Why the Old-School Music Snob Is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter
By ALEXANDRA MOLOTKOW

My friend Lily and I met in 2004 at a showcase for a record label that bartered cassette tapes in exchange for things like drawings and telling jokes. I was there to perform some songs I had recorded on my dad’s four-track using chopsticks for drumsticks; Lily was there to support her boyfriend, who was playing in a band led by our mutual friend’s 13-year-old brother. We hit it off, and after that we often went together to see bands play in local out-of-the-way venues, like the dilapidated shack down an alleyway or the basement nightclub that was perpetually flooded with toilet water. The bands were often lousy, but that didn’t matter to us. What mattered to us was that no one else knew anything about them.

At the time, it was very cool to know about obscure music. We were a few scant years out of the boy band/Limp Bizkit era, and Pearl Jam clones were still proliferating, each one worse than the last (Stone Temple Pilots > Creed > Nickelback). Hyped-up bands like the Strokes were marketed to seem independent, while independent bands like Death From Above 1979 and the Shins were being sought by advertisers and filmmakers in search of an edge. When the movie “Garden State” came out, the Shins — whose song “New Slang,” according to Natalie Portman, was going to change Zach Braff’s life — were dead to us. To our minds, fake obscure was even worse than popular.

Obscure knowledge was once a kind of currency. To get it, you had to be in the loop. You had to know the right people to learn about the right bands. You had to know the right record stores to hear those bands. The right record stores, like the right comic and book and video stores, were manned by knowledge guardians who scared the bejeezus out of us, so the act of going in to these stores felt kind of intrepid.

Lily and I inherited an understanding, which we’d gleaned from Kurt Cobain, that corporate rock was the pits, and movies like “High Fidelity” taught us about the sacred tradition of knowledge passed from cool person to cool person to, eventually, us. When we got our own record-store jobs, we discovered that knowledge-guardian culture was pretty much exactly as depicted. We were as self-righteous and fraternal as cops, sustained by an ideology that dictated that the more obscure the band, the better.

The Internet existed then, but file-sharing was still new, or newish, and there were still tons of artists you would never find online. By the time we reached our sophomore year of college, though, file-sharing had gone bananas and was quickly making our music-store employers go broke. Music wasn’t just free; it was everywhere: you could find it on blogs, YouTube and streaming Web sites, and you could read about it on Pitchfork, Wikipedia and Allmusic, without ever having to humiliate yourself in front of anyone mean.

Worse, file-sharing had rendered us, the knowledge guardians, irrelevant. Within a few years, knowledge had ceased to confer any distinction, and hoarding it had become about as socially advantageous as stamp collecting. Thanks to the Internet, cultural knowledge was now a collective resource. Which meant that being cool was no longer about what you knew and what other people didn’t. It was about what you had to say about the things that everyone already knew about.

Two months ago, Lily sent me a YouTube link to the song “212,” by the Harlem-born rapper Azealia Banks. Along with the song — which, fair warning, is quite profane — Lily mentioned that everyone seemed to be posting “212” on Facebook. So I listened — and several bars in, an intern popped into my office to announce that she loved the song and, not to brag or anything, she had been an early adopter: viewer No. 225,000.

Once I got over the embarrassment of being viewer No. 3,000,000, I realized something: the song was really good. Just as good as it had been 2,999,999 viewers ago.

In other words, there is no longer any honor in musical obscurity. If you can be popular on your own terms — if you can be Arcade Fire or Bon Iver and still win a Grammy — there is really no such thing as “selling out” anymore, unless you happen to sign a distribution deal with the Koch brothers. “I like the idea of our fans being a wide spectrum,” the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney told Rolling Stone for a recent cover article. “Whenever anybody talks about being uncomfortable about being at a show because there’s a different type of person there, that’s just straight . . . ignorance. I wouldn’t want somebody like that to be a fan of us.”

Populism is the new model of cool; elitists, rather than teeny-boppers or bandwagon-jumpers, are the new squares. There are now artists who sell out concerts while rarely getting played on commercial radio (the Weeknd or Tori Amos, for instance), and there are commercial radio artists whom no one in most people’s hipper circles has ever heard of because they listen exclusively to the Internet (Lady Antebellum, Jake Owen — pretty much all of so-called new country).

A month ago, I was walking by the MuchMusic building (that’s the Canadian MTV, though there is an actual Canadian MTV — nevermind) past a line of tween girls coiled around three city blocks. They were waiting for a boy band called One Direction, which, judging from my quick on-the-spot polling, seems to be some sort of tween version of the original Mr. Snuffleupagus: no one over 14 knows who they are. (Their debut album later entered the pop chart at No. 1.)

Pitchfork, the music Web site that is our era’s Rolling Stone, made its name initially by writing obscurely about the obscure. Now it makes itself indispensable by doing the opposite: by interfacing between genres and across all levels of fame. As Richard Beck pointed out in an N+1 article, the site serves primarily as a reviews archive, delivering the party line on each release rather than sparking critical discourse about it (although the site’s voice often reads like a satire of critical discourse). Crucially, Pitchfork exists to make sense of hip-hop and Top 40 for people who grew up listening to indie rock.

A similar reading applies to sites like Gawker and The AV Club, which are as much about telling us what to think about things as they are about telling us that those things exist in the first place. Contributors make no claim to objectivity; they’re smart alecks whose job is to stamp the dough of information. Staying current is now a wild game of whack-a-mole. And knowing one thing about everything is much more important than knowing everything about one thing.

And so: Azealia Banks is the rapper who appeals to Pitchfork readers; A$AP Rocky is the rapper who isn’t homophobic; Lana Del Rey is the lovely waif whose dad is loaded; M.I.A. is the stylish blowhard whose dad is a former Tamil revolutionary. Having learned these lines, you can go ahead and tweet confidently about these artists, holding your own in the great digital scrum, even if you have no idea what the artists actually sound like. If you get drawn into an argument, you can always quickly consult Wikipedia.

My friend Christian, who is about a decade older than I am, has spent more than 20 years accumulating thousands of rare garage-rock records. And she gives great parties, schlepping her vinyl to and fro in a vintage carrying case. Meanwhile, another friend, who is my age and works at an ad agency, makes decent money D.J.’ing with songs he downloads to his laptop; once a month I make a quick buck or two doing the same. The difference between Christian and me is that I know the provenance of roughly only half of the songs I play, and I live in fear that some eager fan will approach the “D.J. booth” (that is, the counter with my laptop on it) hoping to nerd out on some performer that I only just heard of that day via YouTube. I fear that person because I used to be that person. And I know how much the old me would have hated the current me’s guts. But this guilt immediately washes away when I play the latest Azealia Banks song and everyone goes nuts.

My quarrel here isn’t with the idea that cool people don’t know as much about stuff as they used to. If you really want to drill deep into your interests, you still have that option. You just have to accept that most of your findings will have no social value.

My beef is really with the factors that gave rise to this state of affairs, and I realize this beef is deeply stupid: I bridle at the idea that good stuff could be public in the first place, that I should have to share my tastes with the wider world. My love of knowledge-hoarding was part snobbishness, part proprietary, part nesting: I liked the idea that my favorite movies, books and music are for me and a select few others, because they’re special and they’re part of my life. To think that everyone in the world might love them just as much makes me feel like a salt molecule in a tub of brine. Like friendship, taste should be somewhat exclusive — your friends are the ones you choose above all the other bozos. If everybody is friends, then no one is, really. The same applies to being fans of Arcade Fire.

Then again, it’s better to be friendly to all than to be a flat-out jerk to all but a few. And I have to admit that cultural populism is a lot healthier than the crabby elitism that used to prevail. The old way was guided by perverted logic (the fewer people who like something, the more valuable it is), while the new way is guided by a sounder reasoning (the more people who like something, the more valuable it is). The downside of this is that everyone already likes what you like, but the upside is that good artists actually get their due, and a crazy cross-pollination of genres can happen that didn’t seem possible before. We are living in an age when a band like Bon Iver, led by Justin Vernon, a flannel-wearing beardo who sings in falsetto, can collaborate with Kanye West, one of the world’s biggest rap stars, and also win a Grammy. It’s notable that Vernon’s Grammy speech pretty much nailed the exact attitude we’ve all outgrown. “When I started to make songs,” he said, “I did it for the inherent reward of making songs, so I’m a little bit uncomfortable up here.” He failed to acknowledge how cool it was that he was up there in the first place.
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