89Nothing kills
numbness
like a sensory
onslaught:
color, sound,
hedonism,
melodrama, sleaze◁ Hulu’s Pam & Tommy epitomized
the bad-taste aesthetican objective taste hierarchy. The old
high-low spectrum was policed by
people who shared identity markers,
experiences, and educational back-
grounds, so it relects their prejudices.
As the music critic Carl Wilson wrote
in 2007’s Let’s Talk About Love, which
investigates why he can’t stand Céline
Dion, “Pop songs and movies and
genre iction and magazines are so ap-
pealing, achieve so much aesthetically
for so many people, that snobbery
cannot hold the line against them.”
The upshot of taking mass culture
seriously has been a growing aware-
ness that much of what we call good
taste is merely an aesthetic like any
other. No one should “feel guilty or
ashamed about what you like,” Wilson
writes, yet it’s curious how often crit-
ics guide our tastes. Was True Detec-
tive really a great show, for instance, or
did critics respond more profoundly
than the average person to brooding
characters who say things like “Time
is a lat circle”?IF THE MARKERS of good taste are su-
pericial, then the same goes for bad
taste. Where good taste is demure,
bad taste is bawdy. Where good taste
is minimalist, bad taste is maximalist.
Where good taste whispers, bad taste
screams: “Look! React! Feel!”
Bad taste is, then, a value- neutral
style that revels in schlock, camp, and
raunch for their own sakes. What it
isn’t, for our purposes, is what I’ll call
poor taste—tasteless in a mean way.
If bad taste is wearing a gold lamé
bikini to the Oscars, poor taste is
joking about someone’s disability at
the ceremony, or responding to said
joke by slapping the comedian
who made it.
One component of the current
bad-taste aesthetic is nostalgia for the
2000s. As Olivia Rodrigo brings back
punky pop, teens are reviving jeans
that don’t hug hips so much as cling to
them for dear life. And a 24-year-old
fan of indie sleaze, a subcategory of
aughts lifestyle nostalgia, told Harper’s
Bazaar that the bad taste is the point:“I love how random and tacky it is.”
Who could blame her for idealizing
an era before young adults had to
worry about COVID, the end of Roe
v. Wade, and the threat of environ-
mental apocalypse?
Yet every isolating side efect of
the pandemic has more profoundly
afected a broader swath of the popu-
lation than any twinge of nostalgia
could. Antidepressant prescriptions
spiked in 2020. Streaming exploded
as we self- medicated with content.
By the time most people started eas-
ing back into life, a still ongoing pro-
cess, numbness and entertainment
overload had become pandemics unto
themselves. We hadn’t done anything
in over a year, but it felt as though
we’d seen everything.
Now it takes more energy, more au-
dacity, more spectacle to jolt us out
of our malaise—and that’s where bad
taste comes in. Keep your gentle bal-
lads; 100 gecs, a hyperpop act known
for its warp-speed genre collages, re-
cently combined hard-rock guitar,
pop-punk vocals, and conspicuous
auto-tune in “Doritos & Fritos.” The
chorus is just the song title repeated
with anthemic intensity.
The New York Times’ Kyle Bu-
chanan noticed an analogous phe-
nomenon in awards- season movies:
big, lashy performances in movies
audiences are supposed to take seri-
ously. Citing A-listers like Jared Leto
and Lady Gaga, Buchanan wonders if
after months indoors “it’s invigorat-
ing simply to watch actors shake of
their shackles and go for broke.” The
trend has reached TV, from Kidman’s
goofy accent in Nine Perfect Strang-
ers to Sean Penn’s grotesque makeup
in Gaslit. Everything about Pam &
Tommy is a paean to bad taste.NO SINGLE HUMAN encapsulates our
bad-taste moment like Pete David-
son, who plays up his dirtbag swag,
proudly reps Staten Island, and now
sits at the dead center of pop culture
by virtue of dating Kim Kardashian.
What’s remarkable is the absence
of any notable mainstream backlash to
what Davidson represents. Invented
by the rich to shame the plebes, bad
taste had shed its classist connotations
by the time Paris Hilton started liv-
ing in tracksuits and trucker hats. But
even then, tabloids and gossip blog-
gers were always wringing their hands
over all the partying, and the promis-
cuity, of women in particular.
It makes sense that norms are shift-
ing in this direction as Gen Z’s inlu-
ence spreads. Raised on social media,
with access to once illicit bad-taste
touchstones like Rocky Horror just a
click away, they’ve largely replaced
IRL subcultures with a constellation
of aesthetics—cottagecore, dark aca-
demia, Y2K—to be performed, then
discarded. By this logic, big plas-
tic earrings aren’t inherently tacky;
they’re props of the fancy- grandma
aesthetic. Perhaps the backlash isn’t
coming because there’s so clearly
nothing of substance to get up in arms
about. Who but the dourest prudes are
left to trash the bad-taste aesthetic,
when we’re all busy trying to shock
the pandemic into submission by
living—vicariously, if not physically—
as if we’re immortal?
This era of exuberant bad taste has
yet to peak. With warm weather on
the horizon, we are surely in for a sea-
son of orange tans, animal- print caf-
tans, raunchy pop bangers, and other
forms of maximalist entertainment.
And that’s not just ine—it’s healthy.
Like the decadent art that bridged the
19th and 20th centuries, bad taste is
hastening the burnout of a cultural
landscape built for an obsolete reality.
If society can be salvaged, our current
convergence of traumas will yield new,
more relevant and resonant aesthetics,
just as the cataclysm of World War I
ushered in modernism. If not, well,
at least there was fun to be had at the
end of days. As high priestess of bad
taste Lana Del Rey sang, “The culture
PREVIOUS SPREAD, SOURCE PHOTOS: HULU, GETTY IMAGES, NETFLIX (2); THIS SPREAD, SOURCE PHOTOS: HULU, NETFLIX is lit, and if this is it, I had a ball.”