Jumping the musical fence

Have you ever met one of those people, one of those “Oh my God, you’re telling me you don’t light candles in front of a Bob Dylan shrine in your dining room every night at 6 p.m.” people?\nIt doesn’t have to be Dylan. Believe me, I’m not out for him specifically. (I don’t want an angry mob of stoners with big musical aspirations knocking down my door later today.) This artist could be interchanged with any iconic group or artist, such as The Stones or Led Zeppelin or Paris Hilton.\nI know you know who I’m talking about. You’ve probably met them at some friend of a friend’s party, and they were undoubtedly wearing a vintage-looking plaid button-up and Coke bottle glasses. These are the people who want to make you feel bad for not sharing a similar interest in who they view to be the musical equivalent of an orgasm.\nAnd there are people like that for every form of media out there, not just music. I, for example, always seem to attract film students who think that I was born on the planet Zozar for never having seen a single “Lord of the Rings,” “Star Wars” or “Harry Potter” flick. (I’d just rather watch “Legally Blonde” on TBS again, honestly.)\nAnyway, these high-falutin’ people are often the people who end up as reviewers for popular Web sites and magazines, and the problem is that they often create sentences like this:\n“In a scene as self-reflexive as this, backlashes are the order of the day, but even still, there are signs – such as the increasing use of ‘blog house’ as an eye-rolling pejorative, recent records by Calvin Harris, Does It Offend You Yeah?, and Ghostland Observatory, and the parallel rise of Balearic-feeling dance as a worthy substitute – that this world might be slipping under the weight of its own ubiquity.”\nThat’s actually an excerpt from a review of the latest Cut Copy album featured on pitchforkmedia.com, a popular music Web site. It could just as easily have been a review on the latest Lunchables product or the soundtrack to “Bio-Dome.” I mean, I’m sure there’s a handful of people reading this who do understand more than 35 percent of that sentence. I am certainly not one of them. I am on the other side of that hypothetical fence, watching the “Rock of Love 2” season finale and eating non-organic vegetables.\nI don’t want anyone to get the wrong message here. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being this type of critic – obviously these people have an unimaginably vast knowledge of everything music, and I admire that. But the pickle here arises when normal people just want to know if they should go out and buy the new Cut Copy album, but they can’t get past the “eye-rolling pejorative” or “Balearic-feeling dance” to figure it out. \nI just want to bring both sides of this hypothetical fence together so that we can all find the music that fits us perfectly. I mean, isn’t that the point of discussing it in the first place?