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On Taste

on-taste.xyz · 9,505 words · saved by 1 readers

An essay by Pierre Vandenberghe

“Why does everything seem so ugly nowadays?” “When did we stop having good taste?” From AI slop to endless movie sequels, sweatpants, and grey concrete buildings, a thought seems to be crystallizing in many circles: our collective aesthetic environment is in decline. But is there any substance to this claim? For example, is popular music really getting worse? Is “back in my days, we used to have real music on the radio” just boomer nostalgia, or an actual phenomenon? To explore this, we can turn towards the Billboard Year-End Hot 100, the chart that ranks the best-performing singles of the…

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