Daily Inspiration Quote by Ted Rall

There is something deliciously impolite about admitting jazz is "good" while refusing to like it. Ted Rall, a cartoonist by trade, sets up the line like a single-panel gag: premise, twist, sting. The premise nods to cultural consensus. Jazz has been canonized, museum-lit, turned into a kind of tasteful credential. Saying its "good" is the safe move, the little bow to expertise and history. Then the twist: "but I don't enjoy it". The sentence punctures the performance of refinement and replaces it with the messier truth of taste.

The subtext is an argument against obligatory appreciation. In a world where liking the right things can function as social currency, Rall separates evaluation from pleasure. You can grant craft, complexity, even importance, and still feel nothing. That distinction is quietly radical because it refuses the usual bargain: if something is elevated, you must be elevated by it.

"It's not for me" lands as both boundary and critique. It's humble on the surface, but it also implies that "for me" is an honest metric we rarely allow ourselves. Coming from a cartoonist, it reads like a defense of popular appetite against prestige culture, a reminder that taste is lived, not audited. The joke isn't that jazz is bad; it's that we're trained to pretend enjoyment is a duty.