bazzo-182

If you want to impress people with your boundless wit in the field of popular music, all you have to do is convincingly fake it. It’s impossible to have conversations about music frequently without running into quite a few sly bastards who have mastered the art of faking musical knowledge and quite a few more who are at least half-assedly attempting it.

There are a couple of main aspects to seeming more pop-savvy than you really are. First of all, you have to break through the more-indie-than thou barrier: sometimes, people are going to bring up a band that you know nothing about, and you have to be able to beat them at their own game. Secondly, you’re going to have to create an air of pretentious snobbery in order to assert the superiority of your taste. Once you’ve done these things, you’ll be virtually indistinguishable from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

Faking factual knowledge of music is one thing, but you haven’t got the complete package until you also know how to be a snob about it. One of the most important aspects of fake snobbery is never to let on that you like anything.

Remember: conversations about music aren’t really about music, they’re about you. Always steer your conversations toward your own personal taste. In this case “taste” just means “superiority.” You can’t help it if your standards are too high.

A) Nothing is as good as it used to be.
Remember: You preferred their first album. They totally sold out. They were better before the original guitarist left. They’re just a rip-off of Big Star anyway. Keep in mind that rock and roll has been in a continuous state of decline for the past 30 years or so. Every band just gets worse and worse until they collapse under the weight of their own failure. Every band is essentially an inferior version of an older band. Even if a band used to be a good, they suck now. They’ve sucked for years. They’ll never get their old spark back. You might as well give up on them, because they’re just a grotesque parody of their former selves. Does this mean you should start liking older rock? Certainly not! Everything made before 1978 is primitive, uncool, and culturally irrelevant.

B) Every genre is artless, boring, lame, or pretentious.
Personally, you can’t understand how anybody could listen to something so tedious, pretentious and masturbatory as progressive rock. Does this mean you prefer punk? No! Punk is for tin-eared plebeians and retarded, politically clueless teenagers. Electronic music is for boring white geeks with no souls. Jam bands are for burned-out stoner hippies. Industrial music is for Dungeons & Dragons-playing social rejects in trench coats.

C) If anyone’s heard of it, it’s crap.
Nothing can possibly get on the radio or on MTV without being watered-down for easy consumption by frat-boys, hicks, and teeny-boppers. Anyone who owns a radio and has it tuned to anything but the local pirate radio station or college station is a reprehensible consumer whore who wouldn’t know art if he ran face-first into Michelangelo’s David. Pop music is for children and yahoos.

D) If nobody’s heard of it, it’s crap.
The kids who do shows on the local pirate radio station or college station are a bunch of idiot scenesters with an infantile and ridiculous fear of pop music. Unable to appreciate pop music on its own terms, they turn instead to tuneless indie crap and ridiculous obscurity pissing-contests. The shit they play has no standard of quality; maybe that’s why only fifty people bought it.

E) Everything is either underrated or overrated.
If you’re going to convey an impression that you’ve got everything figured out, you need to remember that every band or artist in history is either underrated or overrated. Only you are the true arbiter of how to correctly rate any given band, since you are immune to the hype, nostalgia, and politics that make up the critical reputation of a musical act. Within you is the single flawless barometer that reveals the true quality of every band in the universe. Make sure to use it whenever possible, for it is a mainstay of smugness