Is "sophisticated" just another word for jaded?

Great Debates
1

I was having a discussion with a friend who considers himself to have excellent tastes in music and I asked him what was the most popular musician that he liked. It took him quite a while of looking through top 100 lists before he found an artist he had even grudging respect for. I accuse him of being a poseur hipster who can’t stand anything successful but he vigorously denies it and claims the it has nothing to do with the popularity, it’s all to do with the musical structure being simple and uninteresting.

Recently, I had been experiencing his same argument, except related to food. Lately, every time I cooked for people, I’d been asking them to go through a dish by dish breakdown of the meal and tell me what they liked and didn’t like about it. What surprised me was that many of the dishes I loved other people were ambivalent about and the dishes that bored me, others raved about. It turns out all that’s required to make my guests love a dish is a couple of money shot ingredients: cream, mushrooms, duck breast, short ribs etc. Fat & Umami essentially.

You see the same pattern in other areas as well: film buffs love quirky indie films, sophisticated travelers visit the most obscure corners of the world, english lit majors read dense literary novels.

Generally, the argument is that these things are better than the mainstream schlock that the masses consume. They’re deeper, more nuanced, more sophisticated.

But what if that was wrong? What if what is regarded as “sophisticated” tastes in is simply the result of being jaded. Like how drug addicts require ever increasing doses to feel the same high, people who become connoisseurs in any one area can’t be stimulated by the same simple pleasures that would please a dabbler.

If that’s the case, then we shouldn’t aspire to become sophisticated people. Instead, we should view them as sad, degenerate cases, similar to burnt out drug addicts.

Obviously, issues of taste are more complicated that what I’ve sketched out but, in a broad sense, can sophisticated tastes be explained as mere jadedness or can anyone mount a convincing defense for sophistication?

2

I would argue that sophistication is the ability to shift at will between a wide variety of different interpretive frames. For example, if I’m looking at a painting by Mark Rothko I consciously choose to operate within a different set of aesthetic principles than if I’m looking at a painting by Marc Chagall. This ability to adapt your critical framework to the work at hand allows you to have meaningful interactions with a much wider variety of artistic works.

Some people have trouble shifting frames. Because they’re locked into a single dominant aesthetic, they often discover that their enjoyment of many common works becomes easily “played out”. So they seek out more esoteric works that can still provide an unexpected experience. There’s nothing wrong with seeking out the exotic, but doing so doesn’t automatically make you sophisticated. You can be familiar with lots of obscure works and still be narrow and limited in your thinking. (That’s the hallmark of a snob.)

3

And a truly sophisticated person can appreciate simplicity, well-executed. For example, a person may be all over the latest molecular gastronomy and truly adore what they’re doing at The Fat Duck, etc., but still can thoroughly enjoy a really excellent hamburger or a ripe peach right off the tree.

4

This paragraph reminded me strongly of an acquaintance in college, who loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Then one day he came to me ranting bitterly about how the books were becoming popular and how that totally ruined them for him.

No, of course that’s not to say that such snobbery applies to all or even most sophisticates; but it seems quite possible to me that your friend’s derision of popular artists has at least some element of it. “Even a grudging respect”? “The musical structure being simple and uninteresting”? Bollocks. There’s plenty of garbage in pop music but there’s also great diversity and artistic brilliance.

On preview: What Claire Beauchamp said.

5

I think there’s several answers here. First, just because someone says they have sophisticated, doesn’t mean they actually are. I general, I think people prefer to be sophisticated when the alternative is, what, boring or plain. There are a number of people I’ve met in my life where they pretty much sought anything that seemed sophisicated for seemingly no other purpose than because it seemed sophisticated. The sort of logic that supports this in my experience is stuff like “A a local/indie label band, therefore they’re better than B major label band” or “X is an independent film so it’s way better than Y major studio film”. I’ll just generally ignore these sorts of opinions.

A second thing to keep in mind though, is that there’s a reason that these sorts of things go their reputation. Popular forms of art are popular for a reason, which is either because they have wide appeal, or it’s so awesomely good that people have no choice but to like it. Wide appeal often means simpler and more general themes. Independent art, however, has a smaller audience. It has a smaller audience simply because of a lack of wide appeal because it’s an unpopular genre or has themes that aren’t popular or whatever. Sometimes that’s because it’s more sophisticated, often, it’s just because it’s just not that popular. In other words, I think you’re more likely to find a sophisticated independent film than a sophisticated major studio film, but that doesn’t lead to the logic that all independent films are more sophisticated than all major studeo films.

To relate this to myself, I tend to listen to bands that are mostly on independent labels. This is primarily just because the type of music I like isn’t very popular. I will say that I think the music I listen to is, on average, more sophisticated than popular music, but I explain that more because of the appeal factor, and that it’s primarily incidental. In fact, there’s plenty of stuff that I like a lot that isn’t the least bit sophisticated.

Ultimately, I think The Hamster King and Claire hit what it means to personally be sophisticated. Where a lot of people will use it as a sort of defense for liking something obscure, it really means to me that you understand the art as a whole and can even appreciate that which they’re not terribly fond of. As in, a piece of music is sophisticated if it’s got lots of themes and complex rhythms and scales, but a person who likes only that is no more sophisticated than someone who likes only very simple melodies.

And, to be honest, I don’t even understand why people try to have sophisticated tastes. You like what you like and you don’t like what you don’t like. What’s wrong with that? Perhaps if you’re a world-class chef, I can understand wanting to have sophisticated tastes in food, or a professional musician, I can understand wanting to have sophisticated taste in music, but otherwise, who cares?

6

This is something I don’t understand at all, and it’s something I see all the time. I can understand feeling like you’ve lost something, but I can’t understand it ruining it for them. For instance, I remember seeing one of my favorite bands for the first time a number of years ago when they weren’t even big enough to headline at a small 200-300 person club. It was an awesome experience to see them because many of the people there really were fans, new about all their music, and it was overall a more fulfilling experience. Plus after the show, I was able to hang out and chat with the band.

Fast forward a few years, and they start to gain in popularity where they’re headlining shows at larger venues. I lost a lot of that experience where a number of the fans had just heard about them and didn’t have that attachment to their music, and the band couldn’t just hang out afterwards. I felt like I’d lost something special about them. Some people started to talk about how they were too popular and it was ruining it for them. My thoughts, however, were that I was glad they were getting more exposure because they deserved it, they’ve worked hard for it, and i’m glad that more people will get to hear this music.

So, the people that get upset when something you like gets popular (as if the Lord of the Rings ever wasn’t fairly popular during my lifetime), they’re being elitist and selfish, not sophisticated.

7

There is also the mindset that complicated for complicated sake is a good thing and therefore “sophisticated”

Which is bunk in opinion. If its “complicated” it should be for a good and actual reason.

8

I couldn’t understand it either, and tried to reason with him, but he wasn’t having any. That ordinary people, mere peons compared to one of his refined tastes, could enjoy TLOTR somehow profaned and diminished the work, seemed to be the gist of the jeremiad.

Well, to be fair, this was back in my college days, and I’m a 1971 graduate. So I may have more lifetime than you in which to see TLOTR grow from (relative) obscurity to mass popularity. :wink:

9

Take a look at Jo Stafford, one of the best femal vocalists that ever existed. You name a style of music from Jazz, to blues, to big band, to pop, she did it and did it better than anyone else.

She also did comedy records under Darlene Edwards and Cinderella G Stump. She did those well too.

That said, using Stafford as an example you can see sophistication in the arts isn’t an all or nothing thing.

You can sing high and low quality types of music. If you wrote off Jo Stafford, because of her comedy records, you’d be missing out on one the biggest and best female vocalists that ever existed. If you listened to her sophisticated stuff, you might write her off and never enjoy a hour of laughs you’d get form her off key waling of the BeeGee’s Stayin’ Alive

10

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Tom Lehrer yet. As he said in his introduction to “I Wanna Go Back To Dixie” -

“If you take the various popular song forms to their logical extremes, you can arrive at almost anything from the ridiculous to the obscene, or – as they say in New York – sophisticated.”

11

…sigh… I’ve explained this concept so many times that I just can’t be bothered.

However, I will never tire of cheap irony.

12

I like Claire Beauchamp’s take on it. I consider my taste in music to be fairly sophisticated. I will listen to baroque, classical, big band swing, jazz of all sorts, metal, or country, and can appreciate each for its own sake, either for its complexity or for its simplicity. I might be listening to Jerry Reed, Sabicas, Julian Bream, Chet Atkins, Les Paul, Johnny Smith, Wes Montgomery, or Stevie Ray Vaughan. It might be Glen Miller, or Spike Jones, or Ozzie. It’s having an open mind, and being able to appreciate each form or genre for its own sake.

If someone looks down his nose at something that “used to be good” just because the “filthy peasants” happen to like it too, he is a poser and a wannabe.

13

The only way to avoid becoming “jaded” in this sense is to consume everything so sparingly that the baser exemplars of whichever form of art (cuisine, music, architecture) never become boring.

Another thing is that an appreciation of more sophisticated forms of art is not like needing a higher dose to get the same high. An individual who is not used to alcohol will get really, really drunk if he consumes too much of it, whereas the person who is used to drinking heavily will only get moderately drunk. But someone whose favorite musician is Britney Spears will not get any sort of high from listening to the Brandenburg concertos. Higher forms of art are not a higher dosage of the same sort of thing.

14

I don’t think that sophistication and jadedness are synonymous or even alike. The implications of the word sophisticated have changed, and it’s become rather a designer word (along with nuanced, textured), and has practically moved out of the mainstream. It used to be so much easier years ago. Sophisticated, Cole Porter; naive, Burl Ives. Sophisticated, John P. Marquand; naive, Mickey Spillane. Sophisticated, Fred Astire; naive, Gene Autry. I could go on, but you get the picture. It’s a different world now. What changed it all was hipness, reserved for beatnicks and jazz fans in the 50s, it took on a broader meaning the next decade, began to move increasingly into the mainstream after that. Nowadays nearly everyone under seventy is hip to one degree or another.

Once upon a time the word sophisticated had serious implications, and in America it often meant people-culture-attitudes closer to England and Europe than the United States, in the days when most Americans considered themselves either hicks or closet hicks, incapable of genuine sophistication, which was largely the province of the old world, the best we could do was ape their culture. Well, those days are gone! Long gone. I think of the various uses of sophistication in America these days to be on the post-modern side, the bastard children, so to speak, of the old-style sophistication, which began to die a slow, agonizing death in the years after World War II. If this reads as too much of an essay, not enough of an answer, I apologize. This is the way I think, write.

15

Bloody sophisticate! :wink: Nice analysis.

16

I agree that “sophisticated” doesn’t have much to do with “jaded”. Personally I feel it has a lot more to do with snobbery. The LOTR example showed this perfectly - you can’t act like you have superior taste if everybody else has the same taste as you do.

I saw a video from the TED conference recently where the speaker mocked Applebee’s by suggesting that few in his intellectual audience would ever go there. It got me to thinking that there are several types of snobbery, depending on who you’re trying to impress. Wealth snobs just show what expensive things they can buy - houses, cars, jewelry, designer clothes, etc. Classical snobs model themselves on European nobility - fine art, opera, literature, French food, and “tasteful” opulence. Intellectual snobs gravitate toward the inexpensive but quirky - indy films, offbeat restaurants and music, travel to out-of-the-way destinations.

“Good taste” is often based more on social implications that anything real. We did a blind taste test with friends a few years ago. One odd result was that a store brand ice cream was preferred to Haagen Dazs. Blind tests frequently show that with things like wine and vodka people prefer different things when price and brand aren’t known.

People have a powerful need for social status, but status seeking is a zero sum game - we can only climb higher at the expense of the people we pass up. We’re much better off if we try to find happiness by just doing what we enjoy and trying to be friendly to everybody. At the very least, we should know not to admire (or admonish) other people because of their wealth or taste.

17

Thanks, EddyTeddyFreddy: :wink:

As to sophistication=snobbery, I agree up to a point, however I don’t like to go overboard with such things. Sophisticated is a word derived from the Greek for wise. Okay, most so-called sophisticates aren’t truly wise, and this aspect of the word have been in eclipse for generations (centuries?). The meaning that replaced it is more shallow and we have to live with it, i.e. sophisticates are those who go to the “right” restaurants, art galleries, movies and the like. At the core, however, I do think that there’s still something to the old, very old meaning of the word, though admittedly it doesn’t mean much nowadays. Example: jazz vs. classical music. Both carry implications of sophistication. Jazz concerts and jazz clubs are full of so-called sophisticates. They have a “special” language, know the scene, are usually well educated professionals. How do we know they’re well educated? Well, for one things they’re jazz fans. It sort of goes with the territory, as they say.

Classical music has a smaller audience, it seems, and whenever I’ve gone to a classical event, especially the “small” ones that don’t feature well known orchestras, singers or musicians, I find that the vast majority of people in the audience are there for love, not status. They’d drive through a blizzard to go to an evening with Debussy (or whatever). Often, if it’s an informal event, it’s extremely informal, as in jeans, sweaters, sneakers. Appearance doesn’t matter. The music is “all”. To my way of thinking this is genuine sophistication (obviously, my tastes are more classical, so to say this is self-serving, I freely admit): people who love a certain kind of music who attend concerts to hear that music for whom music is “king”, not how they appear, how much money they make, what kinds of cars they drive, whether they listen to NPR, are for Greenpeace, have been to Prague lately. So amid all the talk, snob and anti-snob, I do think there’s some truth to that old meaning of the word sophisticated, which has taken a helluva beating over the past century.

18

Agreed, john b.. “Sophisticated” certainly has a positive meaning if we’re talking about a sophisticated argument or a sophisticated analysis. It definitely carries the connotation of having additional knowledge. But as you seem to agree, often people think they’re sophisticated when really they’re doing trendy status seeking, and it’s good to avoid that trap.

Of course people may genuinely like various quirky or classical or expensive things, so we shouldn’t immediately assume they’re being snobbish. If you know people a little it isn’t usually hard to figure out. A bigger problem might be with ourselves. At some point when I was younger I realized I was looking to other people to figure out what I was “supposed” to like. That didn’t seem right.

19

Reminds me of the time I was lunching with a friend. We were discussing a mutual friend, and at one point I found myself saying: “Don’t tell [MF], but I like Billy Joel.” To which my friend replied, “Don’t tell [MF], but I like him too.”

20

Yes, truthpizza, it does seem that the word sophisticated has taken on a negative snob meaning, especially in recent years for my (our?) generation, which is to say Boomers, though with most of 'em the favored word is elitist, which I despise. Elite, like sophisticated, has a noble pedigree. There’s an elite (or rather Elite) typeface; many dry cleaners, bars, diners and restaurants used the name Elite; now it’s somewhat tainted. Sometimes I truly hate liberals and what they’ve done to language, and I’m moderate left of centrist myself.

Another example: as to people and personality types, those who were once sensitive are now vulnerable. These words are not identical, and yet they’ve come to mean the same thing. Sensitivity, broadly speaking, refers literally to the senses; thus one can have sensitive hearing, sensitive skin, a sensitive stomach. Sensitivity is strongly tied to feeling, thus when a person was called sensitive years ago it was a reference to deep feeling and yes, a potentially but not necessarily fragile disposition. Vulnerability means easily wounded. The Latin for wound is vulnus; a wound healing medication is or used to be called a vulnerary. The subtle changes in our language and culture, as we’ve moved from calling sensitive people vulnerable, speaks volumes.