The Orange Starburst Problem

If there’s one thing I absolutely despise, it’s orange Starbursts. No amount of persuasion could ever convince me to put one of those things in my mouth. If it’s not the most widely disappointing flavor out of the four offered, lemon has to be a close second.

Nonetheless, we all have an orange Starburst in our life, an option out of several given to us that offer nothing but endless disappointment and disdain. Music functions in the same way, as it depends on a condition all listeners agree on: the music we consciously choose to listen to is palatable to our ears. Within this precondition in mind, though, we can boil it down further to personal tastes.
It doesn't really seem so complex when I look at the playlists I organize on Spotify. I listen to 50’s crooners when I make my coffee in the morning, exorbitant amounts of rap and hip hop when I work, and indie when I’m “in my feels”, so to speak. And like some, I’m guilty of letting the songs in my playlist get so bloated that they’re 14 hours long at some times during the year.
But this is a philosophy blog, and we’re focusing on our proverbial orange Starbursts. Let’s turn the question around: what makes music enjoyable?
Immanuel Kant argued in his 1790 work Critique of Judgment that when organizing fine art by the degree that it allows for “cultivation of the mind”, anything verbalized like poetry is considered the most thought-provoking while instrumental music was at the bottom and may not be considered “beautiful” in the philosophical sense at all. For Kant, all music without words was his orange Starburst, which he rationalized with the idea of “free play” or “harmony” of imagination and understanding, which is ultimately rooted in pleasure. If one were to be moved by such pleasure and deem the object beautiful (a subjective cognition), then he would be entitled to argue that everyone ought to feel the same way. In a similar vein, I can argue that my water bottle is blue and assume that I can also argue that everyone else would agree.
Opponents of Kant’s argument, like contemporary philosophy Paul Guyer, have extended its reasoning into a dilemma: if everything can be subjectively cognized - like my blue water bottle, which everyone ought to agree is blue - then I can argue that everything I perceive must be beautiful. This is where Kant’s argument faces its limitation; if at least one person finds listening to a live orchestra pleasurable, then the music produced by that orchestra must be deemed beautiful by everyone, even if Kant may have disagreed.
But there has to be some track produced where the artist falls short in their abilities, which was the basis for sociomusicologist Simon Firth’s argument that a so-called “bad music” must exist, in the same way that there are two sides to every coin. He defines bad music and puts them into four categories in the first chapter of Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate: tracks made by incompetent artists, tracks with confused genres, disingenuous music, and tracks with trite sound gimmicks. He also posits that this bad music goes beyond just the personal tastes that listeners possess; it also takes into account the moral and aesthetic objections that may be attached to it, though the music that can be universally deemed as “bad” is subject to debate.
In the end, it seems as if there’s no way to universally categorize what makes music inherently “good” and “bad” - every argument trying to answer this conundrum will always have its limitations, even arguments from widely regarded philosophers like Kant. Until then, we’ll never know if there’s a piece of music so universally pleasurable or offensive, and neither will I be eating any orange Starburts until that question is answered.