Oh the trials of being a music snob!!

Most of us have been there, musicians and music-enthusiasts alike. Especially if you have been around to experience the 1990s and prior decades, we all have had those nostalgic moments in music of our childhood and teenage years that brings out harsh remarks about Disney stars, current rappers, pop stars, and Bieber. We all have thought "Gee, wouldn't it be swell if it were *this year* again when there was good music?" What is good music? The underdogs and the veterans? The cool or the uncool? Is music truly subjective? Have we gotten so far out of the loop, so distant from what music "should" be that we have no definition of what "talent" is anymore? Is good music really in the eye of the beholder? Or maybe we all just need glasses.

I had a long period of this. Where I would downgrade the Miley Cyrus song on my mp3 player and admit wholeheartedly that I was a childhood fan of the Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, etc. "Kids nowadays don't know what they're missing. I feel sorry for them." I loved being an old-soul with the Facebook statuses and tweets talking about how I'm now jamming to Aretha Franklin or Stevie Wonder when the next song on the shuffle was just that one song I "kinda" liked from Soulja Boy Tell 'Em. That tune wouldn't get a tweet from me, right? If such songs were to magically appear in my playlist in some company, I felt like I would have to explain myself. Why would someone who listens to the legendary Queen be down with some Nickelback? That's just borderline blasphemous! I know many a music snob in these days. Just look up a song from 1992 on YouTube and I guarantee there will be at least one comment about how Gaga copied it or how the people that "disliked" the video are Bieber fans. I tested this on Guns N' Roses "November Rain." ... So I was wrong. The first comment listed was that it was people who "disliked this are f***kin Gaga fans." My bad. 

So earlier this year, I really started getting into indie rock and other different genres and thought that was the "cool" thing to be listening to, simply because it wasn't mainstream. I embodied my music snobbery by completely rejecting what was on the top 40 telling my peers: "I don't even listen to, or know, what's on the radio right now anymore;" or "Everything sounds the same nowadays;" or "There's nothing good that's out;" or "His/Her first album was better." And I was fine with this. I was hella proud. Even if I told people that I was into this band called "Vicious Flowers" or whatever that no one I know has heard of, but still have a major fanbase in eastern Norway, I stood firmly in that.  Then one day while searching YouTube, I came across a video comment that dealt with a brief rant on how people nowadays are such music snobs that we are afraid to like something popular from today. Now this particular comment had no "thumbs up," no replies, but it strangely stuck with me. Was I truly becoming that? A music SNOB? Was I truly reluctant to connect with the year 2010? And that word popular. Ugh such a stigma, a connotation that we music snobbers love to stay away from. It's our kryptonite, but secretly our forbidden fruit. 

Well, what does this all mean for a reforming music snob? This does not mean that I have to put Ke$ha on repeat and reject the music I grew up with. I am slowly accepting the fact that it is not 1997 anymore. I am proud of the music I have discovered from trying to embody this music snobness. And if I was nine today, would I be saying the same things thirteen years from now? In an essence, yes. In 2023, we will be hearing kids complaining about how awesome the Jonas Brothers were in comparison to "Jonas Bros. 'Copycats' 2.0." Remember how heinous some people thought Hanson was? Now they are saying that the Jo-Bros. can't even compare. Oh the trials of fickleness in time. The past will always pwn the present. Pwn is still cool to say right?