The Trap Of Snobbery

Years ago, a friend told me she wouldn't listen to “pop” music. This was when there was plenty of good pop music. We were discussing a musical artist we both liked—Angélique Kidjo—and my feeling was that she was being snooty, expressing her superiority over me. I started listening to pop music as a teen, and was instantly hooked. Songs I've loved that fit into the “pop” category include The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” Marvin Gaye’s “What's Going On,” Talking Heads’ “Girlfriend Is Better,” and Johnny Cash’s “I've Been Everywhere.” These songs, all played on the radio, are great.

My friend was a snob. She wrote off entire genres of music—rock, country, R&B, Motown, Philadelphia soul, etc. without knowing what she was talking about. She was cutting herself off to plenty of good music based on a meaningless category. That's what snobs do.

Snobbery thrives when one has a narrow circle of friends who share similar tastes while enforcing against attempts to introduce new tastes into the circle. Music’s a hotbed of snobbery. The purists who booed Bob Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival because he played with a rock band were an angry bunch, as were the prominent music critics who condemned Dylan as an apostate. So blinded, they couldn't appreciate the unveiling of his greatest song, “Like A Rolling Stone,” on which he was playing organ.

But were these dissenters snobs, or just purists? That's a question worth examining. Not all purists are snobs. The purist folk music fans at Newport would brook no variations on the original structure of the music they loved, but that alone didn't make them snobs. The ones that booed Dylan were the snobs.

The line between snob and purist is thin, so let's take the example of an undeniable snob to clarify the matter. British politician Jacob Rees-Mogg has suggested that those not educated at Cambridge or Oxford are “potted plants” incapable of writing “an articulate letter to the social services or whoever it is to get your problem sorted out." This statement meets all of the criteria of snobbery in that it assigns exaggerated importance to academic credentials while denigrating the “inferiors” lacking them. Due to the ingrained nature of the British class system, privileged son Rees-Mogg felt free to say what he wanted.

I've been a snob. When a friend told me how great Billy Joel was, I lost some respect for his musical taste. There's also a few other “dealbreakers” in the music world. As for books, the only ones I can be a snob about are of the “airport” variety. This is going back a bit, but I mean popular books like The Da Vinci Code, which I used to see on every plane I was on. The first sentence tells me all I need to know: “Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulted arches of the museum’s Grand Gallery.” No decent writer would lead off their book by explaining that their protagonist is “renowned.” Instead, they'd write so that their readers could figure that out on their own. A review of the best-seller that appeared in the India Times misses this point entirely. Its author lauded the amateurish opening line. “By describing him as ‘renowned,’” the critic wrote, “the reader immediately gets the impression that he is an important figure within the context of the museum.” Such readers prefer to be spoon-fed and know things “immediately,” which I feel applies to many readers who only read on planes. Also, “within the context of the museum”? Try “at the museum” instead.

I've made an effort to tamp down any feelings of snobbery, as it’s not an attractive trait. I have those tendencies because I don't gravitate to the quotidian in choosing my books, movies, and music, but try to keep it to myself. So when my buddy told me how much he liked Billy Joel, instead of putting him down, I held back, merely saying I didn't like that particular musician. I'm sure he acquired the misguided fondness for Joel from his parents, which can be hard to overcome.

There are jazz snobs, movie snobs, book snobs, education snobs, income snobs, wine snobs, art snobs, dog snobs, political snobs. Any arena in which a hierarchy can be identified will foster snobbery. There's the disdain of the cool Mac devotee for the pedestrian PC user, the cinephile video store clerk who scorns customers for renting romantic comedies, and the sommelier who snickers at your uneducated choice of wine. Even ketchup snobs exist, as I found out when I asked for ketchup at a friend's house and she told me, “There's no ketchup in this house.”

There are vocal snobs—the most malign in the category—and covert snobs. There are the Florida snobs like me who look down on the tacky “coastal art” paintings people hang on their walls. I can't help myself. The most blatant case of snobbery I've experienced happened when I was sailing one day in Seattle on a friend’s boat. There was a point at an inlet where a large group of people had gathered as we passed by. “This is where the haves come to watch the have-nots,” my friend told me, to my disgust. This is the same guy who told me, “As my mother used to say, a person's address says everything about them.” Despite the enjoyment of sailing on Puget Sound, the friendship didn't last long.

Most snobs are harmless. Take the beer snob obsessed with identifying the varieties of hops in their IPAs costing $20 for a four-pack who just talks too much about beer. Then there's the malignant type of snob who judges people by their educational credentials, their neighborhoods, or their professions. The problem that this kind of person inevitably runs head-first into is that snobbery is like a Chinese box. Once they reach that peak they've aspired to for years, they're going to find that there are layers of snobbery they hadn't anticipated. When they can't get into the club they aspire to, they'll feel a kind of pain they brought on themselves.