Just curious. I always though musical snobbery was mostly seen in the classical and jazz worlds, but over the years having read many threads here devoted to all tastes it’s interesting that you can have musical snobbery in rap, punk, metal and practically anything if you got down to it.
Who are the worst music snobs?
I don’t know if they’re they’re the worst, but I’m baffled by the indie one-upsmanship of who can claim the most obscure band as their favorite – and I mean like released-a-hand-labeled-audio-tape-of-five-songs-when-they-were-in-high-school-in-1996 obscure.
I’d still rather deal with obnoxious indie fans than obnoxious Beatles fans.
I have always felt that music snobs were always people who used some genre of music as a way of identifying themselves - I AM punk, I AM rap, I AM classical. Any real music lover likes many (if not all) genres of music. I am a member of the classical music community, and most of my peers have a wide mix of rap, country, jazz, blues, and rock on their iPods. There are a few snobs, but again, they get “music” and “personal identity” mixed up.
IME, jazz fans.
I think Dame Damask is on the money.
There’s no ONE genre whose fans are the most snobbish. I’ve met snobby jazz fans, classical fans, indie rock fans, folk fans, Doors fans, Rush fans, you name it.
What makes a snob is NOT the type of music he/she likes, but the degree to which the snob has built his identity around that type of music.
As a prog-rock/heavy metal fan and child of the Seventies, I LIKE Rush, but find that a certain segment of their fans is utterly obnoxious. I’m pretty sure Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee don’t take themselves as seriously as some of their fans do.
The weirdest thing is when people suddenly hate the obscure group they love just because they have a hit.
The “rock snobs” scene from High Fidelity. (video)
This.
I had little use for that movie as a whole, but I loved all Jack Black’s scenes, because Austin’s service industries are FILLED with guys like him, guys who think they’re WAAAY too cool to be serving the likes of you and me.
A lot of these guys are working retail or in restaurants, while they hope to get their big break in the music biz. And when such guys work in sandwich shops, I swer they’ll smirk if the sandwich you order doesn’t strike them as cool enough!
Transcending genre and yet almost a genre unto itself, I’m going to say the “I’m So Eclectic & Deep” people. You know, the ones who have to respond to a “So whatcha listenin’ to?” query with “Oh, my music includes [local indie band] and [music track from Final Fantasy XCVII] and [untranslated Japanese pop band] and [swords & dragons invoking classical music piece] and [untranslated Lithuanian garage band]…” It turns into a game of who has the most obscure bit of music so they can prove how widely varied their tastes are.
I’ve long held that the driving force to MP3 downloads wasn’t the cost or lack of physical material or ease of use. It was that people could actually get a copy of Best of Hall & Oates without getting stinkeye from some 17 year old at Sam Goody.
And then there’s the inevitable shock that Hall & Oates has come around and become cool while you weren’t looking. I think this has happened to Led Zeppelin at least 3 times since I was a kid.
The most obnoxious a musical person ever was to me personally was a classical dude who questioned that I referred to myself as a “musician” because I played rock guitar. Oh, sorry I didn’t have to go to college to learn barre chords, I will go home and think up another word for what I do.
Not exactly on topic, but I had an Army buddy back when who wanted a lift to the record store (what they were called then, though all they sold were CDs) so he could get the spaghetti incident the day it was released. When I didn’t seem super exuberant about Guns N Roses he asked “Well what band do you like?”
“The Ramones would be my favorite, I guess,” I answered.
“Who?”
Around the corner from my house is a place called the Eastman School of Music. They have very nice concerts there where they play classical music.
Almost every time there is a concert there that I actually want to see (very rare, I’m more of a hip hop / reggae / bluesy girl myself) I notice that the freakin’ snobs nearly ruin the show.
They clap between the freakin’ movements. I mean, I don’t know enough about classical music to know when one movement ends and the next one begins. But even if I did, I would know better than to smatter my clumsy thick palmed applause all over the delicious silences right after a particularly beautiful piece of music. I think they do this to prove that they know the music better than all of us lunk heads that don’t know anything about classical music. I could be completely wrong, of course. But I’m thinking classical music fans are the snobbiest.
Dude, you hit the proverbial nail on the head. I lived in Austin from 1988 until 2000, and it seems like every other person I met or worked with was a struggling musician treading water in an ocean of their own coolness.
In my opinion, the musical genre that has the most snobs is a tiny, regional sub-genre; Austin music.
If you’ve never lived there, you probably wouldn’t get it; but if you have I’m sure you know where I’m coming from. The classic Austin Music Snob knows where Charlie Sexton, Doyle Bramhall III and Jimmy Vaughn’s houses are; swears Jimmy Dale Gilmore and Joe Ely are better songwriters than Bob Dylan could ever have been in his wildest dreams, and can recite a long list of all of the local bands who are “…just too good for the mainstream, man.” The less well known the bands are outside of Austin, the better; if an Austin band starts to get recognized outside of Austin, within a week the buzz will be how they ‘sold out’.
I think you hit the nail on the head as well.
One of my best friends moved from Houston to Austin. Not for a new job, though he eventually found one, not because he is himself a struggling musician, not for a better quality or standard of living, nor for any of the other myriad reasons a sane person may move from one city to another, but to be part of the Austin music “scene”. He left behind a good job, a great circle of friends, his family, etc to go follow obsure local acts that nobody outside of Austin cares about. His roomate there did the same thing, though from Boulder, CO.
When you have a group of fans so snobby they are literally willing to abandon their lives for their obsession it trumps all.
It only takes a few hours to get to Austin from Houston, a weekend trip every now and then would have been fine, imho. Communicating with him now is like having a pen pal from Bahrain, I have no idea what he is talking about. It is like he speaks a different language. It is like he has joined a cult or something. He needs an intervention, but I suspect it is too late now.
I don’t mean any disrespect to you, but it’s the other way around, generally. The people who clap between movements are regarded as scum by the real classical music snobs.
Interestingly, I heard recently on BBC Radio 3 (an unimpeachable source!) that the idea that you shouldn’t clap between movements is quite a recent thing. Apparently Mozart, Beethoven etc expected to hear people clap between movements (well maybe not Beethoven but you know what I mean).
Well, then, that makes me a classical music snob! I think deep inside I want to be!
I know nothing at all about classical music. But I do like to hear it sometimes.
Oh, it’s okay to get recognized outside Austin, just not WIDELY known.
Every cult band in Austin has fans who’ll tell you proudly, “They’re HUGE in Lithuania” or “They’re gods in Luxembourg.”
I’ll be conventional and say jazz and classical, simply because those who are deeply into either seldom have any use for anything else. Hell, they frequently don’t even bother with anything outside their own subset of the jazz or classical worlds.
Now being provincial ≠ being a snob, of course. But jazz and classical carry enough intellectual cachet that some aficionados, or even musicians themselves, are tempted to look down on other musics. The temptation can be very hard to resist if you’ve spent years studying “your” stuff.