We have all run into a music snob at least once in our life. Maybe they’ve scoffed at your CD col­lec­tion at a party you threw. Per­haps they’ve snorted at you when you told them you like The Pussy­cat Dolls. Pos­si­bly you’ve been caught in a stream­ing tirade on how there is noth­ing of value in the four chord turn­around. Music snobs are gen­er­ally insuf­fer­able and best avoided if you want to have an enjoy­able time. To help you recog­nise one I’ve put together this list.

Uses the word ‘eclec­tic’ to describe musi­cal tastes.

Miriam defines eclec­tic as:

1: select­ing what appears to be best in var­i­ous doc­trines, meth­ods, or styles

2: com­posed of ele­ments drawn from var­i­ous sources; also : het­ero­ge­neous

There is an inherit arro­gance in the word, which is hinted at in its def­i­n­i­tion. When some­one uses this word to describe their music col­lec­tion, they are trans­mit­ting to you, con­sciously or not, that they have selected the best music to lis­ten to. They want you to know they are not shack­led by the con­straints of genre and are a more edu­cated and worldly lis­tener because of it. Don’t be fooled by this. The plain and sim­ple fact is that lis­ten­ing to a vari­ety of musi­cal styles does not make you smart, nor is it a nec­es­sary char­ac­ter­is­tic of intel­li­gence. To proudly declare their tastes as eclec­tic, and expect­ing that to be enough to demon­strate their ascen­dant place in the cul­tured élite, is to build one’s cas­tle on a foun­da­tion of sand.

Dis­dains ‘pop­u­lar’ and ‘sim­ple’ music.

This atti­tude stems from the snob’s need to dis­tin­guish their self from those they deem as less intel­li­gent and edu­cated. As the music snob has cho­sen music, and its appre­ci­a­tion, as the barom­e­ter of one’s worth it would do them no good to their ego if they were just as intel­li­gent as every­one else. To claim their place right­fully on the upper side of the stan­dard dis­tri­b­u­tion curve they must enjoy things that 90% of us wouldn’t. Unfor­tu­nately they don’t realise that you can enjoy the eso­teric and the pop­u­lar with­out sac­ri­fic­ing your place as an edge-case. If you were to be com­par­ing musi­cal tastes with some­one and there was sig­nif­i­cant over­lap how would they know that really you’re ‘smart’ enough to enjoy inac­ces­si­ble music as well? They prob­a­bly wouldn’t unless you made a point to announce it. So to make it clear, snobs adopt the strat­egy of deny­ing that they would ever like any­thing pop­u­lar, thus remov­ing all doubt as to where they stand.

Holds John Cage’s 4’33” to be “so true”.

A piece’s inac­ces­si­bil­ity acts as a fil­ter, to allow only the élite who have trained in the art of analy­sis to inter­ject them­selves between artist and audi­ence to be the sen­tries of integrity and the gate­keep­ers of good. It is not enough that an emo­tion is invoked directly in the audi­ence by the artist through music. To truly appre­ci­ate song you must under­stand why those emo­tions were invoked, what are the proper emo­tions to feel, and what the song­writer is really try­ing to say, oth­er­wise you are not truly appre­ci­at­ing the work. None of this is pos­si­ble with­out a spe­cialised middleman.

Songs that are so inac­ces­si­ble that they need to be explained in order to be under­stood are the high­est form of elit­ist alien­ation. What hap­pens to these pieces when sep­a­rated from their liner notes or a con­ve­nient expert stand­ing by? They fail to stand on their own and are doomed to be judged by super­fi­cial means such as: musi­cal­ity, emo­tive response, and social stan­dards of ‘goodness’.

To show off their skills at the endeavor of music analy­sis, a snob will claim not only to under­stand, but to enjoy a song that is so off the map that most of us would write it off as dri­vel. It is a big bill­board for them which claims: “I’m smart enough to under­stand this, and obvi­ously, you are not.” Unfor­tu­nately for the snob, that sort of PR never wins the hearts of oth­ers, and they are des­tined never to be invited to parties.

Insists that vinyl is a supe­rior record­ing medium.

My sis­ter once told me of a guy she knew who insisted that music recorded on a CD was not real music. His rea­son­ing was that because the sound wave is sam­pled at dis­crete inter­vals and not infi­nitely grained like an ana­log record­ing the sound wave is not a true rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what was played, and there­fore not true music. What a load of horse­shit. Fol­low­ing this rea­son­ing would lead you to believe that a play is a story while a film is not.

The love of vinyl comes not from its fidelity but rather from its lack of fidelity. Let us be cer­tain, no record­ing is going to fully cap­ture what is heard live. There will always be lim­i­ta­tions of the record­ing media. Many fac­tors come into play such as the range of fre­quen­cies the media can be made, or is made to cap­ture, the sig­nal to noise ratio that is obtain­able by the record­ing equip­ment, the res­o­lu­tion of the sig­nal that may be cap­tured, etc. Then there’s accom­pa­ny­ing prob­lems with the repro­duc­tion of the record­ing and even­tual play­back, both of which intro­duce more degra­da­tion of the orig­i­nal recorded sig­nal. In short any­thing that is recorded is also fil­tered and dis­torted by the process. The truth of the mat­ter is that vinyl record­ings fil­ter and dis­tort much more than CDs. What a snob is really say­ing when stat­ing their pref­er­ence for vinyl is that they like the man­ner in which it records and plays back. This is all fine and good, many gui­tarists pre­fer the sound of vac­uum tubes to tran­sis­tors. We must keep in mind though that this is only a per­sonal pref­er­ence, an opin­ion if you will on what types of dis­tor­tions are bet­ter than oth­ers. To hold up an opin­ion as the immutable truth is a sure hall­mark of snobbery.

Dis­cussing music is a game that must be won.

When in dis­course with music snobs, remem­ber that you are viewed as an oppo­nent. You are not shar­ing, or build­ing bonds together. You are not forg­ing a friend­ship. You are not express­ing, or receiv­ing inter­est. You are in a power strug­gle, in which the snob must dom­i­nate. Often they are ruth­less in dis­trib­ut­ing scorn and vit­riol, all for the sake of prov­ing them­selves a supe­rior class of peo­ple. This is what makes music snobs truly unpleas­ant. They really have no inter­est in shar­ing their knowl­edge, but rather using it as a weapon to blud­geon oppo­nents in the social arena, and every­one is an opponent.

The sure­fire way to avoid enter­ing into such com­pe­ti­tion is to insist on talk­ing about cats. If the snob tries to bring the con­ver­sa­tion around to music again men­tion that you think the Per­sian long­hair is just about the sweet­est thing ever, espe­cially when they are kit­tens. No bully likes to see he has no effect on his vic­tim; talk­ing about cats is sure to con­found and deflate the most hard­core of music snobs.

Tags: Eclectic Music, Elitism, Esoteric Music, Fun, John Cage, Music Technology, Popular Music, Snobbery, Vinyl

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 6:59 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.