ABSTRACT

Music critics and aestheticians are, on the surface, advocatesand guardians of good music. But what exactly is “goodmusic?” Most would argue that it’s impossible to say objectively what good music is, that it cannot be quantified or contained in a single, simple definition. This means that “good music,” in truth, is defined by a lack, by absence; in other words, it is good because it isn’t bad. The boundaries around “good music” are drawn not by what they include, but by what they exclude, what they actively keep out, and how they mark off terrains of Otherness. This is most likely why critics and everyday observers-while claiming to be interested in good music-seem to spend so much time discussing bad music and what makes it that way. Besides, it’s often easier and more fun to describe the myriad ways in which music can be bad than it is to try to explain when and why it’s good. As a result, there is a semantic richness when it comes to describing “bad music” which is largely absent for “good music.” Bad music can be cheesy, lame, corny, gay, or it can just plain suck, but what do each of these facets of badness connote? It is a crucial question as vocabularies of badness do more than simply describe bad music; at the same time they actually create it. The category of “bad music” is produced, then, in the interplay between discourse and musical sound. Thus, it is important to look at the language, the words, that are used to describe “bad music.” For any outsider to a given musical tradition, bad music could never be identified solely in reference to the sounds themselves. Arguments about “good” and “bad” music, even those that go against conventional wisdom, can only be meaningfully expressed when one is reasonably fluent in the prevailing narratives and histories that situate good/bad distinctions in a given setting. Since it cannot be understood outside the social and linguistic

matrices in which it operates, any examination of “bad music” must consider the questions of who supposedly makes and listens to bad music, how people talk about and perform bad music, and why and by whom the music is labeled “bad.”