some thoughts on pretentiousness:

Nour Abi Nakhoul
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

Back in the mid-to-late-2000s I was a disenfranchised closeted trans girl living in the suburbs just north of Toronto. I spent my evenings and weekends hunched over my computer keyboard in my dark bedroom, curtains closed, scrolling through Tumblr and YouTube while maintaining a baseline 75%-dissociated state. As a kid with some serious identity issues that weren’t really acknowledged (unless I was watching porn or like, sobbing in the corner of a parking lot coming down from molly), I defensively held this kind of scornful holier-than-thou distance between myself and most other people. Basically I was a pretentious asshole who hated all my mediocre mallrat classmates who somehow seemed mostly comfortable in their bodies and probably didn’t have vomiting-crying panic attacks at a minimum of twice a week, so far as I knew. But because it was the 2000s and I was pretty into indie rock and was frequently spotted reading Jean-Paul Sartre, people called me a “hipster”, and my sneering demeanour was somehow validated by the fact that I bought vinyl records and liked coffee or whatever? I dunno.

I’m pretty sure I’ve moved beyond that person, because it turns out that existential literature is super bourgeoisie (fuck you Camus, you colonialist shit) and indie music is usually made by #malefeminist white boys who use their Indie Scene Cred to get into their young fans’ pants; but mostly, I’ve moved past, or have tried to move past, that pretentiousness that underlies that whole hipster attitude. Yet that attitude wasn’t born with and won’t die with the hipster movement and is encountered everywhere to some degree. Pretentious is the backbone to cool; like, how will people know I’m cool if I don’t namedrop this super sick local grindcore band and then roll my eyes at the clueless shit who had never heard of them before? How will they know I’m cool if I don’t laugh at all those other mindless snake people scouring Instagram for likes while I, the superior intellectual, spend my free time methodically navigating the complete collection of Tolstoy?

This seems obvious if you think about it for like 3 seconds, but it took me quite a lot of unlearning to figure out: that pretentiousness is totally immersed in, and is a replication of, the oppressive power dynamics that our society is founded on.

For starters, the things that pretentiousness is usually weaponized against are things typically associated with femininity. How shocking. Pop music, the Twilight series, boy bands…pretentiousness here tries to play itself off as just being anti-popular, with the whole Not Like Other Girls™ discourse, but let’s be real, this is just plain old traditional-flavour misogyny.

Even when pretentiousness is being weaponized against things solely because they’re popular, and not because they’re femme-coded, it’s still first and foremost attacking on the basis of privilege. News flash, things being popular means they’re accessible. A lot of people don’t have the time or ability to get stuck in a clickhole scouring the internet for obscure bands, or trek through galleries and learn the names of a bunch of cool local artists. A lot of people spend 40+ hours a week at an exhausting job and just want to watch a fucking rom-com when they get home, alright? And speaking of jobs, developing these curated esoteric interests takes some amount of disposable income. It’s 2017, and vinyl records are like 30 bucks each or whatever. I can’t read the newest collection of that rad queer poet unless I’ve got 20 bucks laying around to drop on it, or I’m really good at shoplifting, but it’s not like they’re gonna carry that book at Indigo and I’d feel too guilty stealing from an independent store.

Last year a friend of mine checked out what bands I’d liked on Facebook, and sarcastically derided me for my “entry-level” taste. I’ll agree that those bands are all somewhat popular, but I was too busy working full-time to support my drug habit during my teenage years to spend any significant amount of time looking through forums for more obscure bands.

We have this predisposition to associate “popular” with less good, or uncultivated, or boring, but when we do that we’re decrying everyone who wasn’t rich enough, or healthy enough, or stable enough, or happy enough, to go and develop their artistic tastes. This attitude towards popular things has been passed down throughout history straight from the powdered wigs of the aristocrats, scoffing at the uncouth interests of the impoverished — can we please let it go now?

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Nour Abi Nakhoul

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living, laughing, loving

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