I hated music when i was at school! Not music itself, i've always loved that. I hated the subject of music that i was taught at school. I hated the lessons, they were boring and i hated the teacher. He was just an old classical guy who by the tail end of the 80s had finally come to accept that The Beatles had actually contributed something good to the world, but otherwise had no time for rock, hip-hop, dance or any other contemporary styles of music.
Music snobbery exists on so many levels, we can all feel united, whether rocker or raver, in knowing that that there are old-fashioned classical music snobs who just don't get what we are about and for some reason think that they are somehow superior to us. Our uncultured music with shouty angsty lyrics and/or loud guitars and/or repetitive beats is so beneath them. Its like the class system all over again.
Its not just classical types that have this snobbery though, its everywhere. There are many musicians who look down on producers because they don't play instruments, like that is the only definition of someones musical credentials. How long did it take DJs to get recognition as performers and not just human jukeboxes? Even now you have old skool vinyl DJs looking down on MP3 DJs, claiming it to be cheating. There are still a great number of instrument-playing musicians who find it difficult to recognise that triggering loops, tweeking filters and firing off synth sounds is actually a real form of musical performance.
Still it gets worse, even in the world of electronica you've got hardware snobs that look down on software musicians, claiming some sort of superiority because at least their synths and samplers are proper pieces of equipment rather than the virtual mouse-clicking USB-controlled inferiority on a laptop screen software producers use. Mac users look down on PC users, blindly believing that Apple are great and Macs are always stable even though they crash a lot and don't have that good old ctrl-alt-del that Windows users are all too familiar with. And to top it all off, the vast majority of producers that don't use Reason look down on those that do, even though there's been some genuinely great music made in that particular program.
So where does that leave the poor producer making dubstep in Reason on a Dell PC? Surely he can respect, admire and possibly even envy the skill of a talented guitarist. No doubt he would love to have a studio full of Korg and Roland synths, but simply can't afford it. Maybe he's listened to a few old Beethoven symphonies and appreciated the depth of composition involved. Theres no snobbery there, no feeling like he has some sort of musical status against his aforementioned superiors.
Its quite a humble place to be really, and possibly one of the truest. Doesn't much of the best music come from artists in the lowest places? If a bedroom producer has no-one to lord it over and feel superior to, isn't it fair to say they are doing it for the love of the music? In many ways the attention to detail and intricate level of composition in many pieces of electronic music is far closer to classical than the simple verse-chorus-verse 3-chord songwriting of many instrumentalist musicians.
Music can be the great unifier yet so often musical differences can cause so many divisions. Understandably people want to surround themselves with people whom they share common interests, yet so many times this leads to people excluding others whom they feel don't fit with their idea of whats right. I mention this hierarchy of musicians here, but lets not forget all the music lovers out there that actually just enjoy listening to good music without feeling any desire to play an instrument or write songs themselves. Are these people any less worthy of being defined as musical? Surely not. The fans are often the best critics, it doesn't matter whether they can play or not.
Music snobbery is an unfortunate reality, but it achieves nothing. There are so many tools available to people to make the music they like, there is no right or wrong. So long as people keep making good music and we all keep enjoying it, surely that's all that matters.
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