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.

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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.

Part of the diagram from Russel Lynes 1949 piece “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” in Life

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?

Western star John Wayne, the epitome of lowbrow entertainment according to Russel Lynes

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.