Musical taste and patterns of symbolic exclusion in the United States 1993–2012: Generational dynamics of differentiation and continuity

•We compare the musical likes and dislikes of Americans across similar surveys conducted twenty years apart.•We find that Americans are less likely to dislike most forms of music in 2012 in comparison to 1993.•Country, Folk, Bluegrass, and Gospel are exceptions since they are more likely to be disliked in 2012.•The highly educated young in 2012 tend to dislike Classical music and Rock more than their elders.

Most research in the sociology of taste has focused primarily on the role of socioeconomic status (SES) in modulating patterns of cultural choice. This has led to a general neglect of the role of age as a structuring factor in its own right. In this paper, we turn our attention to cross-sectional and over-time differences in expressions of cultural taste across age groups. We concentrate on the phenomenon that Bryson (1996) has referred to as “symbolic exclusion”: namely, the (differential) propensity of persons to express dislike for certain cultural styles. Comparing musical dislikes from the 1993 General Social Survey data to a replication of the same instrument in 2012, we find that, overall, Americans are less likely to express dislikes across most musical categories, with the most substantial declines observed for Rap and Heavy Metal, especially among college-educated young adults. The exceptions to this pattern are the Country, Folk, and Religious styles, all of which are more likely to be disliked in 2012 than they were in 1993, and Rock and Classical music, both of which are increasingly rejected by high-status young people at the same time that they are less likely to be rejected by their same-status older counterparts.