Should we worry about not liking Céline Dion?

Cover of the original 2007 Continuum edition

Carl Wilson (not the former Beach Boy, but a Canadian music journalist) is a deeply troubled man. Given the assignment of writing about Céline Dion (for the book Let's Talk About Love, a title in a series published by Continuum, each volume devoted to individual albums) he agonises for over 150 pages about whether it is OK not to like the album he presumably has been commissioned to write favourably about. He must be worried, because he quotes from works on aesthetics (David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Clement Greenberg) as well as academic sociology (Pierre Bourdieu, Petersen (actually Peterson), and Kern) to try to come to terms with his unease. He deserves top marks for honesty, at least. 

Wilson asks an interesting question, if you persevere beyond his mixed metaphors (“Schmaltz circles the rim but seemingly never wholly dissolves in the melting pot, bubbling up again decade after decade.” [p62]) and the odd vocabulary (see my post on music journalists’ style). He is most interesting when moving furthest away from his own response, and weakest when describing Ms Dion, perhaps because he has nothing much to say about her music. As an experienced music journalist, you think he could say something more specific than “her voice is nouveau riche” [p72] and “her singing is aspirational” (and I don’t think he means she pronounces her “h”s). He describes his problem, but despairs of ever resolving it. At one point he states: “For all the sense I’ve been able to make of Céline, why am I still bored?” [p74]. 

Personally, I wouldn’t worry about not liking Dion’s music, but sadly for Wilson, he appears condemned to feeling guilty about some popular music he cannot respond to. Let’s look at the reasons he gives for justifying liking Dion’s music: 

She had a challenging upbringing. As one of 14 children, born to a poor Quebecois family, and not initially speaking any English, Dion progressed the hard way. Nonetheless, that’s not a justification for the music either. 

She is a nice person. I don’t doubt that Ms Dion is a very nice person, but that’s not going to make me like her music. In my teens, I went with my girlfriend to a Donovan concert. I’m sure Donovan was and is a lovely, sincere, person, but I found the music utterly uninteresting. 

It’s impossible to describe your response to some musicians [a bit desperate, this one, from a music journalist]. “It’s not uncommon for musicians to bypass taste categories when they hear technical achievement, and Céline seems to be such a case.” [p67] 

Dion’s music is not white, nor black, but schmaltz. Wilson hears Dion’s music as “black music”, but on reflection, decides her music is neither black nor white; “the only unhyphenated label I can find is “schmaltz”. If nothing else, this response characterizes Wilson's unique way of reasoning. 

My response is tribal, not intellectual: “our guts tell us certain kinds of music are for certain kinds of people” [p19]. “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 reactions are more crudely tribal.” [p19].

In other words, he can’t do anything about this matter of taste; that’s just how he is. Later in the book he considers taste in a more formal way (that’s where Hume and Kant come in) and moves, I think, to a useful conclusion, but doesn’t in the end respond to his own findings. “The question is whether anyone’s tastes stand on certain ground, starting with mine.” 

I think the problem is more simple than that. Hume, Kant, and even Clement Greenberg talk about appealing to some kind of authority, who can provide a neutral judgement. But in pop music, there is no such authority. Pop music is just another commodity, to be bought and sold. The only authority is sales figures, which make Dion without doubt one of the greatest stars ever. As consumers, we humans have just one main task in life: to purchase. For most of us, the only individuality we can express is our preference for A or B, for Dion or Dylan. Through these preferences, we make friends or lose friends. We believe we are free because of that choice, but even when Wilson describes Bourdieu’s famous survey in the 1970s on “discrimination”, that “taste is a manifestation of a quest for social status … to perpetuate the class structure”, he is not convinced. It is no choice; most of popular music is created so that young people can identify with a group (as well as representing something that their parents do not like). Popular music journalists beyond their teens, like Wilson (born 1967, and writing Let’s Talk about Love at the age of 40), struggle to make any sense of it, yet they lived through it; does he not remember? For Wilson, the bands and singers he liked in his teens are the ones that are “real”; the others, like Dion, incomprehensible. Why else would Rolling Stones concerts be full of audiences in their sixties? 

Pop bands and singers come and go, regardless of their cultural significance, and, as Bourdieu points out, cultural significance may well be determined by a different group to the consumers of the music. Consumers of the music may not like this presence or absence of cultural significance, but it doesn't matter to them. At the time, the important thing for the consumer is to have a preference: X is my favourite; I hate Y. Likes and dislikes create bonds and establish identity. Wilson more or less recognises this, at times: “It’s most blatant in the identity war that is high school, but music never stops being a badge of recognition.”[p19] 

Dion is a badge; nothing to do with autonomous value in the eyes of critics. As Wilson memorably describes, she “tastes good” to her audience, even if she is not “in good taste”. As a music journalist, he worries about good taste; music consumers do not. It might have been a problem for his book commission, but he can rest assured that most Dion admirers will not even know that his book exists. His secret is safe, despite publication.