The Great Generational Snob Shift
Are you a snob or an omnivore? Or are they really both the same?
If you’re reading this newsletter, I have bad news. You’re probably a snob. I don’t mean that as an insult. But you’ve got to be realistic. If you’re getting weekly missives sent to your email inbox about “the intersection of music and data,” then you probably spend more time thinking about the music that you like and what it says about you than the average person. Nevertheless, snobbishness is not some monolith. Grandma’s snobbish musical tendencies are likely very different than your own. This week, I want to track the great generational snob shift. As always, this newsletter is also available as a podcast. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or click play at the top of this page.
Refined Taste Through the Ages
By Chris Dalla Riva
In 1949, Russel Lynes published a piece in Harper’s titled “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” that tried to parse how cultural taste had become symbolic of socio-economic class. “The old structure of the upper class, the middle class, and the lower class,” he wrote, “is on the wane. It isn't wealth or family that makes prestige these days. It's high thinking.” When the piece was reprinted in Life, Lynes included a diagram that depicted highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow tastes in a variety of categories, including clothes, furniture, drinks, sculpture, and (oddly) salads.
According to Lynes, if you want highbrow entertainment, you should go to the ballet. If you want upper middlebrow entertainment, you should go to the theater. Lower middlebrow? Head to the movie theater for a musical film. And while you’re there, you can stay put for some true lowbrow entertainment: westerns.
To someone born over four decades after Lynes’s article was published, this strikes me as odd. When I think of people with refined taste, I don’t think of someone who is only into ballet. I think of someone who can appreciate everything from a Tchaikovsky ballet to a John Wayne western. Taste is about understanding a wide range of artistic styles and movements, not about sticking to one and ignoring the rest. So, what led to this shift?
My first theory is that this was purely an access issue. With the rise of the world wide web in the 1990s, information became cheaper and more accessible to the average person. You might not be able to afford a ticket to the ballet, but you could now freely watch one on a GeoCities site dedicated to the art form. Jump forward 20 years and your Spotify subscription gets you access to the same music as Elon Musk’s Spotify subscription, net worth be damned. This theory isn’t accurate, though.
In 1996, sociologists Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern published a paper titled “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore” chronicling this exact phenomenon that I’ve been discussing. Using comparable surveys from 1982 and 1992, they found that “In recent years … many high-status persons are far from being snobs and are eclectic, even ‘omnivorous,’ in their tastes. This suggests a qualitative shift in the basis for marking elite status-from snobbish exclusion to omnivorous appropriation.”
According to the International Telecommunications Union, only 2% of people were internet users in 1997. In 1992, the year of Peterson and Kern’s survey, we can assume that percentage was even lower. Thus, the internet cannot explain this shift in highbrow tastes. It has to be something else. Here are a few things that Peterson and Kern suggest:
The Rise of Racial and Religious Tolerance: In the early part of the 20th century, many tastes deemed lowbrow were those associated with either minorities or the impoverished (e.g., R&B, country). As civil rights protections became codified throughout the century, deeming objects and artistic movements associated with certain groups as inherently lowbrow came to be seen as sexist or racist. Cultural omnivorousness is thus partly an outgrowth of societal tolerance.
A Shift in Critical Perceptions: Arts criticism in the 20th century began to take a wider view of what constituted serious art. In Lynes’s day, comic books and pulp fiction were considered the lowest form of writing. As time went on, critics began to see that there was some genuinely great work in these once derided art forms.
Generational Replacement: Rock n’ roll was originally deemed as crass music for children when it first splashed on the scene in the 1950s. The problem? Those children eventually grew up and came to dominate the cultural institutions that determined what was serious art. Their lens of what fell into this camp was much wider than their forebears.
These days, it feels like everybody is a musical omnivore, fans of rapper Kendrick Lamar also singing the praises country star Zach Bryan. If the internet didn’t cause this shift, it at least exacerbated it. That said, I think the highbrow is shifting once again. If our grandmother’s version of such was snobbishness and our mother’s version was omnivorousness, then I think our version is omnivorous depth.
Above you can see a TikTok post with over 2 million views where a person lists their top ten favorite songs of all-time:
“Enchanted” by Taylor Swift
“On the Wing” by Owl City
“Ready or Not” by Bridgit Mendler
“Piano Man” by Billy Joel
“Squidward Nose” by Cupcakke
“Imagine” by John Lennon
“Foolish” by Ashanti
“Boom Clap” by Charli XCX
“Hit 'Em Up” by Tupac
“Riptide” by Vance Joy
Whether this video is a joke or not, two sentiments are exceedingly prevalent among the comments. First, that the list is insanely chaotic. Second, that even if it is chaotic that it partially reflects the omnivorous tastes of contemporary listeners. Streaming services just make listening across genres so easy.
But pair this observation with another one, namely that many streaming services make passive listening easy. You want to listen to jazz? Just punch the genre into Spotify’s search bar, and you’ll have hours of playlists to listen to. Better yet, just play one jazz song and let Spotify’s algorithms handle the rest. You can listen to jazz for hours on end without ever having to know the name of one artist or song.
In summary, streaming makes musical omnivorousness and passive listening easier than ever before. But if you are listening across many genres without knowing much about what you are listening to — even if you do truly enjoy what is playing — would we consider your tastes highbrow? I doubt it. Because of that, I think we are going to see that while highbrow tastes will remain omnivorous, they will also require more depth of knowledge within each genre vertical. High level knowledge is not enough. You will need to know the songs, artists, and musical tropes to be considered highbrow in your tastes.
I think the end result of this is actually a world similar to the one Russel Lynes lived in, except that within each cultural vertical, you will have tastes viewed as highbrow or lowbrow. For example, the fact that you like country and hip-hop no longer signifies that you are highbrow. It matters which country and hip-hop artists that you like. Furthermore, it’s not just okay to like both ballet and westerns — in fact, it might be required — but you need to be careful about which works you prefer within those canons. Omnivores we might be on the surface, but snobs we remain underneath.
A New One
"Teething" by Ain’t
2024 - Sulking Rock
If you’ve ever had the chance to read a press release for a new song, you’ll know that they are often wildly over the top. That wasn’t the case for “Teething”, the second single from Ain’t. I found the press release quite illuminating:
Bringing together the stranger side of ‘90s guitar, post-punk, and shoegaze from both sides of the Atlantic, Ain’t expertly toe the line between nostalgia and ingenuity … Beginning as a simple guitar motif that returned to guitarist Ed Randall’s fingers almost every time he picked up the instrument, it wasn’t until bandmates Ellerby and Ho were both suffering from burgeoning wisdom teeth that Randall’s original scrappy idea turned into “Teething”, a song soaked in self-pity and the all-encompassing sorrow. Hanna Baker’s driving vocal delivery helps to coalesce the arrangements, with Ain’t’s crushing gut punching ability on full view.
There is some flare in this description. And there should be. It’s a press release. But it really does hit the nail on the head.
An Old One
"Bourée" by Jethro Tull
1969 - Classical Rock
In Russel Lynes aforementioned essay “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” he describes highbrow music as “Bach and before, [Charles] Ives and after” and lowbrow music as anything you’d find on a jukebox. Jethro Tull — a band who you’d find on jukeboxes in the 1970s — split the difference with their recording of “Bourée”.
Written by Johann Sebastian Bach in the early 18th century, Jethro Tull’s version uses the original counterpoint as a launching pad for jazzy flute runs and circular bass riffs. I like to believe it’s something Bach would have enjoyed.
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Resources on Today’s Topic: “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore” • “Anything But Heavy Metal: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes” • “Omnivorism of Eating and Highbrow–Lowbrow Distinction: Cultural Stratification in Poland” • “Why Elites Love Authentic Lowbrow Culture: Overcoming High-Status Denigration with Outsider Art” • “roll over beethoven, there's a new way to be cool” “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” • “The Rap Against Rockism”
Love the Ain't track! Reminds me very much of the The Delgados, who I think are a neat little gem.
A well-reasoned post until your ultimate conclusion that we remain stratified snobs even within an omnivore context. You present no evidence or examples why you assume musical tastes are arranged, or defined, by class. Is Johnny Cash necessarily the favorite country artist of the hip or the hillbilly? Can you type me because I listen to Moby, or Berlioz, or Kendrick or John Prine? Are you sure? I don't think you can shoehorn musical tastes, even in combination, into a class structure.
Love your stuff. I usually learn something, which is precious.