Top Ten Signs You Might Be a Music Snob

The Top Ten Signs You Might Be a Music Snob

Are you a music snob? Here are the top ten signs:

10. You’ve broken up with someone after examining his/her music collection.

9. When asked to name your favorite band, you subdivide your answer into categories such as “Post-British Invasion,” “Neo-New Wave,” “Pre-Grunge Garage Rock, Semi-Melodic,” etc., and continue listing your favorites long after the other person has stopped listening.

8. You alphabetize your albums by producer, not band name.

7. You know what song was #1 when you were born (and what other song from the Hot 100 blows that #1 song out of the water).

6. You’ve investigated copyrighting your iTunes playlists.

5. You easily pontificate on the artistic value of band reunions (the Animals, the Buzzcocks, the Police, Sex Pistols), but can’t be bothered to voice an opinion about the Who.

4. Tired of the lame cell-phone ringtones you hear all around you, you downloaded software to make your own ringtones of your more obscure favorite songs.

3. You regularly read at least 5 MP3 blogs (but only comment on 2).

2. Not only can you easily differentiate between the “Jangle” and “Power Pop” genres, but you can readily cite examples of people who misuse those terms.

1. As you read this, you mentally composed your own, much better list.

Codependency's Greatest Hits

Codependency's Greatest Hits (or Why I Love the Smithereens)

Years ago, I briefly worked for one of the Major Record Labels. One day, I ran into a hotshot A&R guy and pitched him my idea for a compilation album called Codependency’s Greatest Hits. The album would be filled with songs about making it okay for your loved ones to misbehave. The A&R guy hated the idea and mockingly suggested that a more commercial idea would be Songs to Drive Your Neurotic Ex to Suicide, but he disappeared before I could say anything more than "Joy Division."

Neither of those albums ever came out, but it's always been clear that the first song on Codependency's Greatest Hits would have to be "Behind the Wall of Sleep" by the Smithereens. I mean, listen to this:

She was tall and cool and pretty and she dressed as black as coal
If she asked me to I'd murder, I would gladly lose my soul.

It's a codependent's dream come true.



Some songs just seem timeless from the first time you hear them. Instantly familiar and instantly different from anything that came before. So perfect that they somehow must always have existed – maybe you just never noticed them before.

But let's back up. The song moves like gangbusters from the first beat, a perfect song to play in a car. Going very fast. With the volume all the way up. And the fuzzy guitar making your speakers buzz.

Then the singer starts up:

She had hair like Jeannie Shrimpton back in 1965
She had legs that never ended
I was halfway paralyzed.

What the hell is this? And more importantly, when the hell is this?

This song easily could have come out in 1966, 1976, 1986, 1996, or 2006 and the crunchy guitars and Pat DiNizio's vocals would sound just as fresh and revelatory.

A perfect love song about the girl everyone wants – a chick bass player who "stood just like Bill Wyman." Because anyone could name-check Mick or Keith, but it takes a music snob to worship Bill Wyman. And to want a female bass player to anchor his life (just like Bill Wyman anchored the Stones).

But there's a price to pay. With Bill Wyman, it was putting up with rock-star excesses from Mick and Keith. With the girl in this song, it’s having to murder someone just to get on her radar. If that seems like a fair trade-off, you're probably codependent.

Back in the real world, female bass players won't take all your pain away… and they won't care if you lose your soul. But in an alternate universe (where Codependency’s Greatest Hits has sold 15 million copies and that hotshot A&R guy is flipping burgers), the female bass player really, really loves you and will let you save her. And when you do, she’ll take away all your pain -- 3 minutes and 24 seconds at a time.

The 34th Most Important Band in the World

Maybe some bands were never meant to break out.

Maybe some bands were always supposed to be big fish in small ponds.

In the early 1980s, Blotto appeared nearly everywhere up and down the East Coast, sounding like the Bonzo Dog Band updated with new wave rave-ups. Blotto, whose members had been in a mime troupe together then in the Star Spangled Washboard Band, hailed from Albany and wrote tunes like "My Baby’s the Star of a Driver’s Ed Movie," "She’s Got a Big Boyfriend," and the "The B-Side" ("you can't sing along, the words are awkward..."). Their songs were smart and fun… and they were arguably better than many of the bands that did break through in the early 80s.

In homage to the Ramones, they all took the name "Blotto" as their last name – so the group consisted of Broadway Blotto, Sergeant Blotto, Bow-Tie Blotto, Cheese Blotto, Lee Harvey Blotto (who has since become a lawyer and now sometimes calls himself "F. Lee Harvey Blotto" – proving that jokes can stretch too far), Chevrolet Blotto, and (briefly) Blanche Blotto.

But the Music Gods are inscrutable and fickle. So while Adam Ant became a star, Blotto floundered, a beloved cult-band from Albany with a fanbase up and down the Eastern seaboard.

They toured endlessly and got lots of radio airplay for a couple years. They should have been signed by a major label (and nearly were several times), but it just never worked out (not even with Burt Ward, Robin from TV’s Batman show, as their manager). And by 1984, the band was done (save for the occasional reunion gig).

That might have been that… and they might have stayed a distant memory. Except for one thing.

A couple of SUNY-Albany students looking for a fun senior project spent thirty bucks making a "rock video" with Blotto lip-synching their song "I Wanna Be a Lifeguard." The students got an A, then moved to New York City where many of their friends were working for a brand-new cable network.

So when MTV launched on August 1, 1981, the "I Wanna Be a Lifeguard" was a favorite of the people who worked there. And while everyone knows that "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles was the first video played on MTV, most people don't realize that, a few hours later, MTV was playing "I Wanna Be a Lifeguard" (sandwiched betwen Iron Maiden and Rod Stewart).

Some people will tell you that when MTV started they were so desperate for videos that they played anything they could get their hands on. But I've got a better explanation.

Sure, maybe they never broke through and reached the national (or international) audience they deserved. But on August 1, 1981, Blotto was the 34th most important band in the world.



"I Wanna Be a Lifeguard"


"I Quit"


"Metal Head"

Needle Drop

Vinyl is different.

It’s hot, frenzied, often wobbly and complicated. It passes over you like a wave, washing across your consciousness. You can’t hide from it. You can’t decide which parts you want. But you can become one with it.

Digital is slick. It’s discrete and ordered. You can slice it into units, decode it into ones and zeroes and move them around. Turn them upside down. It’s like watching the world from behind thick glass.

You can watch it. You can sometimes appreciate its beauty. But you never quite become one with it. It’s always a little bit distant and a little bit cold. And, because it’s cold, it’s easy to turn away from it.

When you put a needle down on a record, there’s space. Space to climb into so you can wrap the sound around yourself. And there’s an infinite range of values beyond the simple choice of zero and one.

Yes, records are imperfect. They’re flawed and approachable. And even the noises have personality. The scratches and skips. The clicks and pops. They sear their way into your mind until they merge into the song and become part of the listening experience. A record welcomes you in, gives you a place that’s all your own. And if you let them, the clicks and the pops will embrace you, prop you up, support you.

The silence between tracks on a CD is cold and dead. There’s nothing there. The “silence” between tracks on a record is alive, buzzing with possibilities, humming with hints of the future and distant echoes of the past.

Crouching between the wow and flutter, nestled between the clicks and pops… is a magical place created anew just for you every time the needles drops. There’s noise in the “silence,” a warmth of ambience before the music begins. Sound jumps out at you and redlines when needle hits vinyl. And just for a moment that sound joins your past and your future, transporting you to a more perfect present as you literally become part of the music.

Wasted Youth in Used Record Stores

I spent too much of my youth in used record stores.

See, I grew up in a small town with three colleges (and two more a few miles away). There were great used record stores there – one in the back of a head shop on Main Street (specializing in selling foreign cut-outs), one next to a stationary store (whose owner was busted for selling pot – I know, in a college town? Shocking!), and another one that sold hundreds of cheap bootlegs whose “covers” were cheap mimeographs of bad band photos.

And I was patient – I’d thumb through the stacks, always looking for something specific, but always open to what I might find – especially if the price was low. And the price was almost always low, because there were always lots of college students selling their records to the used record stores. Plus, I wasn’t a collector.

That’s important. Collectors care about more about the label and the idea of the record than they care about what’s on the record.

This is what collectors do:



For me, it was always about the music.

And while I own a few records that actually are valuable, their real value for me is what’s on them.

To be honest, when I was younger, I was more like Jack Black’s character here:



(I like to think I'm more tolerant now. So if you wanted to listen to "I Just Called To Say I Love You," I wouldn't say anything mean about you -- but I would leave the room.)

And while I own a few records that actually are valuable, their real value for me is what’s on them.

So this blog is mostly about music (and often about vinyl). Because it’s the music that matters.