This is something I’ve been meaning to write since at least 2020, but it’s a bit involved and I didn’t have a good place to write it. I’ll talk about what I think is a useful distinction about different approaches to making music and how that transfers to food. This is probably going to be a lot longer than anything I’ll write for a while. Skip to the bottom if you just want to know what music I’m listening to now.
I’m hoping to write at least once a month.
art music vs folk music vs popular music
These are 3 terms that are not mutually exclusive but describe what the musicians are trying to do when they make music.
Probably the easiest one to start with is folk music. When Americans say “folk music”, what they usually mean is a specific kind of American folk music, maybe something like Bob Dylan. But that’s just one kind of folk music, which is basically any music that is part of a musical tradition. And there are many, many folk musics in the world. Blues is a folk music, as is Tuvan throat singing, as is music passed down by griots in West Africa, etc.
Popular music is any kind of music that is intended to appeal to a broad audience and is usually distributed through some sort of mass media. This means that most music consumed by most people today is at least partly popular music. This is most obvious for pop music, which is the most extreme form of popular music, but even in niche genres, professional musicians are trying to make a living, so trying to appeal to larger audiences is usually part of the deal. What makes the distinction between folk music and popular music difficult is that most popular music does owe something to some kind of musical tradition, so there’s no clear line between the two.
Finally, art music is any kind of music that attempts to do “serious art” with music. Some people define it way more narrowly, defining art music as music that is considered high status, but this seems just elitist and not terribly useful for understanding what the artists are trying to do. This quote from Wikipedia captures how I want to use this term:
Musician Catherine Schmidt-Jones defines art music as "a music which requires significantly more work by the listener to fully appreciate than is typical of popular music". In her view, "[t]his can include the more challenging types of jazz and rock music, as well as Classical".
Classical music may be the most obvious example of art music, but you can certainly play rock as art music. That includes basically all of prog rock, and as another example that might be more surprising, plenty of heavy metal.1
Another way to talk about the popular vs art music distinction is that popular music tries to get a lot of people to like you (width of support), while art music tries to get the people who like you to like you a lot (depth of support). You can see that someone might attempt to do both at the same time, and succeed to varying degrees.
And again, there’s no clear line between art music and popular music or folk music. Maybe something like serialism would be almost pure art music, but most music has some art music aspects along with folk or popular music aspects. The fact that rock musicians can “sell out” indicates that people expect them to pursue what is artistically true to themselves and not just the most profitable music they can make.
Case study: jazz
One interesting case when you think about these 3 terms is jazz. Here’s a sentence from Wikipedia on the origin of jazz:
Jazz originated in the late-19th to early-20th century. It developed out of many forms of music, including blues, spirituals, hymns, marches, vaudeville song, ragtime, and dance music.
So jazz came from multiple folk music traditions as well as some early forms of popular music.
Then it became a major form of popular music in the US, one of the first to be distributed through recordings—Original Dixieland Jass Band’s first record dates from 1917. As bands get bigger in the Swing Era of the 20s and 30s, it’s still a popular music, with a clear constraint that you need to play danceable music.
But around 1940, something interesting happens. Jazz musicians start realizing that they can play with harmonies in ways that weren’t part of traditional jazz, and they liked how that sounded2. It didn’t lead to more danceable or singable music. Instead, it was an exploration of what music can express, making this less of a popular music and more of an art music. I think if you took someone who’s not familiar with jazz and got them to listen to Thelonious Monk, they would probably find it interesting but not immediately enjoyable.
So a lot of jazz becomes art music, but it continues being popular until around the 60s when rock takes over. Nowadays most of jazz is either popular music that isn’t particularly popular3 or art music that even fewer people listen to.
All this is to say that music from the same genre can contain pieces of the folk-popular-art triangle to different degrees. The distinction is less about the name of the genre and more about how the musicians are approaching their music and what they’re trying to do.
art food vs folk food vs popular food
Here’s where I switch to food. I’m making these terms up because I think this works—let me know if you don’t see it.
Again, folk food is the easiest to start with. This is any kind of traditional food, in any tradition from around the world. This is similar to “ethnic food”, except ethnic food is usually food from a culture that is somehow foreign. Folk food includes all traditions, including your own. So pizza is a folk food from southern Italy, clam chowder is a folk food from northeastern US, and miso soup is a folk food from Japan, and so on. This is also what people (want to) mean when a food is “authentic”.4
Popular food is food that is intended to appeal to a wider audience than your immediate community, so that you can sell it and sustain a business. Fast food chains are the most extreme form of popular food, much like pop music in music5. But running restaurants is a tough business (so, not unlike making music for a living), and most restaurant food makes at least some concessions to what a lot of eaters in your expected customer base might like, instead of what the chef or the owner think is best. Unless you happen to be in a city where lots of people appreciate authentic Chinese food, your Szechuan place probably makes non-Szechuan (and even not-really-Chinese) dishes like orange chicken.
And art food is any food that attempts to do “serious art” with food. This probably sounds weird, so let me paraphrase the art music definition above. Art food is food which requires significantly more work by the eater to fully appreciate than is typical of popular food. Art food can taste great even for casual eaters. But what makes it art food is that if you know more, you’ll probably get more out of it. Some of this is high-end fare at Michelin-star restaurants (this is the Western classical music of food). These restaurants aren’t trying to get everyone to come. They just need some people who appreciate what they do enough to pay hundreds of dollars per head. But this isn’t all of art food. You may have a new take on sandwiches that you think is good but you don’t know how popular it’s going to be. Or maybe you just invented Korean tacos. My claim here is that explorations like these should be considered art food.
Chicago case studies
When I think of good examples of folk food in Chicago, the first place that comes to mind is Kabobi Persian and Mediterranean Grill in Albany Park. I was taken there by an Iranian friend, and there would be many Iranians eating there, especially on weekends. This is a good sign that the restaurant serves food that is, if not identical to what they would get at home, faithful to their tradition.
One dish that is definitely not catering towards the average American eater here is kalle pache, a sheep head stew where more or less every edible part of the head is on the plate. They don’t have it on the regular menu, and serve it only on certain weekends, but ask your Persian friend (or the people at the shop) and they can tell you when they have it.6
I actually think even Kabobi makes some concessions to American customers, but it’s hard for me to say definitively that this or that item on their menu is totally not Persian.
Next, what are some popular food places in Chicago? The easy examples are your fast food chains, your pizzerias, your Italian beef joints. But I want to give a general rule and one interesting example.
The rule is an application of ideas from Tyler Cowen’s book “An Economist Gets Lunch“.7 The pressure for restaurants to cater to more customers is strongest where the foot traffic and rent are high. Where would that be in Chicago? It's the Loop and the immediate vicinity of Mag Mile. You won't have a hard time finding food in the Loop, but most of it will be popular food. For the most part, what you see here are fast food restaurants, bars with generic (American and maybe Italian) food, and high-end restaurants that are focused on being fancy venues rather than on serving great food.
Purple Pig is the exception that proves this rule. It’s an excellent restaurant with interesting food that includes some pork offal right on Michigan Avenue, but you might miss it if you don’t know that it’s tucked inside a pretty nondescript building. It’s allowing itself to do some art food in a very accessible location by being somewhat hard to find.
And here’s a general example of something that’s high-end that is also usually popular food rather than art food: steakhouses. This doesn’t mean that the quality of food at steakhouses is low. This just means that a lot of their effort goes into satisfying people who want a good cut of beef cooked just right and don’t necessarily want too much that’s creative done by the cook.
I saw an interesting sign of this recently, when the highest grossing restaurants in the US were announced. Of the 19 Chicago-area restaurants to make the list, 9 are steakhouses, and there’s a few seafood restaurants that I would categorize in the same bracket as steakhouses: high-end but standardized food with focus on quality ingredients. Steakhouses bring in a lot of money because they can charge a lot and serve a lot of people, a sign that they are a successful form of popular food.
Finally, what are some art food places in Chicago? I guess the most obvious answer here would be Alinea, which also shows up on that list of highest-grossing restaurants above, but by charging much higher prices than steakhouses for extremely creative dishes. Not that many people would pay a lot of money to have watermelon that looks and tastes like tuna. But people who would would pay a lot of money for the experience.
But art food isn’t necessarily expensive. The tasting menu dinner at the newish Filipino restaurant Kasama is expensive, but their lunch menu is fairly reasonable. One of the things I’ve had there is the Kasama combo sandwich, which is a fusion of 2 folk foods. A combo sandwich in Chicago is Italian sausage combined with Italian beef, which is a sandwich with thin-sliced beef, peppers (in particular, pickled vegetables with hot peppers called giardiniera), and gravy. Kasama combo sandwich takes this concept, then replaces the beef with sliced pork adobo, and the Italian sausage with longanisa sausage. I’m sure it’s a very good sandwich even for people not familiar with Italian beef or the Filipino meats, but people who are familiar with them would appreciate the familiar elements combining in a new way. That makes this art food based on folk foods.
So what’s the point of all this?
It’s good to know what you like or dislike and have more ways to describe it. I think this provides dimensions of describing food that aren’t usually talked about explicitly.
I think this can give us a way of seeing what’s similar and what’s different about food and music. There’s a bunch of similarities and differences that I hope to talk about sometime.8
I want to get us away from the elitism that surrounds things like classical music and Michelin stars. Talking about how relatively low-status things can have artistic merit is part of that.
What I’m listening to now
I keep coming back to Mexican artist Natalia Lafourcade’s album De Todas Las Flores since it came out last month. I discovered her 2015 album Hasta la Raíz only last year, but she’s been big in Mexico for 20 years. I’m guessing she can release whatever and a lot of people would buy it, and it’s inspiring to see what she’s doing with that freedom. As far as I can tell (with machine translation help), she’s making some very personal and intimate music.
To come full circle, if this isn’t art music, what is?
I actually happen to not really get the art in metal, but I can see that they’re trying to do things that are not immediately obvious to people who don’t listen to a lot of metal.
This is the bebop revolution, with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell being some of the major players.
I’m probably underestimating how popular Michael Bublé is.
I wrote it like this because what some Yelp reviewer thinks authentic Thai food isn’t necessarily what is the food in Thailand is actually like, for example. It requires actual knowledge to know what is part of a tradition and what isn’t. Much easier to just say what you like and don’t like.
Here, I realize there’s an additional dimension of cost that is more salient for restaurants. Musicians don’t have much choice in how much their products are valued, at least for recordings. And for concert tickets and such, popular musicians (as in people who play “popular music”) can command much higher prices than other musicians. This points to at least 2 major differences between music and food:
You can live without music but you can’t live without food. Making food cheap makes it popular simply due to this.
Technology allows musicians to reach much larger audiences than chefs can.
I think there is a sign that tells you when they have it, but it’s in Farsi.
If you don’t have time to read a book, try his shorter essay on The Atlantic.
One thing I can give away here is this interview of the late Jonathan Gold. He was a long-time LA Times food critic, who was also a music critic in his younger days. For his comments on the difference between food criticism and other kinds of criticism, go to the section “VI. DOUCHE-FOOD“. This is also only one of 3 things that I remember vividly about this interview, so you should go ahead and read all of it.