. It's pop-culture criticism of a very high-minded type.

With regard to the perceived problem of Celine Dion not having a distinct musical personality, her blankness, and of seeming to let a song shape her identity (in contrast to Barbra Streisand who seems to impose herself on a song): Wilson tries to imagine why, for some fans, this might be a good thing:

If she sings without personality it is because it would be selfish of her [to come between] the listener and her voice. [...] Her songs disclose little personality because she is just the voice's vessel, all medium and no message, channeling feeling impeded by as few contours as possible. [...] This ego vacuum makes her seem phony to her detractors [..] but perhaps it seems more honest to her devotees that she presents a subjectivity so flimsy and precarious, as all subjectivity can be. The authenticity is in the gift, not the giver. Perhaps the receiver feels honored by this [...]

I had never thought much about Celine as a person/performer. I had no opinion, but didn't hate her. I actually had to cue up that song ("My Heart Will Go On") on YouTube while reading this, so as to truly recall how I heard it, and how I once felt about, and to decide for myself if it was really deserved all the hatred that gets lobbed at it. (My conclusion: I don't really know. It's too much. Maybe it could be beautiful, but she's too much.)

The other essays collected in this updated edition are contemporary writers commenting on Wilson's original piece. Most of these left me cold, but I did like Mary Gaitskill's.

[Stan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm sure I'm not alone in considering some of my favorite music as "the good stuff", while regarding certain other music as utter crap. Personally speaking, it can feel very clear that certain art is, without question, better than others. Wilson grapples with the question of whether such an objective quality scale actually exists, even whether there is such thing as "good taste" or "bad taste". He raises so many good questions. Has kitsch been unfairly demonized? Is our "taste" determined by our class status or image consciousness? If we don't develop a system of higher/lower values regarding music we hear -- if everything is "ok" -- does that mean we really don't care about anything that much? Is there in fact no good art or bad art? To try to understand where all these judgments come from, and what they are worth, Wilson undertakes to study in detail the music of Celine Dion, who ranks as his personal #1 Most Hated Artist, who is almost universally panned by critics but who has sold millions and millions of records and has a worldwide adoring following of fans. (You've got to give him credit. Imagine listening repeatedly and continuously and in depth to the music you most despise: sounds like torture, right?) It is an interesting exploration of our unconscious assumptions. At times his delving gets so deep that it's hard to be convinced the considerations he's chasing are truly relevant. But the book is sure to cause re-examination of preconceived notions, and may well benefit from repeat reads.

[Van Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes a little over the top and cludgy with analysis, especially by some of the added essays in the second half (James Franco's is worth reading, though), Wilson tackles his own disdain for Celine Dion and in the process discovers that perhaps he's been too hard on her work. An interesting read in many places - but not all; I was forced to reconsider my own taste snobbery. Smaltzy, over-the-top, overly emotional, Broadway-style music often speaks of real emotions and real things that happen to people, though amplified and stretched to a breaking point. We're more apt to sing along with "My Heart Will Go On", "Let It Go", "All By Myself", et al., than anything 'cool' by Sonic Youth or Yo La Tengo. One passages that really solidifies his turning of opinion, and gave me pause:

"When this album was first released (Let's Talk About Love) I assumed it was shallow, that it was beneath me. A decade later I don't see the advantage in holding yourself above things; down on the surface is where the action is, the first layer of the unfathomable depths. Down there is where the heart gets beaten up, but keeps on beating. It does go on and on."

Once I finished the book, I found Celine Dion's "Let's Talk About Love" on Spotify, got through two and half songs and then decided to give the new U2 album another try. Surely the whole internet can't be right about them...

[Kelsey Landhuis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my good this book is so good and important and pretty much articulates everything I've ever felt about cultural snobbery in a very smart and academic way while also remaining extremely accessible; 10/10 would recommend to pop music/Lifetime movie/soap opera enthusiasts and anyone with an open mind.

I can't really coherently review this book cuz I took a huge break in the middle of reading it but I mainly want to say that it's super-important to get the new and expanded edition because the essays in the second half provide a lot of crucial counterpoints and alternate perspectives on Wilson's argument. Mary Gaitskill's response is posted on Slate and was one of the things that made me pick up the book in the first place; Daphne Brooks' piece on Diana Ross is also excellent.

But honestly there's just so much good material in this book; it's kind of amazing how in writing about what seems like a very specific, almost trivial subject matter like a Celine Dion album, Wilson gets at the heart of the issue when it comes to taste, class, history and popular culture in general.

[Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up for a related project regarding taste, so my review will differ from some others. I have no brief for or against Dion, so had absolutely no interest one way or the other in whether Carl Wilson would get past his hipster indie-credit music critic background to discover something worthwhile in the album of the title or not. And of course, given the nature of the project, you'd have to be a grinch to expect that Wilson wouldn't come away more warmly oriented toward Dion and her fans. To that extent, the project kind of has, baked into it, a pre-ordained narrative. (It would be slightly more interesting, if unedifying, to read a critic deep dive into CD and discover that all of his animus toward her oeuvre was reinforced and made still more acidic.) Honestly, I was more interested in the name-checked sources on taste, both old and new, than anything else. To that end, Wilson was a useful guide to areas of reading I was previously unaware of. This edition, with its padded out essays by cultural figures and critics, predictably has hits and misses in the final pantheon of contributions. Of those, I was most edified by the writings of Nick Hornby and Daphne Brooks.