You now have two options; do you stick with this hamburger next time or do you mix things up a little? It's not foie gras, the hamburger is ubiquitous enough that you're bound to be aware of all the different things you can do with it. Do you try some bacon and cheese next time? What kind of cheese then? The humble cheddar slice or do you thrown some Cashel blue on there? Ever hear of tobacco onions? They're fantastic on burgers. Of course, you can simply choose to stick with it; you liked the one you've already tried, no need to go changing anything. Sure all that fancy garnish is just for foodies and hipsters, you like your hamburger plain and you see nothing wrong with that.
Of course there is nothing wrong with that. There really is nothing wrong with only having ate and planning to eat, only one type of hamburger. Just as there's nothing wrong with only watching films made in English or only listening to stadium rock. But there's nothing right with it either. Sticking with what you know is something we do out of comfort and at times is done out of fear and a trepidation towards the unknown. For that reason, there's nothing to be ashamed of in sitting there, eating your plain hamburger, listening to U2's greatest hits before settling in for a Friends marathon, but it's nothing to be proud of either.
Food and culture are two of the very few areas where the idea of kicking up is as derisable as kicking down. To return to the hamburger, we all know the simple joy of the plain hamburger, especially at a summer BBQ. Yet I'd wager you also know how good it can be to mix things up with the hamburger. We've all had enough nights in the likes of GBK to know what makes a great burger, what makes an awful one and what makes a curious one. We know that some go well with beer, whilst others go better with wine. We know all of this and yet the one we keep coming back to, our all-time favourite, could be that first, plain hamburger. It's bland, it's lazy and it has the nutritional value of a rubber coaster; but then, lazy isn't necessarily bad, there's comfort in familiarity and sometimes it good to eat things that are bad for us.
One night at University a friend was going through my CDs looking for something to put on. As he searched he would repeat the phrase, "I only want to hear hardcore dance music" (the only people still listening to hard house in 2003 were the Scots). It's important to note that this wasn't before some night out, nor were we prepping for a house party. He was looking for something to put in his discman (remember those?) before he walked to campus. I find it impossible to imagine wanting to listen to hard-house at nine-thirty on a Tuesday morning*. But he wasn't in a particular mood or taken by some random whim, he literally only ever listened to hard-house. It was his musical accompaniment of choice. Night out? Hard house. House Party? Hard house. Walk in the park? Hard house. Romantic night-in? Hard house. For him, hard-house was his plain hamburger.
If we've all experimented with the humble hamburger, why can we find it so hard to experiment with everything? There are of course as many reasons for this as there are people doing it (so somewhere in the region of seven billion reasons) but unquestionably, two of the main factors are our use of language and the culture of individualism.
Individualism today can be broken down into three messages. The first is to always try new things, the second is that you are always correct and the final is that you are the most important person in the world. Marketing and social media have seen to the solidification of the latter two points but no-one seems to have stopped and realised that they're incompatible with the first message. If we are always trying new things, two things are certain; we'll find out that we're wrong, a lot, and we'll also find out that we are far from being the most important person in the world. Viewed in this light, the decision to stick with the plain hamburger isn't so much a choice as it is a prerogative or a defining feature.It's at this point that we get scared about trying new things, this is when we get defensive and retreat to the comfort of our plain hamburger.
This is then reinforced by the streak of aggression in all the language we use around culture. Music we don't like isn't simply music we don't like, it's shit. Films we don't want to see aren't simply films we don't want to watch, they're wanky. How many times have you heard something being derided as "artsy-fartsy"? This is far from being an issue exclusive to culture, I've lost count of the amount of coverage I've read, seen and heard that deride the intellectualisation of football journalism. Consciously we've a spectrum in our head; at one end is everything we've labelled as high art, at the other, everything we've labelled as low art. We place our likes and interests somewhere on that spectrum and then we only branch out into things we've placed next to us on that spectrum. If we step back for a second and think about this rationally, we can see how preposterous the idea is. We can enjoy the plain hamburger but why rob ourselves of the Michelin Star dining experience? We can own a lot of Kings of Leon records but why deprive our ears of someone like Kraftwerk? You can of course opt to keep to the plain hamburger and Kings of Leon's greatest hits but don't think for second that you're doing anything other than denying yourself new experiences.
Let's work through an example; ITV's The X Factor has consistently been one of the most popular television shows of the last twelve years. Many of the winners and contestants on the show have gone onto have hugely successful music careers. There's nothing wrong with being a fan of The X Factor, in fact quite a lot of work has gone into making the show incredibly easy to like. Similarly, there's nothing wrong with liking the music put out by the show's stars; again, a lot of work goes into making their music likeable. The show and it's music are however, simply a plain hamburger. The music is so lacking in invention or creativity that one could take any given song from any given season and swap for another without anything feeling out of place. For show that's been running since 2004, that borders on the absurd. The show is also guilty of that most heinous of cultural crimes; it derides the new and the different. The show has a formula for what it feels is the "X Factor" and anyone who doesn't fit the mold is mocked on national television. If all musicians were assessed on this X Factor model, we don't have to think long before we start excluding many of the great artists. As I write this I'm listening to Bjork, it's a fair bet she'd have never made it to the judges' houses.
We all have our plain hamburger. We all have something that we know is better in some other format but our quite content to just leave as is. But this attitude is only healthy if we've sampled the other burgers and continue to sample the other burgers. It's perfectly fine to exclusively listen to stadium rock but don't deride the Norwegian nose-flute until you've sampled it. Who knows, you might get to really like Norwegian nose-flute.
*Yes, I know what you're thinking, maybe Tuesday mornings are the best time to listen to hard house but I'll never know. Well for the purposes of writing this, I did try it and all I can say is that I care even less for the genre now.
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