Rock snobbery is bad for society.

It was 2002 (or whatever), and I had haphazardly moved to Seattle from my small PNW town. It was a logger down. It was a place where people go to escape somewhere else. It was a beautiful, weird place and I needed to escape it.

So I headed north in search of some sludgy-inspired future powered by lagers, whiskey, cigarettes, and a punk identity I could barely claim as my own — yet tried voraciously to assign myself.

It was a weird living situation. It was the basement of a house owned by a member of a church. Said church somehow owned this rad punk club that occupied an old movie theatre in Seattle’s university district — a place I would always cite as the holy grail of music community.

But here I was, in this basement apartment with two other dudes. The toilet had just flooded the entire carpeted apartment a few days before. The landlord hadn’t fixed it, and it was getting worse, and we were all probably getting ill.

I sat on the couch and watched the film adaptation Nick Hornby’s beloved romantic comedy for burnout culture snobs, High Fidelity. I wont rehash the plot or significance of this film at the time. Just watch it, I guess.

But this seemed to create a persona that every college-aged hipster white dude with a p-coat wanted to emulate. The emulation came in the form of 4 distinct traits of insufferableness:

Trait 1: Be a rock and roll know-it-all, and take pride in it.

Trait 2: Make friends, family, and strangers feel bad about their lack of obsession about records, their context, and history.

Trait 3: Have a messy personal life. By all means, have a job that “fulfills” you creatively — but only have enough money to go to the bar or see shows. And bonus points if you are a misogynist sad sack with lots of complicated romantic entanglements.

Trait 4: Argue with your friends constantly. Get in filibuster-length debates about Steely Dan’s Aja. You may replace this conversation with boring musings about the history of punk rock and/or the origins of heavy metal.

When I first showed up in Seattle, I was too young and dumb to know that I was allowed to like what I wanted to like. It took me a matter of about a week to know that I wasn’t allowed to like pop-punk, I must love Bob Dylan, and Television’s Marquee Moon must be revered or there would be stiff consequences.

So, I went on this journey to pretend to like music I didn’t like to fit a stereotypical rock snob persona that never really fit me. I would spend years making people feel small about their preferences. Embracing the phrase ‘guilty pleasures’ to describe my own musical tastes that weren’t in the punk rock canon of records I wasn’t supposed to like.

Then I started writing songs and making records. I started to obsess about what makes a good song great. I began opening up my world a bit — Diggable planets. George Strait. Billy Joel. Bon Jovi. Waylon Jennings. Patsy Cline. Whitney Houston.

Songs matter to me. Sad songs mattered the most to me. And for me, it stopped mattering where they came from. 90s country playlists. Adult contemporary classics from the 80s. I was able to bridge the gap between my punk rock meanderings and the music of my childhood which brought me a lot of joy.

So what do I do with my record collection filled with avant-free jazz and obscure noise rock from the early 90s? Nothing. It’s all integrated.

Snobbery is useless. It closes doors that should remain open. Art is and always will be subjective. Making anyone feel small because of something they love is a form of cultural cruelty and practical relational annexation and I refuse to participate in it.

I think the culture at large refuses. Music consumption is changing in both good and bad ways — one of the good ways it’s changing is that the walls that separate us are getting blurry. Rock music isn’t the straight, white man’s playground it used to be. Gatekeeping doesn’t work. Anyone with an internet connection and $500 can make a record.

I’m here for art appreciation, but not at the expense of someone else.

But also, High Fidelity is a great fucking movie.