Here’s something I’m afraid to say out loud. I like Feist. I know I’m not supposed to like Feist. I’m not even sure how I know that, but I do. Her voice is too pretty, edgeless, located only in the most harmonically pleasing registers. Saying you like Feist is like not having an opinion, the greatest offense in certain Internetty precincts of our contemporary culture. You might as well say you like chocolate or potato chips. It says nothing about you. It’s not curated. It doesn’t say what we most want our music to say about us: I used to read Pitchfork.com until it got lame. You can’t like Feist, in other words, because it’s middlebrow. And loving the middlebrow is an unforgivable crime against taste. Loving something terrible makes you interesting—in some ways the lowbrow is actually higher-brow than highbrow. Watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta or being into shitty peasant sandals from Vietnam or low-res porn—that you can sing from the rooftops. But if you like Feist, it’s like you might as well tell people you’re having a wonderful sexual affair with your mother. Because you know who likes the middlebrow? The unacceptable. Boring people. The easily manipulated. But fuck it. I was in Le Pain Quotidien the other day (middlebrowest chain in New York!), and some Feist came on, and my mood brightened a little bit. Because you know what? I like potato chips. I like chocolate. And if Feist isn’t middlebrow enough for you, I will offend your fashionable sensibilities by saying that I, from time to time, enjoy hearing songs by Sting. I’ve never admitted that, even to myself. But (as long as it’s not from Ten Summoner’s Tales) I would gladly sit listening to Sting while I consume a three-pound fajita burrito at Chipotle wearing a J.Crew suit and reading Jonathan Franzen with Friday Night Lights on in the background. These are all things that make me happy to consume. And they are all middlebrow.

It’s not totally fair, of course, to classify Sting with J.Crew. They really belong to two different species of middlebrow. Because the middlebrow—having been subjected to the marketing genius of a generation that’s obsessed with the niche and constitutionally opposed to the middlebrow—now knows how to disguise itself as something else. Anyone can admit to liking J.Crew and Franzen (Chipotle is more polarizing, I don’t know why), because J.Crew and Franzen are really a new kind of middlebrow. The high middlebrow. (Which isn’t actually new: Turns out someone made up a similar classification in 1949.) Again, the point here isn’t to put down anything listed above, except Sting, whom I hate even when I like him, like an unpopular girl you’re attracted to in junior high school. Pulling off the high middle, writing Freedom, that takes enormous skill. The high middlebrow is middlebrow product for folks who say they hate the middlebrow. Which they probably don’t.

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People tend to hate the middlebrow because of its embarrassingly earnest desire to be liked, its scientific and successful approach to hitting people’s pleasure buttons. It points out the obvious fact that you’re not as much an individual as you’d like to think, that human beings are designed to like chocolate and potato chips and Jack Purcells. That’s where the high middle differs. Take Vampire Weekend. Sarah Goldstein, associate editor here, calls it "elevator music from Africa." She’s right, of course: Last Christmas season, companies like Tommy Hilfiger and Honda used the song "Holiday" in their ads, even though it’s supposed to actually be about American imperialism. (Everyone: Is there a more tired topic than American imperialism? I mean, we’ve been imperialistic assholes since technically, I’m told, 1898. And we’re going to continue to be until we simply lack the power to imperialize other people anymore. You know what’s great about the middlebrow? It won’t make you swallow a redundant lesson about American imperialism while you’re shopping for slim-fit chinos. Because if "Holiday" were really, at its core, about American imperialism, no way would it have been in Tommy Hilfiger ads.) While it associates itself with something highbrow (music from other cultures, critiques of society), Vampire Weekend is really just unchallenging, and really pleasurable, middlebrow music.

If you’re still having trouble classifying all this stuff, it may only be because you possess a durable sense of logic. What the high middle does is further mess with an already totally whacked-out logic of what’s high- and lowbrow now. I mean, is a T-shirt highbrow just because it costs $345 and says Maison Martin Margiela on it? Part of the anxiety here is being able to figure out at any moment what brow anything is.