I am obsessed with Gnarls Barkley, and my brother is a music snob, which means every time I go home, the majority of our interactions end in a shouting match of insults or a fistfight (I prefer the latter since I’m still bigger than he is). “Music snob,” however, is a very general term and does not completely describe my brother’s disgust for what I listen to. He scoffs every time I pick up a CD from the store, rolls his eyes every time I turn up a song on the stereo and freaks out if I tell him any classical artist is boring. That’s right, my brother is not just any snob, but a classical snob: He plays classical, listens to classical, knows all the important names and corresponding works and enjoys nothing more than telling me the exact difference between a sonata and a symphony.
That’s not to say I don’t have my own musical prejudices, because I do. I don’t listen to much country or emo music, but it’s not because I think that every artist from those genres is untalented. It’s just not my thing, you know? But I’ll still listen to a song I like when I hear it, even if it’s not a familiar style. That’s how I became a Gnarls Barkley fan. I don’t really listen to much radio, so the first time I heard “Crazy” beginning to end was when I watched The Late Show about a year and half ago. A short fat man, Cee-Lo Green, stood in front of the microphone in an Angus Young-style outfit while a taller skinny guy with an afro and a pair of dark shades, Danger Mouse, sat hunched in front of a keyboard and I was prepared for the worst, but that changed the moment they started the song. The next day, I looked up every song on St. Elsewhere and listened to it twice. I decided I had to own the CD, so I downloaded it from iTunes. But that wasn’t good enough. I needed a hard copy so I could play it in the car and on my stereo. So, I bought it again. That’s right, I loved St. Elsewhere so much I bought it twice. The next time I was in the car with my brother, I put the CD in my player. About five seconds into “Go-Go Gadget Gospel,” he turned down the volume.
Let’s ignore the fact that “Go-Go Gadget Gospel” might be the greatest name for a song in the history of music and that it totally rocks. Instead, we’ll look at my subsequent reaction: I turned the song volume back up, louder than it was before. Why? Because I’m the older brother, of course. It’s what I do. That’s when my brother decided to tell me every song on the CD was boring because the singer was no good and they used a I, IV, V chord progression too much. I told him if he had half the talent of Danger Mouse, he would already be a professional musician and the argument didn’t end until the drive did.
It’s a shame, actually, because my brother is so much more talented than I am in just about every conceivable way. For that reason, I wanted him to like it, but instead he told me to my face that the band to which I had devoted the last month of my life sucked. I knew the music was good, though. I knew it just like I did when I heard The Beatles or Tom Petty for the first time but my brother didn’t care. All he said was that Bach or Beethoven or Brahms were so much more innovative and technically superior and wrote music for the love of music instead of for money like all pop artists.
I knew he was full of crap, of course. Every artist he named was popular back in his day and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a musical apocalypse in the 1920s that sapped all the musical talent from the human race, so I figured musicians today are just as talented as those who wrote hundreds of years ago. Different, certainly, but not less talented. The same rules apply to genres. I fail to see how any one genre can inherently attract more talent than the other. If you don’t like a particular style, fine, but it’s not because the music is no good. My brother came up with more than 20 reasons why classical music was technically superior to all pop music, and I couldn’t say anything because I just don’t know enough. Whatever. I still control the stereo, and now I have a new tool to annoy him.
John Raderman is a sophomore journalism major. He can be reached at raderman@umd.edu.
