Debunking the Jealousy Narrative

On Taste, Popularity, and the Freedom to Disagree

There’s a quiet pressure that comes with taste.

You hear someone everyone loves. Someone “important,” or “undeniable,” and you wait and wait for it to hit you the way it seems to hit everyone else. And guess what? It doesn’t.

And unfortunately, that’s where the trouble starts.

Rather than simply saying, “this isn’t for me,” something else sneaks in. A kind of moral side-eye. I like to call it the voice of second-guessing, always carrying its usual messages: What’s wrong with me? Or worse—am I just jealous?

And let me just say, that word gets used like a diagnostic tool. It’s a word that’s thrown around way too casually, and way too confidently.

Jealousy.

To put it lightly, it becomes the default explanation anytime admiration isn’t unanimous.

Now, let’s be fair—sometimes jealousy does rear its ugly head. After all, we’re human. We see someone else being showered in attention and praise, like they’re caught in a rainstorm of success, and every now and then, something in us shifts. That’s real.

But we over-assign it. We hand out the jealousy label like a parking ticket.

Sometimes, it’s not that complicated. Because sometimes you just don’t like something. And not because you don’t understand it, or because it’s flying over your closed-minded head. In fact, that’s the twist: you might actually hear everything—the intention, the licks, the craft.

And still… nothing moves you.

That’s not jealousy. That’s just good old-fashioned taste.

And taste is personal in a way we don’t always respect. It’s shaped by your history, your aspirations, your first loves, and your last disappointments. It’s not a consensus sport. It doesn’t take a vote. And it doesn’t care who’s trending.

Still, somehow we still act like popularity comes with moral authority.

As if something being widely accepted means it has automatically earned entry into your inner aesthetic world.

It hasn’t.

What’s really happening is more subtle.

We’ve built an unspoken hierarchy: if someone more popular or more established than you dismisses something, they’re “discerning.” However, if you do it, you’re “bitter.” If you don’t hear what everyone else hears, you’re “missing something.”

Same act. Just a different diagnosis.

Unfortunately, that’s not truth. That’s simply positioning.

And once you see that, it gets a little easier to breathe.

For me, this shows up in a very specific way.

There are certain players I keep hearing about, where the enthusiasm is loud and almost evangelical. So I’ll go back and listen again. Just to be fair. Just to make sure time hasn’t secretly upgraded my ears without telling me.

Soon enough, within a few bars, it returns. That familiar, quiet certainty.

Yeah… still not for me.

And I don’t mean that as rejection in the dramatic sense. There’s no need for some dramatic declaration or public argument.

Just simple recognition. And I move on.

Because you realize that at a certain point, there’s nothing to argue.

Nobody’s wrong or needs to be corrected. It just is what it is. You like what you like. “It be what it be,” as some like to say.

Sometimes, though, this whole conversation about taste slips into something almost comedic.

I remember when I was at Berklee College of Music decades ago. There was a teacher who, for reasons never fully explained, did not like John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins.

His analysis was simple.

Coltrane “just played a lot of notes” and didn’t have any soul. Rollins, apparently, was just “running patterns.” Even now, I can’t say that without laughing a little. Not just for what he said, but because of the certainty behind it.

That kind of certainty ages strangely. And, as you might guess, he wasn’t exactly a towering example of the craft himself.

Back to my original point, maybe that was his taste.

Maybe he needed something more linear. Something that was more horizontal with less harmonic pressure, if you will. In other words, where the line sings rather than climbs. You could imagine him preferring someone like Johnny Hodges or Paul Desmond—players who inhabit melody rather than wrestle harmony. Less vertical architecture and more song.

That’s a real preference.

But preference and dismissal are not the same sport.

To call Coltrane soulless isn’t taste, it’s overreach dressed up as certainty. And to reduce Rollins to patterns is to miss the depth of what’s actually happening.

And I remember years later, a young saxophonist caught a surprising amount of backlash after publicly saying that Wayne Shorter wasn’t really his thing. And what struck me wasn’t even the opinion itself. It was how quickly people reacted as though he had committed some kind of moral offense rather than simply expressing taste.

Which is funny when you think about it.

Because if someone as universally admired and deeply respected as Wayne Shorter doesn’t connect with everybody, then maybe that’s the point. Taste was never supposed to be unanimous.

So was the teacher at Berklee College of Music wrong? Was that young tenor player wrong?

In a strict sense… maybe. Or maybe they just lacked the ears for that particular language.

And that’s the part we don’t like admitting: sometimes what we call “taste” is just limitation. Which is something I alluded to earlier.

Yet that doesn’t make it evil. It just makes it incomplete.

Which brings us back to something simpler. You don’t have to like everything that everyone else swears by.

You don’t need to turn your preferences into indictments or your indifference into insecurity. And you definitely don’t need to apologize for your own ears.

Here’s the truth: not everything on the plate is yours to eat. Some things you just push to the side and wait for the dessert. Or better yet, save your appetite for what actually nourishes you.

One of the less obvious side effects of not being able to accept that your taste might be different is what it does to developing artists.

Because if you can’t sit comfortably with that difference, you start to second-guess it. And before long, that uncertainty becomes imitation.

Here’s a common scenario: you hear what’s popular. You see what gets shared, reposted, and talked about like it’s the center of gravity. And slowly, almost without noticing, a thought creeps in: Maybe I should be doing that too.

Not because it’s honest for you. But because it’s validated. And that’s a dangerous shift.

The reality is that what often follows isn’t growth, it’s displacement.

You begin adjusting your priorities, not toward what you actually hear internally, but toward what seems to be working externally.

And the result is predictable: frustration.

The problem is that not only do you not become that voice, you slowly lose your own.

Eventually, you’re not really building a language anymore. You’re assembling one. A little of this player, a little of that trend—basically anything that’s currently being applauded.

And somewhere in there, you stop sounding like you’re developing something personal, and you start sounding like someone merely participating. Just another cog in a wheel that was already turning before you got there.

That’s why the ability to say, “that’s not for me,” cleanly, without apology, becomes more than preference. It becomes protection.

It keeps you from outsourcing your voice. And maybe that’s the real value here. Not rejection or critique. But preservation.

To end this, there’s a small parable I wrote that I sometimes use for teaching purposes. To start, the teacher tells a story about a player he calls the invisible man.

A student asks, “Was the invisible man always invisible?”

And the teacher says, “No. There was a time he was seen and heard all over the world. People could recognize him after just two notes.”

“And what happened?” the student asks.

The teacher pauses.

“He made one of the gravest mistakes an artist can make.”

The student leans in. “What is that?”

The teacher says:

“He tried to become just like everybody else.”