'Música de mierda', de Carl Wilson, toma el éxito de la cantante canadiense, tan fácilmente caricaturizable, para explicar lo que hay de clasismo y prejuicios en nuestra idea de buen gusto.

Everyone has what in English is known as Guilty Pleasures.These unconfessable pleasures adopt many forms: from Bertín Osborne's new album to the group of adolescents massacred by a serial murderer;From Tarot programs in the television morning to Màxim Huerta's new novel.They are unconfessable because, to manifest it publicly, possibly these tastes would end up making us a cultural leprosy.Since art, in addition to art, is a social construction, there is an abyss between what we call high and low culture, works of good and bad taste, expressions of value and others that are directly shit, but nobody has yet managed to explainWhy objectively an indie rare band is better to Bertín's macho, why we should see the new Coen brothers before a teenage slasher, prefer This is operates Save Me Deluxe, or read Marcel before Màxim.And that was the great paradox that one day began to intrigue the critic Carl Wilson, the seed that led him to write his book Fuck Music.

Wilson has written for publications such as Slate, Pitchfork or the Pages of Culture of the New York Times, and both for its appearance -bushy barba, informal clothing -and for its personal tastes -indie -pop, abstract electronic music, reissues of dark works of the dark works of theJazz and rock- is what we would call a gafapasta, a cultureta.And while Canadian, his nemesis has always been Céline Dion, the maximum expression of everything he did not like, the incomprehensible mystery of human existence: being céine exactly opposite to his idea of taste, and his taste being a tasteCultural construction coherent, purified and perfectly explainable, why do there are, he wondered, millions of people out there that worship Céline Dion, who listen to their songs and cry with her?What happens to these people to prefer it to Animal Collective, Autechre or Tame Impala?Until one day the opposite question was asked, which could also be the perfect one: I have the problem the problem, what happens to me?

The popular phrase says: "Eat shit, millions of flies cannot be wrong".But perhaps it is that, those flies may not be wrong, and Céline Dion - and who says Céline Dion also says the first Taylor Swift, Julio Iglesias in his time Libra, Laura Pausini and even David Bustamante- could be the right thing and everythingThe rest an incoherent aberration.Perhaps experimentation and novelty are not valuable, but the conventional, lack of risk, familiarity, vocal virtuosity and appeal to all kinds of primary emotions, what we call sensory.

Carl Wilson originally published shit music in 2007, an essay that now rescues the Blackie Books publishing house.There is a bit of cheat in the Blackie edition because the original book was actually titled Let's Talk About Love: WHY OTHER PEOPLE HAVE SUCH BAD TASAbout Love (1997), who contained the unmistakable flute melody of James Horner in My Heart Will Go On, and more than an essay on bad taste, is actually an essay on bad taste, and aroundCéline Dion, which is what Blackie avoids saying both in the final title and in the synopsis of the back cover, giving to believe that this book is a different one that really is.But that's not important, really.It is clear from the first paragraph that Céline is the axis from which the entire trial revolves.

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'Choni' Quebec

From Céline, the author performs an exact radiography of his humble and precariously polite social origins -he is what in Canada they know as a ketthat for years he has been mocked by broad sectors of society and has been unanimously denosted by critics.Céline Dion has nothing of Guay: nor does it have the attractiveness of prefabricated pop stars or surrounds itself with producers with original ideas, it is a tar of work that takes it too seriously -it says that several days can passWithout speaking to protect his beautiful vocal strings- and every time he opens his mouth he lets that poor and village girl out of his origins, it is like a Bethlehem Esteban with the pyrotechnic virtuosism of Mariah Carey.Even their charity works have a horter point and their albums are, without exception, the maximum expression of the cloying and the cake.How can someone like this sell millions and millions of records worldwide, from end to the planet without neglecting a single market, and with special incidence in Asian and the South American?

Throughout 200 pages, Carl Wilson is preparing a very particular experiment: little by little, he is facing the inexplicable black hole that is Céline Dion -his discography, his biography, he will see it live to Las Vegas, talk to someOf his most staunch fans in the United States to understand the reasons for his passion and affection, he explores his most controversial or laughible videos on YouTube- and gradually prepares to explain what no one has still explained: why what theCriticism unanimously considers bad taste, shabby or cake, sweeps normal people.To, in the end, have convinced that many of his initial prejudices were arbitrary and how, without having fully convinced that Céline Dion actually cool (it does not come so far, because the goat throws the mountain), having accepted its natureas a valid expression in art.

In recent years, this reflection and starting point of Wilson has been strengthening between musical criticism, and the closure of a few years ago has given way to a much more comprehensive criteria that recognizes particular merits in many products that we would previously consider horrifying,manufactured, lacking or past back in their artifice.So the shit music approach is no longer exactly groundbreaking in 2016: now the obtuse rabies have been relaxed against reggaeton, and it is easy to read reviews that recognize numerous merits to Justin Bieber's last album, for example.But it was much more difficult to justify in 2002 why Justin Timberlake's first solo album was great, if it is considered that the boy came from a boy-band for teenagers ruffled by the arrival of puberty.This Wilson's book, which is a classic of the destruction of taboús in cultural criticism, helped a lot to observe issues such as kitsch, sensibility and the fundamental importance of light music, romantic ballad and torrential exhibition of positive affections in our society.

Wilson relies greatly on the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who established that the distinctions of taste were based on a social construction according to which, the greater education corresponded certain elections -the opera, James Joyce, Orson Welles, the poetry-, and thePopular, less formed strata, tending inexorably to the culture produced by mass, soap operas, sentimental music and kitsch.The wide surveys led by the Bourdieu team so assured, supported by a wide and unquestionable statistical shows.And, therefore, taste was still the result of the balance of powers, a mechanism to perpetuate differences between social classes.There is a fundamental problem in this statistical approach to Bourdieu, however: there are popular classes people who end up developing exquisite tastes and even become hipsters, and the Russian billionaires who pay millionas to have Julio Iglesias at their private party are legion.It can't be so easy, so stratified.

Wilson continues to investigate the matter, seeks alternatives, and ends up concluding that taste does not have so much to do with social classes, but with prejudices: that is, how many times we use them as protection for others, how we do not want me toPeople see that we are really, forcing us to reject everything that makes us weak in the eyes of others, be it our extreme sensitivity and the power of our most unconfessable emotions, or rejecting complexity (or even accepting it unconditionally)Show our limitations in terms of effort, attention or analysis capacity.Therefore, there is either good or bad taste, but reasons to believe that others have it because we self -affirm in a complex society that keeps us defensive.

In the end, it even turns out that Céline Dion sells millions of albums because, contrary to what we have thought for years in large sectors of society, it is not shit.In certain contexts, for certain people, and to replace a series of shortcomings and attend a series of needs, their music can be the best.Never despise the strength of enduring love, what Quevedo called "constant love beyond death" ("dust will be, more dust in love") and our céline simply summarizes in the words that appear in the frontispiece of shitty music: "And My Heart Will Go on and On".