The Problematics of Taste

My wife and I love the show Freaks and Geeks We own the DVD of its entire season, and watch it regularly.

One of the things one can deeply appreciate about this show is that it accurately illustrates the social facts of the problematics of taste within its teen setting. The show takes place in a high school in 1980, and as it turns out, I was in high school from 75-79. At the time, you were pretty heavily judged by your peers on the basis of such things as whether or not you did drugs and if so, how much and what sorts (as well as how well you handled yourself while on them) and related to this, what sort of music you listened to. Freaks and Geeks illustrates this, such as through the main character of Lindsay, a brainy "good girl" who is nevertheless drawn to the "bad" kids, i.e., the freaks. There was also probably less overt racism than in the mid 60s and earlier, but it was (and is) still an influence on how you went about relating to others. Anyway, these things come to mind as I reflect both on the show’s characters as well as on my time as a more or less typical, and sometimes aimless, high school kid in the Carter era, that is typical and relatively aimless by the era’s standards. Although the sexual revolution (pre-AIDS carefree times) was probably at, or just reaching its peak, not everyone was necessarily scoring all the time (particularly those like myself in a single gender Catholic high school, though as Freaks and Geeks depicts public high school life, this was probably the case in such coeducational settings, as well). So, the country's political and economic future was beginning to look shakier and shakier, Carter (now playing peacemaker) was turning further to the right and looking feebler in the process, drugging could result in various sorts of chaos, sex was available in varying degrees, but, there was always Pop Culture - the question being which elements to partake in and identify with.

As I said, one was (and probably always has been) judged by whether one follows one's own idiosyncratic path or goes along with the crowd. In the seventies, for white boys like me, and like Freaks and Geeks music freak/drum enthusiast, Nick, culture came down to this basic dichotomy: rock vs. disco/top 40 and then mainstream rock vs. punk. I realize now that I probably wasted many hours of my life listening to really crappy 2nd and 3rd rate music in the form of concept albums, double live albums, and by even decent musicians, all sorts of crappy filler and gimmickry. Even then, I realized how dull much of it was but I listened, dutifully, while hanging out with friends and acquaintances or even while alone in my room, listening to rock stations on the FM dial. For example - listening to Deep Purple Live in Japan (actually, not a bad record) at a dorm party during a college visit with a buddy. In this example, it's not necessarily that it was a bad piece of music, and in fact, it was probably designed for the use to which my friends and I put it, but that it's excessive and repetitious and encouraged lesser talents to rock out in a totally self-indulgent manner.

There would also be times in someone's car, where someone in the front seat would be flipping the dial around and pass through some funky black/dance oriented station and it would be like inhaling pure oxygen. The dial flipper would then keep going until he landed on some familiar FM rock (Doobie Brothers, Lynyrd Skynrd, Crosby Stills and Nash, Aerosmith, etc.) and that's what we'd listen to. Similarly, I might sometimes be within proximity of an AM radio (back when AM stations still mostly played music) and hear some silly and very catchy top 40 song which I might privately enjoy but publicly disavow. Calling for it to play was generally not worth the hassles.

Finally, punk rock came along and changed everything. But that's another story. Interestingly, the theme song for Freaks and Geeks is Joan Jett’s punkish song "Bad Reputation". It seems as though the show’s creator Jude Apatow was looking for a way to move away from 70s culture and found this way in a song.