You can like the popular song and the weird one. Taste isn’t a team you have to pick.

Somewhere along the way liking things turned into declaring an allegiance, and then defending it. The arithmetic does not work: a song being popular tells you nothing about whether it is good, and a song being obscure tells you even less. People with the most interesting taste almost always have an embarrassing favourite and a difficult one sitting side by side.

Make a playlist this week with no coherence at all, the chart song next to the strange thing nobody you know has heard. Do not explain it. Taste gets wider by admitting what you actually enjoy rather than what fits the set.