The iPod and the Rock Snob

Is the iPod destroying the rock snob? This is the question Michael Crowley poses in the latest New Republic. I tend to believe that for good and for ill, the rock snob will always have a niche, with presuppositions of taste outpacing the capacity of technology's wonders. But the iPod has already had a democratizing effect on music listening. At the same time, there has always been a facet of music snobbery that has been at heart luddite. Look at vinyl fetishists (that is, the sort who fetishize the old lp played on a turntable, not the other kind). I have always felt as if they scorned the cd not out of any rational sense of which medium was better, but rather because it made them part of a special club with their own handshake.

Whatever other sins of snobbery I commit, the luddite-as-cool-kid affectation is not one of them. I did not switch from cassettes to cds until 1994, and now I still buy cds, even though I own a Mac with iTunes and have slowly begun to join the year 2000 and download some cds onto my computer. The next step is the iPod, but to be honest, it sort of frightens me. I'm not ready yet.

That said, there is one solid reason to celebrate music snobbery: Some people's tastes in music really, really suck. I hate to admit as much, but with a few exceptions, my girlfriend's musical preferences fit comfortably into that category. (I've only had one girlfriend with really serious commitment to music -- maybe like making top five lists and overwhelming sports obsession, music snobbery tends to skew male?) I'd rather be annoyed by a rock snob (mostly because I think their snobbery is wrong -- as in: they are snobbish about the wrong things!) than perplexed by someone with an embarassingly bad or mall (usually both) cd collection.