Taste really can be good or bad

[Thumpalumpacus]

So you think it's okay that people listen to shitty music.

You declaring someone's music "shitty" doesn't make it shit.
They can say the same thing about your music.

Exactly, and it's not just because taste is subjective, it's because experience is subjective.

When I was a kid, I loved Kiss. The makeup, the fire-breathing, the lyrics about having a good time, it was what I was capable of getting at that time. It spoke to me, the simplicity of the music didn't ask me to ponder Beethoven or Brahms, the lyrics occasionally perplexed me (what was a rocket doing in his pocket? I had no clue), but I knew what "rock and roll all night, and party every day" meant.

From an aesthete's view -- having studied classical and jazz guitar, as well as played bars for a couple of decades, as well as discovered other musics from around the world -- from the aesthetic standpoint, I know that Kiss is shitty music.

But when I hear their music, it takes me back to a time when the world was simpler, mainly because I was simpler, and the jazz snob in me can relax and say, "hey, at least it got your dumb ass to playing the guitar, you mook."

What we define as good music is that music which speaks to us, about the things which move us.

That means that the concept of "good music" is necessarily subjective.

Now, that is a different kettle of fish than "technically innovative", "artistically unique", or "impressive" ... those categories overlap, to be sure, but like a Venn diagram, with non-congruent sections all around the overlap. And that's a good thing.