6 Levels of Music Listeners
Level 1: The Pop Fan
…
Level 2: The “Alternative” Lover
That’s not real music
Level 3: The Hip-Hop + (some word)
What is all that gabble?
Level 4: The Metal + (some word I haven’t decided yet)
They crossed a border at some point and they cannot come back and they know it. They will tell you this themselves, unprompted, because the story of their conversion is the only origin myth they have and they've polished it until it shines. There was a song. It was loud. And it changed everything. You Gen-Zs wouldn't understand. What do y'all know about metal?
They speak of subgenres the way cardinals speak of dioceses—doom, death, black, thrash, progressive, symphonic, deathcore, mathcore, blackgaze—an endless taxonomy that exists solely to give them grounds to dismiss one another. The death metal fan finds the metalcore fan embarrassing. The black metal fan finds everyone embarrassing. The progressive metal fan has a music degree at the University of Arts Philadelphia (which filed for bankruptcy in 2024), a subscription to a theory YouTube channel, and would like you to know that Meshuggah is essentially Stravinsky but with electric guitars.
Underneath the taxonomy is a simpler person: a guy who discovered, usually at fifteen, that volume is a form of permission. Permission to be angry, to be dramatic, to feel things at a scale that they couldn’t from an ordinary life. This is fine. This is, in fact, human nature. What's less fine is that they're still asking for the same permission at thirty-seven, still needing the blast beat to feel the emotion, still constitutionally unable to be moved by anything played below a hundred and forty decibels. They call this authenticity. Their therapist, if they have one, would call it something else.
Level 5: The Jazz (some word here)
Miles Davis once said, “I don’t care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing”. Jazz is the only music in which anything real is happening. Sadly, 99% of people in this world are simply not cultured enough to understand just how beautiful, ingenious and indulgent jazz really is. Blimey, thank god I am not one of them. How pathetic must their life be?
Pop, indie, hip hop, metal all play with a safety net. With mixed chord progressions, reliable resolutions, and the guarantee of having a chorus, these genres aren’t just artistically limiting, but frankly, cowardly. But when we tear that net apart to show the world what music should be, these unenlightened heads call us “performative”, diminishing our beloved jazz to nonsensical gibberish.
What they fail to realise, is that if something is hard to listen to, it automatically rewards the listener. Which is why we must spend twenty cumulative hours in discomfort, nodding slowly, waiting to feel something that will eventually come. Just as Miles Davis said, “It’s like, how did Columbus discover America when the Indians were already here?”
Level 6: The Classical (insert some word here ig)
The most wonderful quality of classical music is the blossom of different interpretations between conductors. Take Rach 2, bar 148 to bar 156. Listen to Bernstein’s interpretation, then Karajan’s, then Jarvi's then Salonen’s then Bohm’s. And there’s Johann Nikolaus Graf de la Fontaine und d’Harnoncourt- Unverzagt’s interpretation. My favourite version. You haven’t heard of his name, have you? I know. He’s pretty underground. What? You cannot hear the difference between each version? You’re simply not listening hard enough. It’s ok, just listen to it again. And again. You’ll eventually hear it. I was once this close (like thisssss close) to hearing it, but some bastard sitting at 12J coughed between the movements and completely interrupted that flow state. I hope he never recovers.
You know, we are unable to enjoy anything composed after 1913. People tell us this is an arrogance that has cut them off from a century of human musical expression, but that isn’t true. It is simply a mark of refinement, a mark of our ability to transcend time and space to find true refinement. Especially the Baroque period. I am not a particularly emotional person–in fact, I have never, in my known memory, cried even in front of my parents and my wife. But every time I hear La Primavera (you MUST hear Alana Youssefian’s version–it’s the only real version), those little pearls just cannot stop dropping from my eye. It’s like, I have an old, old soul, you know?
And there’s jazz, the most morally presumptuous genre—the musician above the composer, the self above the structure, improvisation mistaken for inspiration. Every other genre below jazz is tasteless and artificial—worth my breath. Pop is not music. It is a sound made by a process. I have said this. And I will say it in your face again, proudly and loudly, until the words themselves begin to swing.
Level 7: We return to pop
Ah yes. Here we are again. You thought pop was way at the bottom of this musical hierarchy, didn’t you? But here they sit. Argue with them that Die With a Smile isn’t real music, they ask you, why, then, does it boast twenty billion streams on Spotify, while your Murray Perahia Plays Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 23, Op. 57 "Appassionata": III. Allegro Ma Non Troppe has a pathetic three thousand streams? Tell them there is a difference between popular music and good music, and they’ll ask you: what even is good music? If ninety-nine percent of people don’t get the song, how could it be good?
And they aren’t interested in hearing your response. Regardless of whatever argument you were able to construct, they’ll dismiss you as nothing but performative and pretentious, someone who probably still lives in their parents’ attic, yet wants to feel elitist. Someone who had no choice but to weaponise music just to feel some meagre superiority in their life. And depending on who’s reading this, they might not be wrong.