Zadie Smith on Music, Ecstasy, and the Collapse of Taste
Everyone has at least one artist they have dismissed out of hand. Be it for the voice, the style, or even just the image, you put up an immediate wall and just say “no, thanks”.
Sometimes that rejection is honest. Some music does not reach us, and that is fine. Nobody needs to fake a private religious experience with every canonized genius. But sometimes taste is not nearly as noble as it sounds. Sometimes we reject something because it belongs to a feeling we do not want to be seen having. Or we dismiss an artist because the wrong person loved them first. Maybe we even call a song embarrassing because it gets too close.
Zadie Smith is very good at writing about this kind of embarrassment.
That is one reason her writing on music has more life than the usual “novelist takes on pop culture” routine. She treats not as refined, but as something more unstable, as a defense system or a locked door.
Taste can be real, of course. But it can also be tribal, inherited, class-coded, racialized, generational, snobbish, or just stubborn in a way we later try to dignify as principle.
That is where Smith’s music writing gets interesting. She is not simply a novelist who has written smartly about the likes of Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Jay-Z, and others. Across those essays and fictional moments, music becomes one of her favorite ways of testing the self. It finds the weak spots in our self-image. It catches us pretending to be more finished than we are.
The famous example is Joni Mitchell.
Smith’s “Some Notes on Attunement” is often remembered as a conversion story. She did not like Joni Mitchell. Then, eventually, she did.
That summary is true, but it makes the essay sound too polite. The drama is not simply, “I changed my mind.” It’s more, “what kind of person was I when I could not hear this?”
That is a much more uncomfortable question.
Because, after all, it wasn’t Joni Mitchell who changed. The voice, the songs, had always been there. The emotional register Smith once resisted had not secretly improved while she was away.
It was the listener who changed.
Anyone who has had a delayed conversion to an artist knows the humiliation. You spend years thinking, “Just not my thing, sorry”. The voice is too high. Too exposed, soft, earnest. Perhaps too much like someone else’s idea of depth. Then one day the same song comes on and the whole objection collapses.
That is why Joni’s voice matters so much in Smith’s essay. More than merely a vehicle for lyrics, it is both the barrier and the doorway. That idiosyncratic, emotionally risky voice asks the listener to adjust. It waits for you to become capable of hearing it, rather than meeting you exactly where you are.
It’s important that Smith’s eventual attunement is not just a new preference. It is a small rearrangement of the self, as crazy as that sounds. Her taste expands because the old self could not hold.
Music can defeat taste slowly, even over the course of years and years.
But Smith’s writing becomes even more alive when music does not wait for the mind to catch up. Sometimes the body gets there first.
That is part of what makes Smith’s essay “Joy” such an important companion to her music writing, even when it is not only about music. She is interested in experiences that exceed ordinary pleasure. Joy, in her hands, is not just a nice afternoon or a well-made cup of coffee. More disruptive than that, it shakes something loose. It is wonderful partly because it is hard to manage.
Dance does this too.
In Swing Time, dance is class, race, imitation, envy, talent, longing, rivalry, and escape moving through bodies. The narrator and Tracey relate through rhythm before they can explain everything dividing them. Dance becomes a way of imagining freedom, but also a reminder that freedom is not handed out evenly.
Which is very Smith. She understands the thrill of movement, but she does not turn it into a cheap cure. A beat can make the body feel briefly ungoverned. The world is still waiting outside with its old rules, and it has not misplaced your address.
Still, while the music is happening, taste looks ridiculous.
Taste is at the wall with its arms crossed. The body is already in the middle of the floor, betraying every theory it ever claimed to have.
That betrayal can be thought of as knowledge arriving by another route. Music can reveal what the intellect has been editing out. You can have a whole polished idea of what kind of person you are, what kind of music you respect, and then the right song catches you at the wrong angle and suddenly your system needs repairs.
Smith is drawn to that breakdown. She is a cerebral writer, but not a bloodless one. Her best work understands that thought often arrives late. The body has already registered the room, the voice, the rhythm, the humiliation, the desire.
If dancing shows the self losing control from the listener’s side, singing makes the problem stranger.
A voice feels intimate. That is why listeners get greedy around singers. We hear Billie Holiday and think we have been allowed close to something private. We hear the behind-the-beat phrasing, the worn elegance, the conversational closeness, the ache, and we start mistaking feeling for access.
Smith knows better.
Her engagement with Holiday, especially in “Crazy They Call Me,” pushes against the lazy romance of treating pain as authenticity. Holiday’s voice is often reduced to suffering made beautiful, as if the artist were simply a wound that learned how to sing. That is too easy. It is also too convenient for listeners.
It lets us turn a complicated artist into an emotional service. But a singer’s voice is not a diary accidentally set to music.
It is an instrument, a style, a strategy, a shield, a public object, a form of labor. Holiday’s voice carries pain, but it also carries timing, intelligence, humor, glamour, refusal, and control. It sounds close, but it keeps its final distance.
That distance matters. Smith is deeply interested in the space between public image and private self, between the person and the performance, between what the audience thinks it owns and what the artist withholds. Holiday becomes a perfect subject because her voice seems to promise intimacy while resisting possession.
This is where Smith’s music writing overlaps with her fiction. She is always alert to voices: how people speak, how they perform class, how they move between worlds, how style reveals and hides at the same time. Music intensifies that question because it makes the voice physical. You hear identity, but you also hear identity being made.
Jay-Z gives Smith another version of the problem.
With him, voice is not the fragile, intimate thing listeners want to rescue. It is built, strategic, public, and controlled. Rap makes authorship audible as timing, boast, memory, argument, persona, pressure, and release. Jay-Z’s voice is making a self in motion.
That is why Smith’s interest in him makes sense. She has always been fascinated by self-fashioning, like how people become legible and how they tell stories about themselves without being fully reducible to those stories.
Jay-Z turns that into sound.
The voice is biography, but not only that. It is craft, mythmaking, business, control. It is a public self with rhythm.
He also exposes another failure of taste, the old habit of separating serious literary culture from popular music. Smith is too sharp for that game. The question is not “Is this literature?” as if literature were a gated community and Jay-Z were waiting outside with references.
The better question is what forms of intelligence become audible when we stop treating musical taste as a class performance.
Put Joni Mitchell, the dance floor, Billie Holiday, and Jay-Z together, and Smith’s music writing starts to look less scattered than it might seem.
She keeps returning to the same instability.
Taste says, “This is who I am.”
Music says, “For now?”
A Joni Mitchell song slips past an old defense. A club track makes the body answer before the mind can object. Billie Holiday’s voice gives listeners the feeling of nearness while refusing to become theirs. Jay-Z’s flow turns persona into authorship in motion.
In each case, music disturbs the finished self.
That is why Smith is such a compelling writer on the subject. She does not treat music as decoration or proof of cultural literacy. She treats it as a pressure point. Music reveals the places where identity is more porous than we pretend. It shows that taste may be real, but it is rarely innocent.
We use taste to keep ourselves intact. To signal belonging. To avoid embarrassment. To keep certain feelings at a safe distance. To insist, quietly or loudly, that we already know who we are.
Then a song gets through.
The mind may arrive first with an opinion. It may even be a good opinion. But in Smith’s best music writing, the song keeps going after the opinion has finished talking.
If this sent you down a rabbit hole, there’s more where that came from.
Explore deeper essays on albums, artists, novels, writers, and the strange overlap between music and literature in Music Essays & Deep Dives, Literature Essays & Deep Dives, and Intersections Essays & Deep Dives.
