I have to come to terms with the fact that I really am a music snob. And not a very good one either–I have no deep knowledge of any kind of music “scene.” It’s just that much of the music I do like ends up being music most people don’t like–indeed, I’ll say it, can’t appreciate. Meanwhile, the kind of music that seems to get very popular, seems to me to be not just “not to my taste” but objectively bad. As in, I think less–yes, I do, I have to come to terms with this!–I think less of people for liking that music.
But I’m not obnoxious. I keep these thoughts to myself, in part because I try to keep them from myself, i.e., pretend they don’t exist. Because it makes me feel like a snob.
But you know what, I am a snob. I’m just not a competitive snob who likes to get into musical pissing matches with other snobs.
Great scene, although my favorite is when Jack Black says under his breath to a customer, “Don’t tell anyone you don’t own fucking Blonde on Blonde!” He gives him the album, then hugs him and sighs, “It’s gonna be O.K.”
Jazz fundamentalists, esp. if they’re the defenders of the holy faith of bebop, and esp. if they were once music majors or music grad students of some sort. But indie rock people are right up there; I think the key difference is that fewer of them were music majors.
And you guys are all nuts. The best characters are clearly Lisa Simpson and R2!
What Marley said about “slavish obedience to tradition” and the “stifling of innovation.” And it knows no particular genre, in my opinion.
Take my dad, Ulf Sr., who loved classical music but had zero interest in anything written past about 1900. Give him a newly-discovered work by Beethoven or Schubert, or something by one of these guys that he’d just never heard, and he was happy as a clam; but let somebody modern compose something in a similar style, and he was EXTREMELY suspicious and liked practically none of it.
Or his sister, Auntie Ulf, who is a true connoisseur of Celtic music. Once she went to Nova Scotia and spent most of a week trying to find an “authentic” band. None them were quite what she was looking for, and it had nothing to do with their skill; it was that they used electric guitars, or sang some of their own compositions, or otherwise didn’t perform exactly what Scottish musicians of 1845 or whenever would’ve performed.
And ye gods, but some of those jazz and blues fans…
Maybe this isn’t snobbery, exactly, but it’s related–and it seems to get in the way of people’s enjoyment of music for its own sake.
Nobody’s left collecting 78s but the hyperfocused anymore. I quit as soon as I could start swapping files with others. Collecting 78s is the worst drug there is, because it is GUARAN-GODDAM-TEED to fuck up your life. I don’t even know why. It just does.
Preach it. Lamest genre name ever. Sounds like it was made up by people who were very defensive about their love of dance music. Being able to call it “intelligent” means they can be less embarrassed about it around snobs of other genres.
If it seems to be “objectively” bad, it’s probably a lot more subjective than you think. Besides, is it really important to you if something really is “objectively” bad?
I only lived there five years (back in the 80s), but several times was told, with a knowing look, how Jimmy was actually the better guitarist of the brothers. Oh, and I also heard that Eric Johnson was better than both of them.
Perhaps there was even some guy playing the Drag with an open guitar case who was better than all three of them?
I didn’t really care for the movie at all, because the characters hit too close to home. Jerk-offs like these are a bane on the music retail sector.
I think that’s the big difference between music and movie snobs. A movie snob may look down their nose at your cinematic tastes, but they’re also happy to explain to the you the finer points of French New Wave film or encourage you to watch movies like Citizen Kane, The Seven Samurai or 8 1/2, whereas a music snob believes that you will forever be incapable of appreciating whatever stuff they’re listening to and will actually want to go out of their way to keep you from hearing it. Think of the Seinfeld episode where the pretentious writer didn’t want to tell anyone where he got his glasses.
