Rock Snob Snub?

There's a new kid on the blogging block, the darling of all the popular kids, snobsite.com claims to be the ‘official home of rock snobbery on the web.’ But something feels completely hollow about them, including what I've read of the book they're hawking in the 'sample pages' section, Entries from The Rock Snob*s Dictionary. Once I'd read the whole of their site, admiring the sharp writing and good site design, the thought occurred to me: I don't think they like music.

What I found missing was any love for the act of listening to music, no exultation in the sheer joy of plopping on a pair of headphones and rocking out. No writing about what makes music good. What I did see was gossip-column-worthy bitchiness about once hip bands doing un-hip things and a lot of meta-rock-criticism. Now, while rock writers certainly deserve to have the air let out of them, the general blog hubbub is labelling this a music writing site, and I don't think it is. And I think perhaps anyone who falls for this false premise, that snobsite.com is 'for rock snobs' has fallen into a classic internet trap.

My next though was “Have I been trolled?” A troll, a true troll and not the overused catch-all message board insult, is a venerable USENET practice more accurately known as 'trolling for newbies', where someone calculatedly makes statements designed to trick a newcomer into revealing his lack of knowledge on a subject.

Similarly, and perhaps this isn't intentional, I believe anyone who calls snobsite.com a site about music, rather than a satire of music writing, is revealing the shallowness of their own love for music.

The reason I got so worked up about this little site is that I was actually hopeful that I had found another good music site, and one that embraced the true nature of rock snobbery. The first thing that I looked for after reading the blog's month of posts was what other sites it linked to. Scanning down the list, I noticed one glaring omission, setting off alarm bells: NO FUCKING ROCKSNOBS.COM.

If you don't know rocksnobs.com, go there and check it out. You might (probably will) disagree with most of the opinions there, but that's because they're real opinions, from a real music fan, and not the carefully refined reflection of some indie-hipster zeitgeist.

Now, why would a site claiming to be the 'official home of rock snobbery' miss such an obvious kindred spirit? To think that they don't know about it is silly, what do you think the first domain name they tried to get was? Snobsite.com sure as hell isn't anyone's top choice. It's like one of those lame suggestions hotmail will give you if you try and claim an address that already exists.

So my guess is that the people behind snobsite.com know that if a reader were to encounter real rock snobbery, their house of cards would flutter to the ground faster than one could say 'Nick Denton media empire'. Rocksnobs.com doesn't have professional designers, illustrator credits or a PR machine, and it is not not not in existence to sell anything.

What I really think The Rock Snob's Dictionary is is a mirror held up to the music journalism world to show the sad uniformity of the generally accepted opinions of various personalities and movements in the world of rock and roll. But that wouldn't explain the adulation they are getting in the blog world. I'm continually trying to figure out if it's a joke or not, and if it is, how many layers out is the number of people linking to the site that are in on it?

Now, I believe they have managed to break most, if not all, of the Rocksnobs Rules of Etiquette, most blatantly Number Six: "Rocksnobs should always feel free to stand up and say, "Yeah, I listen(ed) to _____, so what?""

This has got me in the mood for more tearing up of the indie set, but this post is getting long. I do plan on e-mailing DragonAttack (I bet the snobsite.com people won't even know where that name comes from) and asking her opinion, and I'll post the response here if I get one.
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