The Art Snob Archive

Arsenal - February 17/06

MUSIC + INTERNET = DECK

artsnob tip #3: BUILD YOUR BAND NAME ARSENAL

Music, dear readers, is a monumental, immovable, ivy-covered pillar of the art snob’s world, as embedded into our culture as art galleries and fancy glossy design magazines. Explosively creative, endlessly complex, and sympathetic to skinny ties and one inch buttons, music gives to the art snob the same joy heroin gives to Peter Doherty. Indeed, art snobs across the world pride themselves on listening to music that you’ve never heard of: “Oh, you’re not familiar with that obscure disco-punk band from Brooklyn? Well, then…I guess I really am better than you.”

We successful elitists are constantly searching for the unknown, the underappreciated and the underground. It is not always easy, with false alarms from British magazines and a constant battle to stay ahead of that confounded “OC” show, but music is at least one element of art snob culture that doesn’t require reading a three-hundred page book to become familiar with. Lucky for you, the aspiring art snob, there are plenty of resources available, and plenty of bands yet to be discovered.

Any person with true art snob potential will realize immediately the importance of the internet in “building one’s band name arsenal” for, unlike magazines, web sites often allow you to actually listen to the music you’re reading about. No elitist wants to be one of those posers who knows the band’s name but doesn’t know what they sound like: “Oh, the Stills? Yeah, they are a pretty deck hip-hop group.” (‘deck’ means ‘cool’, FYI. Use it.)

The information age has done more to bring independent music to the mainstream than any other medium, and although the internet allows us Waterloo folk to keep up to date on the latest art rock bands emerging from the suburbs of London, it also means there is a lot more crappy music to sift through. There are, however, a few sites that can be helpful in your quest to build musical knowledge.

A good start may be www.pandora.com. The “Music Genome Project” created this website to link different music together so listeners could basically create their own radio station. The aspiring art snob types in the name of a band that he or she already knows and likes, and Pandora will find similar artists, matching everything from vocal styles to “rhythmic syncopation”. This is certainly a good gateway website for musical exploration, and exposes to the art snob tunes like “rhythmic syncopation”. But Pandora can be a little commercial at times, so you may actually have to do some work to find the truly obscure.

Far better (but also a little more advanced) than Pandora is www.epitonic.com, a website offering not only a vast database of music to explore but also FREE and high quality mp3s to download. This is key; the art snob must fill his or her iPod with epitonic’s ‘cutting-edge music’, so the next time someone searches through their library they will be shocked and astounded by the level of musical sophistication. Each artist profile offers mp3s, links, a biography, suggestions for related artists and movements, and is highly informative. Fill up on knowledge, o aspiring art snob, for then you, too, can look down your nose at people who don’t know about stuff like the California Avant-Pop movement.

The whole blog thing has also had important repercussions for underground music, for it allows art snobs everywhere to share/show off their particular tastes. As far as free music goes, www.3hive.com may be your best bet. This blog is run by three fellow art snobs, attaching their personal opinions and reviews to a growing archive of free downloads. Their write-ups are both humorous and informative: a wonderful resource for the advanced art snob. 3hive allows the visitor to search by genre, artist, and label, and the page can even be streamed through iTunes.

The internet has much to offer to the aspiring music elitist, and these sites are certainly a good start on the young art snob’s search for the unheard. Most important, however, is that you actually listen to the music. It can be a very enjoyable experience.

posted by HLL @ Friday, March 24, 2006