Taste and Culture @betti4p34 - Tumblr Blog

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/game-of-thrones/10757681/Want-baby-name-inspiration-Watch-Game-of-Thrones.html

Continuing with the Game of Thrones theme, the show's massive popularity has led to several babies in the last few years being named after characters on the show! Names like Tyrion, Bran, and Daenaerys are rising in popularity all thanks to the series. If that's not an example of being a hardcore fan I'm not sure what is

One Belgian teacher has figured out a diabolical scheme worthy of King Joffrey

A demonstration of the power of our tastes? These students are so into Game of Thrones all it took to discipline them was to threaten them with spoilers of the show. Not that I blame them at all, but still interesting

YouTube top 100 most subscribed channels list - Top 100 most popular YouTube channels by subscribers - One Hundred most subscribed

Thought this was an interesting showcasing of taste on the internet since everyone in the world uses Youtube. Thing is, not everyone uses it enough to actually make an account and subscribe to various channels, so we end up with a list that is kind of hard to determine what it actually tells us about taste. My conclusion? People with the time to be on Youtube a lot really like good looking girls, comedy, video games, and Rihanna.

AC/DC "Back In Black": Rock N' Roll Wines

Rock N' Roll wines: low brow? Probably. But it brings up an interesting ground between low brow and high brow. Wine is generally considered fairly classy as a drink, while rock and roll, and especially AC/DC, is generally the opposite. So I'd assume these Rock N' Roll wines are somewhere in the middle brow region, but it is interesting to see how these kinds of collaborations affect our perceptions

With its lack of transparent voting and occasionally odd subjective induction criteria, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has seen its fair share of c

The 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony will be tonight (not televised for another month) and is an interesting subject of controversy for its depiction of taste. Every year it seems people have issues with the artists being inducted into the RRHF, not surprising considering the fact that no one really knows the selection process involved and that some of the inductions have certainly been questionable. I'm a fan of plenty of different kinds of music, but for a place called the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame its kind of strange to see artists like Madonna and Run DMC being inducted while many other notable rock bands and artists have been ignored for years. It's been suggested that they should incorporate some form of public voting to avoid further controversy, and when dealing with matters of popular taste on such a large scale, this seems like a reasonable solution. The article linked above discusses some of the RRHF's more controversial moments.

Is Jesus kitschy? It's a genuine question. It seems like a lot of religious decorative items kind of fit into the description of kitsch. Cheesy, tacky, whatever you want to call it, I personally feel like a lot of these kind of objects are "cute" to the religious follower, and borderline frightening to anyone else.

Matthew McConaughey’s return to the Hollywood firmament has had an unusually organic quality to it.

Over the last couple years we've seen Matthew McConaughey change from a rom-com douchebag into an actor that we can not only take seriously, but we also genuinely like these days. I was a huge fan of HBO's True Detective, and while I haven't seen Dallas Buyers Club yet, it's pretty amazing that this kind of turnaround is possible in modern day Hollywood all by putting in some great performances. The McConaissance is real, and really goes to show how our taste can affect our perception of people.

Comedian Stephen Colbert will succeed David Letterman as host of The Late Show, CBS has confirmed, according to Variety

Today Colbert was announced to be David Letterman's successor on The Late Show. Very bittersweet for fans of Colbert's, since on the one hand he'll have a longer show and we get to see more of him, but at the same time we'll be seeing the end of the Stephen Colbert character that got us watching him in the first place. CBS's decision definitely shows their desire to try to appeal to a wide audience, as Colbert is hugely popular with youth as well as adults and will no doubt make for a widely approved choice.

Sunday night's Grammy Awards seemed to have an unofficial theme: People Tweeting That They Don't Know Who People Are.

Continuing with the idea of people's knowledge of culture, I remembered the Grammys from a couple years ago when Arcade Fire won record of the year. For some reason, this decision outraged people who were irate that a band they had never heard of could win record of the year. People like to feel that they have a strong knowledge of culture, so when something like the Grammys threatens their knowledge... well apparently they might get offended.

A culture of connoisseurs

Thinking of Charlene Elliott's article “Considering the Connoisseur” made me think of how just about anything nowadays has the capability to form its own group of followers. There seems to be a trend recently that people want to show off how they have a privileged relationship and understanding with a certain thing. An obvious example are people who like to say they listen to music you've probably never heard of, but it seems like we can see this kind of behavior in pretty much anything now. I've even spoken to people who like to brag about their vast knowledge and experience with hot sauces. Why is our culture like this, and.. am I supposed to be impressed?

Maybe I'm not being overly creative in this, but I thought I'd bring up Guy Fieri and what he represents in food culture. The guy is hosting what has got to be the Food Network's most popular show (it's the only one I've heard people talk about), and yet at the same time is probably the network's strongest example of low brow culture. For a network that tries to maintain a certain level of class in dealing with food, it's interesting to see how this show's popularity is affecting the network's programming and leading to more shows about "junk food". It seems to say that the Food network is starting to follow TLC in thinking class means nothing if you can't get ratings.

A lot of us have probably seen this Jimmy Kimmel segment before, where journalists go to a music festival (SXSW) to question individuals about bands that don't exist. The best part being that these people all give answers as if they've heard of the bands before. A great demonstration of how people love to show their cultural awareness and taste

In our class we talked a bit about subcultures, using punks as the main example. But I've realized there are a surprising number of parallels between punk culture and metal culture worth noting. Both started out as shocking and rejecting popular culture, yet over time we've seen them become a part of popular culture themselves. Punks and metal fans both have a pretty distinct style about them, as well as general attitudes, behavior, and even rituals (think headbanging). They've both got their roots as an underground culture, but its hard to really see either as separated from mass culture, and I think these parallels say a lot about subcultures in general

Why do we go to Tim Horton's as much as we do? Are we really trying to showcase our 'Canadianness'? Do we just love the taste of the drinks and food? Is it the wide selection to choose from? How much of it comes down to the advertising and image production of the company? These are all questions I wonder when I think of Tim's. We often talk about it as if it were the flag-bearer for Canada, but I question how many of us really feel this deep connection with Tim's? Personally, I get Tim's coffee all the time - it's just so damn convenient you could pass 3 stores on a 10 minute drive - but truthfully, I think the coffee is pretty awful, and I can't say I feel any profound Canadian connection to the place. So I wonder how much of Tim's current position is thanks to its sheer number of locations, or if it is truly its "working class" and Canadian image that appeals to people.

http://www.app.com/article/20140224/NJENT02/302240097/Survival-series-television-thriving?nclick_check=1

I was trying to think of some of the more positive aspects of reality television and inevitably thought of Survivor, the show that most people agree started it all. That got me thinking of other more recent shows with the theme of survival, such as Survivorman, Man vs Wild, and a newer show on Discovery called Naked and Afraid. It raises questions of whether shows like these could possibly provide some form of educational value (Survivorman/Man vs Wild), or are more a form of ‘social experiment’ as this article talks about (like Naked and Afraid/Survivor). Regardless, I think that any form of reality television is striving for entertainment above anything else, and so any value we might actually get from these shows has to be understood as entertainment first and foremost

While we talked about queer culture and "camp" behavior today I couldn't help but think of David Bowie. It hasn't really ever been totally clear if Bowie is heterosexual or bisexual, but I think it's difficult not to argue that the man fully embraced the camp sensibility. Not just in his clothing, but his music and performance also strongly gave the message that he didn't want any part of a macho, masculine identity, and instead preferred to challenge these ideals with outrageous clothing and flaunting "queer" behavior - to some extent, what Richard Dyer would call "camping about"

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