1996, The Beginning of the End of Taste

· by · in

In an earlier piece I argued that today’s right-wing masculinities use the performance of bad taste to demonstrate a virility undomesticated by anything so feminine as a sense of style, or worse, a wife. Aesthetic taste emerged in the enlightenment as a component of the white masculine objectivity and universality required to participate in civil society/the public sphere/etc. Exhibiting good taste demonstrated one’s alignment with the rational – and thus objective and universal – judgment that qualified you to do things like vote, serve on juries, or otherwise participate in the civic life of a citizen. And while the right is leaning into bad taste, personalization algorithms like TikTok’s “For You Page” have driven avant-garde internet cultures far away from anything like a monoculture or a commitment to shared norms and standards about what counts as “good” or “highbrow.”

Taste’s demise over the first quarter of the 21st century was signposted by three events in 1996: 

  • The publication of sociologists Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern’s article “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore” in the scholarly journal American Sociological Review;
  • The passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996;
  • The passage of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996.

Each of these events signals how ideologies and practices of privatization (such as the ones Melinda Cooper discusses in Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism) are shifting one aspect of the taste/politics/identity compound that leads directly to today’s alt-right masculinity.

Peterson & Kern argue that elite musical taste has shifted away from highbrow exclusivity towards a more ecumenical “omnivorousness” that includes genres that are traditionally highbrow and lowbrow, like jazz (highbrow) and metal (lowbrow), or opera and bluegrass. In their sense of the term, omnivorous taste means “an openness to appreciating everything” (904). To “appreciate” a work of art does not necessarily mean to like or enjoy it, but to understand it in its native context. For example, Peterson & Kern explain that omnivores “appreciate and critique [a genre] in the light of some knowledge of the genre, its great performers, and links with other cultural forms, highbrow and lowbrow (904). In this sense, taste is not an index of personal preference, but of an individual’s knowledge and acuity; omnivores don’t identify with genres or artists as fetishized commodities, but with the mastery of musical knowledge as such. For this reason, Peterson & Kern argue that the bourgeois good taste of industrial capitalism has gone out of fashion because omnivorousness is more reflective of how knowledge workers mark and understand status:

While snobbish exclusion was an effective marker of status in a relatively homogeneous and circumscribed WASP-ish world that could enforce its dominance over all others by force if necessary, omnivorous inclusion seems better adapted to an increasingly global world managed by those who make their way, in part, by showing respect for the cultural expressions of others. As highbrow snobbishness fit the needs of the earlier entrepreneurial upper-middle class, there also seems to be an elective affinity between today’s new business-administrative class and omnivorousness (906).

Omnivorousness is how technocrats understand and mark cultural capital. It’s not surprising, then, that the programmers Nick Seaver studies in his book Computing Taste value musical “avidity” above all, as it represents an openness to discovering and learning new things, an interest in advancing one’s mastery of musical knowledge.

The publication of the Peterson & Kern article marks 1996 as the year when quantitative social science research demonstrated that old-fashioned bourgeois good taste was on its way to becoming a thing of the past as technocrats rose to power in the very early days of the dot-com era.

Signed into law by President Bill Clinton in February of that year, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first law to regulate the internet like broadcast and telephonic media. That act is more (in)famous for its other major component, which deregulated media ownership by removing restrictions on the number of media entities any one person or company could own in a single market. This led to massive media consolidation and homogenization as giant corporations like Clear Channel did to local radio what Wal-Mart had recently done to local small businesses: put them and their local color out of business and replace them with standardized outlets that look the same in Hawaii as they do in Vermont.

As I wrote about here, the Telecom Act led to a market bubble in alternative rock stations. As Clear Channel, CBS, and other megacorps vacuumed up new stations, in markets where they already owned a country station they often switched one of their new acquisitions to the then-trendy alt rock format, as this first was seen to appeal to a demographic similar to but not identical with country’s. When the bubble burst in 97/98, programmers doubled down on what they thought their core audience was – white men 12-34 – with content and DJ banter that reflected mainstream stereotypes about white masculine grievance. In the 70s and 80s, part of what made post-punk “alternative” or non-mainstream was the kind of “alternative” masculinity many of its stars performed: in one way or another, artists like Robert Smith, Dave Gahan, or Morissey were, as Lauren Goodlad put it, “men who feel and cry” (Communities of the Air, 134). This masculine vulnerability stood in contrast to the hard, transgressive masculinities of mainstream rock stars like Dee Snyder or John Bon Jovi. However, since the late 1970s right-wing media worked to reframe white masculine identity around a narrative of personal injury. For example, Claremont McKenna sociologist Friedrick Lynch’s 1989 book Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action paints white men as victims of so-called “reverse discrimination.” As sociologist Jennifer Peirce found in her book Racing for Innocence, stories of white men angry about affirmative action flooded the mainstream media in the leadup to the 1996 US Presidential election. Filling their airwaves with songs and banter where “women ambivalently represent both indispensable sexual gratification and emasculating discipline” (Goodlad 143), turn-of-the-millennium alt rock radio flips post-punk’s masculine vulnerability into misogynist grievance in order to attract men listeners whom the rest of the media is encouraging to see themselves in those very terms. Described by Goodlad as “emasculating discipline,” this sort of misogyny frames women as unjustifiably dominating and domineering, of usurping men’s masculine authority out from under them. Just as affirmative action was supposedly robbing white men of the college admissions and jobs their gender and racial status had previously entitled them to, here women are framed as robbing men of their entitled mastery over others. Noting how Limp Bizkit’s hit “Nookie” “translates a discernibly Rage [Against The Machine]-indebted sound onto a depoliticzed anger at an unfaithful girlfriend” (147), Goodlad illustrates how turn-of-the-millennium alt rock radio made the political personal by putting modern rock’s musical aesthetics to voice lyrics about private feelings of romantic injury. Sara Banet-Wiser locates the rise of “popular misogyny” with the spread of social media, but here we can see a masculinity rooted in anti-feminist backlash spread in a much older broadcast technology. The Telecom Act created the conditions that ultimately led to alt rock radio becoming what former KROQ program director Kevin Weatherly described in 2005 as “red state rock.”

Officially named the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 codified that flip from public to private into federal law. As scholars like Melinda Cooper have shown, this act transformed welfare from a public benefit or entitlement into a program for compelling private individual and family responsibility. The House Ways and Means Committee described its aim as “attacking dependency” by forcing people to go to work within two years of receiving benefits, compelling parents receiving benefits for their children to marry their child’s other parent, and enforcing child support payment. The point was to force people off dependency on public funds by making them rely on themselves and their families. Whereas white women and people of color were traditionally barred from participating in the public sphere because their “private” differences in race and/or gender made them too biased to be objective or universal, the Welfare Reform Act is the product of an ideology that frames them as lacking sufficient private (individual and family) responsibility. The figure of the “Welfare Queen” is an anti-Black stereotype about women who supposedly have lots of kids on welfare and live luxuriously on the taxpayers’ dime. Emerging in the Reagan 80s, this figure demonizes poor Black women for not exhibiting the private individual and family responsibility necessary to keep themselves off public support. The politics of race and gender had shifted from a binary between the white masculine public sphere and the feminized, non-white private sphere to one where the presence or absence of private responsibility cut the lines around patriarchal racial capitalist personhood. Applying these logics of private individual and family responsibility on the ground, which continues to be significantly shaped by white supremacist capitalist patriarchal domination, the Welfare Reform Act effectively deregulates racial, gender, and sexual exclusion by outsourcing to families and individuals the work of overcoming and ensuring against oppressive and exclusionary obstacles (rather than actively excluding them from civil society with laws restricting voting or full citizenship).

Taken together, these three threads where traditionally public things flip private – the end of bourgeois sensus communis in favor of technocratic individual skill and adeptness; masculinity as anti-feminist personal injury; the reworking of race/gender/sexual exclusion as private individual and family responsibility – created the situation we have today in 2025 where right-wing influencers loudly proclaim their bad taste as a way to show they are undomesticated by feminine things and fully masters of themselves (and other things, like AI agents they use to create terrible works of art). The roots of this are long and go back way past social media and Web 2.0, and they are part of a broader political and epistemological shift away from “the public” and towards the private sphere framed specifically as private individual and family responsibility (and not as “private markets”).

I’m not saying the Peterson & Kern, the Telecom Act, or the Welfare Reform Act caused any of these changes; rather, they’re inflection points where a lot of different forces, people, and phenomena come together in an especially legible configuration, like signposts on the “subjective but non-intentional” (i.e., it has a trajectory but no one person or group of people is driving the thing) path of history. Unpacking these phenomena helps me identify the reasons why bourgeois good taste is out and alt-right bad taste is in.

** Another possibly relevant 1996 event is Randy Michaels’ appointment as CEO of Jacor Communications, which bought Rush Limbaugh’s show the following year and then was acquired by Clear Channel by the end of the decade with Michaels ascending to Clear Channel CEO. Michaels is notoriously conservative to the point that a friend recently quipped “surprised he doesn’t have a cabinet position” in the Trump administration. We often think of Fox News and social media as the main drivers of 21st century neoconservatism, but my point here is that this all has roots in the post-Telecom Act radio industry, both on the FM on corporate alt rock radio and on the AM with talk hosts like Limbaugh.