There it is, the treacherous choke hold, inevitable quip of the "Underground Music Snob." The grasping rebel consciousness that turns hours of jaded rhetoric in to some stance to topple the "Giant" man. In my opinion turning actual success as a musician into some kind of open wound where the fans who loved and got you there, will cauterize and screw you. I will do my best to bring this epidemic to light....being a text book "Underground Music Snob" myself.
You can almost smell the flesh bubbling and searing as a young woman in a Neko Case T-shirt throws 12" vinyl sleeves at a barbecued carcass. She wipes the soot from her coke bottle thick glasses, and yells in tongues something profound. Something prophetically high school kid"Deep, man," that if translated would refer to the death of "Clear Channel Radio" and "MTV Devils!" The ever classic burning at the stake of so called "Sell Outs."
Let us start here. Music does not matter to everyone. Some people spend their whole life collecting stamps. Spreading protective pages over a perfectly perforated portrait of Abraham Lincoln or a rare Bald Eagle holding the Alabama State Flag. To these people stamps are art. To these people stamps should last forever. To these people no stamp will ever top the rare 1959 Frank Sinatra tribute which was only printed 250 times by an antique press in Winchester, North Virginia. These people are "Stamp Snobs." I'm not. I find the cheapest stamp I can, barely look at the front, lick the back, and send it off to a bill collector. Stamps don't matter to me.
Sadly, good music doesn't matter to more people than you would think.
Average people are not music fans, they are consumers. They buy that new album they saw in a magazine add, play the single over and over, and maybe skim the rest of the album once or twice before they get the new "Kelly Clarkson" for their birthday. I mean Kelly Clarkson must be what music is about, America chose her to be the next American Idol...Right? Some people actually fall for that bullshit."
Not the "Underground Music Snob." This almost extinct breed spends hours fingering dusty CD shelves in Independent Record Stores for that one thing that is the complete opposite of what is popular. They separate and question record store clerks, in bad cop movie fashion, if there are any new releases on the obscure 2 person Norwegian Death Metal label "Sodima-nation" based in Chicago (believe me....I used to be one of these record store clerks) The "Underground Music Snob," is often sucked into oblivion despite starting this obsession with completely good intentions, and starts to judge music on how obscure and different it is, instead of how GOOD.
When have "Underground Music Snobs" gone too far?
Is when they disown the band that they reared from birth, the group that they saw 5 times in one year at a local bar, because they got a spread in "Billboard Magazine?" Or is it when they splatter emails and blogs hatefully across the infinite reaches of the internet, condemning a great and talented musician, for releasing a new single produced by, god forbid, "Kanye West." I am guilty of both.
Hello, my name is Bear the Astronot, and I am an "Underground Music Snob." How scary is that, when you are an "Underground Musician" as well?
