take life as it comes

i am anti-snob, for the most part

minorearth:

At some point, I’m going to get goaded into writing a big thing about how it’s PERFECTLY OKAY if someone doesn’t know/care who Kurt Cobain is, or who Paul McCartney is, and how it’s okay if a young person today knows Justin Bieber but can’t name any Elvis Presley song, because everyone’s tastes and pop culture references are different. And how making a giant deal out of shaming people who don’t share your pop culture references is actively discouraging younger/new people from exploring farther into the history of music, because music snobbery is by definition a way of putting your own personal tastes above everyone else’s and telling them that your way is the only way to appreciate things. (And, tell me - how many people who howl about people not appreciating Nirvana or the Beatles can name more than a couple of influential jazz artists of the early 20th century? Or classical composers of the 19th century? Unless you’re an obsessive collector of music of all types and eras, there’s always going to be someone else who can tell you that you don’t appreciate the right people, so why get into telling anyone that at all?)

This random rant brought to you by someone who very much appreciates Nirvana’s contributions to music, but kinda hates the virtual canonization of Kurt Cobain. And feels much the same way about the Beatles, quite frankly. And really, for all the people who are talking about Whitney Houston’s contributions to pop music right now, there were twice as many back in the 80s/early 90s who thought she was schlocky pop that didn’t deserve as much attention as she got. So appreciation levels change over time. 

… anyway. I didn’t mean to write the rant now. I’m just maybe going to have to put Kurt Cobain on Tumblr Savior until people stop talking about his birthday.

Man, I couldn’t agree more.

There are a couple of things that make this kind of snobbery absolutely ridiculous and disgusting.

Firstly, it’s horribly Eurocentric and USA-centric. The same people who consider it a scandal not to know which city the White House is in, are the same people who can’t list 10 countries in Africa (and consider it perfectly acceptable that they can’t).

It also is basically people taking their own, personal value systems and acting as if the fact that the stuff they like and know about is basically canonized in western societies somehow makes the higher value they place on that stuff “true” and absolute and not just a matter of cultural or their personal preferences (obviously it’s objectively most important to know about Nirvana and other important bands from English speaking countries).

Another ridiculous thing about it is how superficial the “knowladge” that’s considered so important and essential is. People will be completely outraged when someone, say, thinks that Tolstoy wrote “Crime and Punishment”, but most of the time those same people who are so outraged that someone wouldn’t know who the author of such an important book is haven’t actually read it themselves (and the few who did wouldn’t know to explain why it makes absolutely no sense for Tolstoy to have wrote it). Now, nothing will convince me that there’s any value whatsoever in knowing who the author of any book is if that’s all you know about that book. Geez. It’s even more hilarious when people start going on about classical music, lol.

And then there’s… well, I was raised in a kinda weird home. My parents are complete hermits and I was really hated by kids all the way till highschool, and my parents thought tv and radio, and later intenet were all a huge waste of time, so I didn’t know almost anything about pop culture till highschool. I simply wasn’t exposed to it, and instead of learning it gradually and organically, it was just thrown at me all at once - I was as likely to hear about Nirvana as I was to hear about some random local indie band, and because of it I still, over a decade later, have these strange gaps in knowledge of pop culture. I used to get really embarrassed every time one of those gaps got discovered, but I thankfully stopped angsting about it years ago. Fuck that shit.