Chris Lawrence confesses to enjoying the likes of Avril Lavigne and rails against the kind of crowd that I dislike too:

[...] [I]f there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s the widespread condescension displayed by the self-annointed music cognoscenti toward popular music. It’s the same order of pretentious twaddle advanced by NPR listeners, independent bookstore owners, peddlers of concern about low levels of political knowledge among the American public, and film-school graduates—faux bourgeois superiority, nothing more, nothing less.

— Chris Lawrence: The Pretentiousness of Music Critics

I do not know the entire history of art and pop culture, but somewhere along the way, art is no longer perceived as Art unless it is esoteric for the sake of being esoteric. This is the same kind of snobbery — and that’s what it really is, Prof. Chris — that plagues teenage garage rock bands, folky indie artistes, and “literary types.” However, has it not occurred to them that any artist who wishes to extend his lifespan as a human being needs to make a living, and that if the day job cannot support the artistic time, that money has to be made out of the artistry itself? Self-loathing artists annoy me. They give me the impression that they are afraid of being successful for fear of turning out to be exactly like the ones they railed against during their prolonged diets of ramen noodles.