I am not familiar with the headspaces of those who have reacted to my reaction onChris Lawrence’s post regarding “self-annointed music cognoscenti,” and their condescension with which they approach pop music.

I came out with what would probably be the most obfuscating word involved in this whole exchange of ideas. I used the term “esoteric.” The usage that I chose out of the definition from Merriam-Webster is 2a: “limited to a small circle.” The closest antonym of “esoteric” is this case, is “popular.” It seemed axiomatic to me, considering the different usages of the word, as in its dictionary entry. Spencer opines (although his entire piece is worth reading):

The offshoot of this is that I think Chris & Jay are right to admonish the legions of music fetishists who turn on & off of music as it makes the journey from obscurity to popularity. But only to a point. Their wavering certainly calls into question the fixity of objective aesthetic standards. In their partial defense, though, I would argue that — acknowledging that there’s little distance between high & low in pop music — they pick their favorites like anyone else — for conditional reasons. If someone’s identity is built on being hip to music it’s not only preferable but necessary for them to move away from artists who become popular. For them to disregard the ‘low’ is essentially the same as the public rejection of the ‘high’…most of the men I worked with on the beer truck back home wouldn’t be caught dead at a foreign film simply because it was a foreign film. They’re reciprocal actions, & I’m not sure you can claim one is better or worse than the other. For the cutting-edge musicfolk to not abandon the popular would be to risk their hard-earned self-definition. It’s important to note, though, that many critics will throw a bone to the popular every now & then…an attempt, I guess, to show they’re still ‘of the people’. It’s also important to note that there are plenty of bands loved by the cognoscenti that aren’t esoteric at all — I’m enjoying right now The Mooney Suzuki, who I don’t find esoteric — three chords, two guitars, good harmonies/melodies, your basic garage rock — & seem well-loved by the elites (though I’m not sure how Chris & Jay are defining a band as esoteric — both a band that is appealing to all but unknown and the one that has some quasi-cryptophasic relationship with its audience?). In this sense, part of the appeal of these bands is essentially a value relative to scarcity. The bands, like all products, lose value as they become more common. If the currency of music-fetishists & critics is ‘knowledge’ & ‘awareness’ then there must be a decline in their appreciation of a band as it becomes more popular.

— Spencer of Mediocrity’s Co-Pilot: The Tyranny of High (or Low) Expectations

I’ve added my own emphasis and took out his own to highlight a point the I am trying to make: I disdain that particular attitude of music “fetishists and critics.” In the comments to Tom Mulherin’s post I said:

I typed out a long response but Haloscan told me to be brief. So I will. My points in my post:
1. The idea of “snobs” that commercial success taints art and makes it “awful.” That is what Chris complained about when he talked about the cognoscenti.
2. That commercial success relies heavily on popularity means that commercially successful art is “not esoteric.”
3. Snobs want good art, but commercially successful art is “not good.”
4. Therefore snobs promote the idea that only esoteric art is good.

Best example are young musicians who like a particular song of a particular independent band, only to call that band and its song “terrible,” should that song be released as the first single under a major label.

I pointed out the example of the “betrayed” fan-base because I see that kind of attitude all too often. I find it wildly pretentious when someone I know says: “they’re a good band, too bad they got signed by Sony.” Too bad, I would ask, and then they would get into a rail about commercialization, about how, basically, the money pumping into their pockets and their nearly assured popularity would diminish the quality of their work. That, and pardon me for being axiomatic, is exactly what I mean by snobbery.