Acquiring the Taste

What a prog-rock band taught me about how we reach the profound

Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.

—Jerry Garcia

Loving weird music is a lot like loving hot sauce. At first it's just too much — but over time, what once tasted like Mount St. Helens now tastes like a creamsicle, and you find yourself needing something bolder. My own taste started to stretch in high school. The Grateful Dead were the springboard: experimental at their best, they got me absorbing more exotic flavors, and I liked it. From there it was a short step to prog rock — the Mahavishnu Orchestra, King Crimson — and to the groundbreaking improvisational jazz of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. And recently I rediscovered one of these groups — possibly the oddest of them all.

Gentle Giant formed in Portsmouth England in 1970. Their music sounds a bit like putting Jethro Tull, The Moody Blues, Igor Stravinsky, and a band of medieval minstrels in a blender. Their melodies, time signatures, and instrumentation scratch so hard against the grain that the friction itself becomes part of the pleasure. They understood this about themselves — which is why they named their second album Acquiring the Taste.

And a line from that album’s liner notes has recently given me philosophical agita. The band announced that their goal was “to expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of being very unpopular” — that they’d abandoned commercialism for something “far more substantial and fulfilling,” and that all the listener had to do was “sit back, and acquire the taste.”

You might be asking: well, why should I? Isn’t it the musician’s job to make their music approachable? Aren’t they, after all, entertainers?

Here’s what I’m struggling with. I often liken spirituality to music — and I genuinely can’t decide which way it’s supposed to run. Sometimes I’m sure the climbing is ours to do: that we, ordinary people, have to approach the great traditions on their own terms, adjust ourselves to fit what they actually are, and pay the full price of admission. And sometimes I feel the opposite — that the traditions themselves ought to meet us halfway, to translate and open the door wider, so that most of humanity isn’t left locked out of something critically magnificent.

The case for climbing comes down to a fear: that if we don’t, we end up with weak-sauce spirituality. In former times, if a Westerner sought Eastern enlightenment, he had to learn Sanskrit or Chinese, travel enormous distances, and undertake difficult, unfamiliar practices. Nothing was in English. There were no apps, no yoga studios down the block. If you were interested, you moved toward it — that was the only option. And there’s a wonderful purity in that. It wasn’t for everybody; it was for those who wanted it badly enough to give something up to get it. No different, really, from any advanced achievement in any discipline — you don’t get to the summit without the climb.

There is, however, a certain elitism in all that — one that seems to run counter to the foundational principles of these traditions. Presumably, since we are all developing souls, enlightenment (or transcendent consciousness, or God) is meant for everyone. So why should anyone be left behind? If circumstances conspire against you — no time to travel, no leisure to study, no quiet hours to contemplate — how is that fair? If you spend all day chopping wood to feed your family and collapse from exhaustion each night, are you simply barred from your soul’s deepest desire?

The Hasidic movement in Judaism arose, in part, as an answer to exactly this. It took the loftiest, most closely guarded mysticism — the world of Kabbalah — and brought its heart to the little guy: the radical claim that the simple laborer’s sincere prayer could reach as high as the scholar’s study. Access to God, it insisted, was not the private property of the learned elite.

So which is it? Unsatisfying as this kind of answer can be, it seems to me this is a case where both directions are equally real. It’s fine for there to be an elite — as long as everyone else has genuine access, and could, in principle, join the ranks of those at the highest rung. Nobody objects to Spotify giving away millions of hours of music to all comers while also offering a premium tier.

And there are real benefits to a premium spiritual account — a kind of access and development most of us, I suspect, can’t begin to fathom. It sits there, open for the taking, and the price of admission is not money but devotion. For the rest of us, though, a great deal can be done in translation. Given the manifold constraints of modern life, weaving these teachings into an ordinary existence in any meaningful way is itself a real achievement — not one to take lightly. The only version to be wary of is the counterfeit: not the tradition made accessible, but the tradition replaced by its packaging — the app that sells the feeling of arrival without the journey.

The musicians of Gentle Giant staked out high ground and refused to budge — but they enthusiastically welcomed anyone who made it up. In the end, they stayed put, and I climbed up to find them. It was worth every bit of the effort; I still love listening to them, all these years later. Would I fault anyone who isn’t drawn to it? Not for a second. Some things — music and spirituality alike — are an acquired taste.

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