Just because he can fingertap the Star Spangled Banner with his dick...

Professional musicians and sound engineers. I'm going to use that category very broadly. I'm going to use it in the same way that someone might use the designation of 'warrior' to describe everyone from the Special Forces operator in Afghanistan to the mall cop who wishes he could carry his mail-order katana while on duty. As you can imagine, for every Neil Pert, John Scofield, or Victor Wooten, for every third tier technician that labored for two years on Fleetwood Mac's 'Tusk', and for every anonymous studio rat that makes an actual living doing ad jingles and the lead-in music for televised fishing tournaments, there's at least a hundred pretenders.

There are easily several dozen thousand guys with half a toe in the door of the music industry. If you're ever in Los Angeles and somebody tells you they're an actor, that's a fancy way of saying they wait tables. It's the same deal in music. Now, of these part-timers and weekend warriors, there is a very annoying subset who have inflated senses of professional accomplishment and of personal musical efficacy. They regard themselves as the unheralded vanguard and dogged preservationists of genuine music. And that makes them assholes.

Well, I'm sure that a few of these particular cats have ascended into the upper ranks. Not all of them qualify as rear echelon motherfuckers (REMFs). Still, I have found that most arrogant assholes aren't arrogant assholes because they know where they stand in the grand scheme of things. With these guys, I'd say it's closely related to all those angry little people with authoritarian personalities that enabled the rise of fascism: they kiss up while stomping down.

Sure, there were a million teenage kids who believed that the revolution would be at hand if they aped Sid Vicious. So what's wrong with being a wannabe? Well, this goes a little beyond that. If we're talking about punk rock, these guys are more analogous to the 'Crassholes' that went around sucking the fun right out of it. In the overarching world of rock-and-roll and jazz, they're the equivalent of Theodor Adorno carping on Stravinsky for being too populist and sentimental, and extolling the abstract cat scratches of Shoenberg in the next paragraph. Or rather, they're the equivalent of Adorno's snooty 1930s High German bourgeois readership, rather than of the great critical theoretician himself.

You see, in the vast, ultra-fragmented world of popular music production and consumption there is a certain subset of individuals whose bent is squarely towards conspicuous studio engineering, self-indulgent displays of technical virtuosity, and anally-retentive formal technique. To an excessive, almost neurotic degree, while oozing with pretension like lobster tails slathered in garlic butter sauce. You know who I'm talking about.

You play them a CD of a band you like and they instantly dismiss it, saying that it's pure shit compared to their third favorite lead guitar wanker that does seven-fingered arpeggios in the Phrygian Dionysian Mynacean scale in twenty-fourths while layering false harmonics in with the diphthongic cantacle overtone superstructure. Blah blah blah. They slobber over the latest bass guru in fusion jazz who can churn out 15 minute spank-and-wank solos on a gigantic 11-string bass guitar that looks like you could play it with mallets. (They stare blankly if you say the names "Ornette Coleman" or "John Zorn", and turn up their noses in derision if you mention the word "Flea.") They fetishize objects such as $5,000 coffee table basses that were carved out of solid slabs of exotic zebrawood with 400 year old luthiery tools originally used by a Viennese cello maker, and veneered with ten interlocking layers of burled walnut, purple heart, and spalted maple. Yeah, that's jazz fusion for you.

They earnestly believe that any example of rock that exhibits less "craftsmanship" than Chicago or Emerson Lake & Palmer is garbage. Well, I suppose the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd make their cut. And maybe Dream Theater, in spite of their being associated with heavy metal. The one chord wonders of punk rock? It doesn't even qualify as "music." One guy I know is "deeply offended" whenever he sees people digging a three chord rock band, or weird outsider music like Daniel Johnston. "Because I spent all those years perfecting my technique, learning theory, learning how to play things that most people just cannot approach [deep breath]... And I'm supposed to just nod my head and agree when someone who doesn't know anything about music comes and tells me that this is good music!?" That must be what it's like when educated professionals abuse their children.

Needless to say, I always found their bullshit insufferable. And, asshole that I am, I always relished any opportunity I had to piss them off.

So, in the spirit of being an asshole who can't leave well enough alone, I ask this: Why should I consider it 'good music' just because your favorite bass player can fingertap the Star Spangled Banner with his cock? Why should I consider it a great album just because there was a 25 minute organ solo that took up the entire B-side? Why should I consider them awesome musicians because they took their conservatory training and introduced uptown pretension into music that used to be the domain of gutter slime? Yeah, an Aston-Martin is a fine automobile, but let's see it compete with a Jeep in the mud.

If it's rock and it doesn't rock, it ain't shit. And that's whether they know four chords or whether they know every conceivable harmonic on a 24-fret six-string guitar. If it's jazz, and "virtuosity" and "tone" are the two adverbs brought to bear above all the others, then it's entirely uncompelling. If the music doesn't get me going, regardless of how shitty or how slick the musicians making it are, then it fuckin' sucks! How difficult is this for you people to understand? I dislike your favorite jazz fusion musicians not because I'm not enough of a musician to appreciate them. I dislike them because 1.) it fucking puts me to sleep, 2.) the tones their instruments produce are as sterile, over-polished, and innocuous as Art d'Academe paintings of blushing cherubs, 3.) and I associate the music with wine and cheese booster events for a suburban school district in Tuscon, Arizona.

In the end, if you get to be the arbiter of what "good music" is, then I get to be the arbiter of who gets to be called an "arrogant prick." Guess who qualifies?