This week I took the painful step of throwing out my old cassette tapes. They had been thinned out over the years, but I still had a few dozen lining the shelves of my office, waiting for that last play that would never come. Over the years most of them have been replaced by CDs which in turn have been ripped to the hard drive of my computer and now conveniently sit on my iTunes account. A few of them I had lugged around from place to place over at least 30 years, but the last one (Foo Fighters: The Color and the Shape, thanks Lani!) was bought somewhere around 1998, itself symbolic of my lateness to newer and better tech. After I had deboxed them five or six years ago I had systematically listened to each one last time. Suzy Boggus, the Black Crows, Boston, and DC Talk all took me back to my younger days. A few had gone bad, as cassettes do, but most of them had survived.
Most of these cassettes, though, were bought before I started to encounter the musical snobs of my life. You know, the same people who this week are beside themselves that David Bowie has died. I'm not here to rip David Bowie, but it's always amazing to me when people find a not-quite-mainstream artist and judge all others according to his/her current hipness. I didn't own any David Bowie records, nor did I find myself rummaging through used vinyl shops to find a rarity from the Velvet Underground or very cooly describe how much Miles Davis influenced my worldview. No, for years I was happy with my little case of cassettes; it was music enough for me. I admit to owning a lot of music that was and remains decidedly uncool. Lots of Eagles, .38 Special, Huey Lewis, and Genesis. Once in awhile I had something that the snobs wouldn't snob about (hello, REM!), but generally my collection was not nearly as cool as people remember theirs as being. Even today the critics would shudder at my iTunes listing. There's a lot of John Denver, Air Supply, and Wings scattered about...and even worse, I am more content to get a lot of Greatest Hits (shudder) and not get worked up about not having the final track on an early Queen album.
But what's the problem, really? Why do we have to look down on what others like? Perhaps we can lay the blame for our snobbishness on awards shows. Whether it's the Emmys, Tonys, Oscars, or a thousand other lesser ones, we have to have this mindset that something, somewhere is extra special and deserves our adulation and what the common folk think is good is in fact vulgar and to be despised. Certainly, often times such shows may open our eyes to something we otherwise might not have looked at. But can't we still enjoy our Phil Collins and Peter Frampton without people thinking us worse for it?
A lot of people today have moved on from music snobbery to now being TV snobs. Likely this is more of a problem for me. I loved Mad Men and I refuse to watch the Bachelor with my wife. Yet I still can't get into Breaking Bad, even though I can see some value in it. I haven't watched The Wire, The Sopranos, or even New Girl. My Netflix watch list is filled with stuff that I like, not stuff that I will need to talk about around the watercooler (though I have no fellow employees, nor a watercooler). Would this be a good time to confess that I'm finally getting around to watching Glee with great glee?
As I get older the more I realize the futility of being cool. There will always be somebody discovering something new, and in all honesty I just don't have time to keep up. Life is hard enough as it is without trying to impress everybody with the things we don't really care about.
