Developing Tastes

We've discussed before the fact that everything is available these days; that young people no longer really have the opportunity that my generation had to explore strange new worlds of mystery by doing a bit of research and special-ordering music, or obtaining it by other means. Everything, from dusty old archive recordings to brand new remixed and re-issued fodder, is readily available all the time. And there are, of course, radio stations dedicated to playing nothing but the kind of thing you might like already, so why would you bother to look elsewhere?

Books can still be hard to come by, and because of the sheer effort involved in typing one out, or scanning it in and error-correcting it, you don't find too many of those posted up on the innernet. So books still have a rarity value, to an extent, in that if you find the one you are looking for, you can be charged a fortune for it. On the other hand, if you know where to look and how to look, it takes a matter of seconds to dig something out. Whereas, in my youth, my only option would have been to trawl second hand bookshops in every place I visited, in the faint hope.

Back in days of yore, in the mid-1990s, it wasn't so easy. I looked for this book for several years, before buying it second hand, at great expense, too late for it to be any help with my thesis (I had to struggle with a photocopy). And getting hold of this one was something of a coup (it was written pseudonymously by Don DeLillo, the subject of my PhD research). But now I can find 1, 2, 3 copies in a blink of an eye. Which is good because I loaned it to some guy who got the sack and I'll never get it back.

So my point is still valid. It's all too easy these days, so I imagine it's quite hard to develop quirky and individual tastes. When the Velvet Underground blares at you from TV ads and throughout episodes of Crossing Jordan, it's hard to imagine a way of being different. 'Course, there are bins full of obscure music in Selectadisc, but that is precisely what I'm talking about. It costs you a bus ticket and a couple of hours browsing, and you've got 20 years of someone else's painstaking research.

Then again, films present an opposite problem. Because to delve into the past and watch some classics, in order to develop a taste in motion pictures that goes beyond the Empire generation's knee-jerk lauding of Tarantino and Scorsese, a satellite TV subscription is an absolute requirement. Because all those classic Cary Grant and Gregory Peck, those Katherine and Audrey Hepburn movies, they're all on TCM or similar. Some things are available on DVD, if you know what to buy. But a lot of stuff is hard to find, available on Region 1 only, or VHS only, or second-hand only. And, frankly, why would you want to buy everything? Sometimes it's enough just to watch it once. Then you know, and it's helped you develop some taste. Whereas if you buy everything, you'll end up flogging it at a car boot sale when you run out of space or change formats, as you inevitably will.

And even if you have all that, the purchasing power, the satellite subscription, you still don't have what I had, which is the value of rarity. Because it's all out there, all of the time. No wonder people want to switch off and go and clean shit out of a barn in France, Italy, or Spain. Because with it all there all of the time, where on earth do you start?