I feel we are entitled to dislike any music we want to. However, it's when we slag off every genre but a certain one that I consider musical snobbery. I'm a jazz musician primarily and I have played with people for whom jazz is the only music ever made that has any value at all. Everything else is an abomination. I hate that. Jazz ain't everything.

Then there are snobs within the genre. I have played with Dixieland musicians who intensely hate any other jazz and refuse to play it. Now, I love good Dixieland but, damn it, there's way more to jazz than just that stuff. Anyone who can tell me that Charlie Parker or Ornette Coleman or Bill Evans or Oscar Peterson or Ray Brown are an abomination to jazz are beyond being a jazz snob, that's being the hemorrhoids on a jazz snob's asshole.

However, with that said, I feel as an earlier poster--I cannot stand modern pop or country. I feel they make absolutely no contribution to culture. Yes, that's a subjective thing but I'm hard-pressed to see any value here. Country, for example, has become a one-hit wonder factory. In country, you get to have one hit and then you shut up and sit down. How can you make a contribution to anything when you can't grow as an artist? The exception appears to be Taylor Swift who is the least listenable of any country artist I have heard in the last few years--in my opinion, you don't have to agree.

Here's the thing, a lot of country fans are snobs. Not all of them. But many of them are. It turns out a lot of these people know next to nothing about Bob Wills or Hank or the Delmore Brothers or Spade Cooley or Skeets McDonald or Patsy Cline. Those that know of them, don't even like them and admit they would never buy their music and yet they call themselves country fans. But they've admitted they only like one particular subgenre of country and the rest can go to hell. That's snobbery--period. It's like country music has been taken over by snobs. Ignorant morons proud of their ignorance.

It's like this guy I encountered online about a year ago. He tells me he is a rockabilly fan. Great, I said, I love rockabilly. I mentioned Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran and the Johnny Burnette Trio and Janis Martin. He responds with, "I don't listen to any of that. I only listen to modern British rockabilly."

"Not even Elvis? There wouldn't even be rockabilly without him."

"No."

Now, it's one thing to say you PREFER modern British rockabilly (which I have nothing against) but to tell me it's ALL the rockabilly you listen to and you have no interest in the American artists that started it all or in the modern rockabilly of America or any country outside of Britain IS snobbery. You can't call yourself a rockabilly fan when you are as ignorant of most of that genre as someone who has no interest at all in rockabilly. To assume British rockabilly is all the rockabilly there is and the rest of it isn't worth your precious time to even give a cursory listen to presses the boundaries of musical snobbery and borders dangerously on total dipshitism.

Such people deserve to be ridiculed (which may make me a snob in the eyes of some posters here) except they are not worth the energy of doing so. I find them sad and pathetic.