It doesn't matter who you are or what you like. If you listen to music, you are a music snob, and you might as well make things easier by admitting it now.
There's just something about music that inspires conceited pretensions in people. Our taste in music defines us in ways that intelligence and athletic ability cannot, and our favorite songs represent audio clips of our personalities and thoughts. Sure, music can be a medium for comfort, unity, defiance and awareness of social issues, but it's also a measurement of "cool," whatever transitory definition that word has taken on this week (if anyone knows, please fill me in; Wikipedia wasn't much help).
Think about it. When your best friend told you she bought the latest My Chemical Romance album of her own free will, you lost some respect for her. You may not have openly berated her (though a true friend would have), but most people won't hesitate to take advantage of musical tastes to assert their superiority.
So what's the hierarchy of musical tastes? At the top are genres like classical and jazz, in which compositional mastery is indisputable. Can you really try to put a contemporary band like Fall Out Boy on a higher platform than Ludwig van Beethoven or Louis Armstrong without sounding foolish? I don't think so. Don't even try, you'll just hurt yourself.
The next step down consists of influential musicians regardless of genre. This includes but is not limited to artists like Elvis, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Clash, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Sonic Youth, The Pixies and Nirvana. While some of the artists in this category are overrated (I won't say which because I do value my life), people who listen to them can always play the your-band-wouldn't-exist-if-it weren't-for-my-band card, and that's a tough rebuttal to make.
Indie, alternative and experimental lie directly underneath. The followers of these genres tend to be the haughtiest. In fact, I think pretentious is somewhere in the definition of indie. Whether their alleged superiority is justified is a whole other issue that will be addressed at a later time.
Along the same level are metal, punk and psychedelic. Though it depends on the person, metal-heads, punk rockers and counterculture hippies often feel secure enough in their tastes that they ascend above the hierarchal system. Kudos to them.
Now we're getting to the bottom, where we have pop-rock, emo and then, last and least, bubblegum pop. If you are in dismay to find yourself here in the lowest rank, my apologies, but this is where you belong. Blame your poor musical upbringing. There are exceptions to all of these levels, the exception here being The Spice Girls, because they are simply amazing and always will be.
Of course, I've left out a lot of genres because, in our label-crazy world, 20 million have come into existence; there are overlaps; and of course, there are anomalies. It would be nearly impossible to take all factors into account, and I'm not going to pretend to be competent enough to try.
Don't, by any means, think that I consider myself exempt from this whole pecking order. I'm sadly not even at the top. I have even secretly been in the bottom tier more than once (I ashamedly admit to downloading Panic! At The Disco's "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" when it first came out; it was a moment of weakness, and it won't happen again). So I've been put down by some, and I've scoffed at others myself. The logical course of action to take would be to remove myself from the metaphorical food chain entirely, but looking down on those with inferior taste in music is the little power I have left in this world, and I'll be damned if I'm going to give it up.
That having been said, I feel like we can now embark on a glorious journey together, one filled with condescension, inaccurate generalizations and egocentrism.
