I remember enjoying the first time I heard "Smells like Teen Spirit" while my friend's parents drove us home from a movie in their mini-van. He turned to me and said "I can't believe people think this is music...It'll never catch on." I remember thinking "I don't care if the music sucks, this is fun" while crowdsurfing my way up to the forward fence at Edgefest. Being a gangly teenager meant I was light enough and offered enough surface area to be propelled like a ragdoll. I remember hopping around frenetically while the sun came up at my first rave overlooking an isolated lake. It was the first I ever went too and probably the last I enjoyed. Do you know what all of this has taught me? The music scene is irredeemably retarded. I can't take it anymore. Unknowingly, as I've gotten older and been able to comment "done it," I've also found myself withdrawing from the public consumption of music. It's not that times "are a changin'" and I've suddenly become an anachronistic curmeudgeon. Instead, just how many concerts, clubs and parties can one go to before all of it just fails to disguise the growing pretentiousness of the experience? And while I admit that such a sentiment sounds like anti--mainstream pretentiousness in its own right, the environment for indie, college and niche music scenes are even worse. It seems any form of popular music that cultivates a following will be cannabilized by an insipid movement towards cliquishness. Hardly earth-shattering I know, but it's such an astounding pattern of perversion that every generation is subject to. It's so inevitable a development that it should be a primary tenet of psychohistory. Simply, how do you share in the public experience of music without becoming mired in convention rather than enjoyment? It's not the case that the music itself is stupefying--atleast not anymore than 99.7% of it has always been. Instead, the music scene's accompanying--and unavoidable--apocrypha of elitist sentiment deadens music for everybody. Also. it's not that people who bugout to the pop music du jour are the problem. No, It's the people who need to institutionalize the manners of enjoyment that dilute the experience for everyone. No wonder then that all musical scenes end up so ridiculously retarded: they take themselves so damn seriously. I've only experienced two decades of popular music culture ebbing and flowing, but I've seen more than enough to realize that the stylistic legitamacy of {insert any Rolling Stone Cover Artist here} or {insert emerging genre du jour here} matters about as much as the current whereabouts of Hitler's Left Nut. h3. "It's not the band I hate, it's their fans." Raves are chocked full of pretentious farts who complain about how diluted "the scene" has become--though they only got into "the scene" for the drugs anyway. Concerts are filled to the brim with sycophantic toadies who posess a radar for detecting posers in exchange for trading away their ability to have fun. Clubs and their suffocatingly pretentious trends need no further explanation. I know I come across as a misanthropic ex-scenester as well, what with all my criticisms of these scenes. Yet, it's not the state of all these scene's that I'm whining about. Rather, my gripe is that these ridiculous contraptions exist as ends unto themselves: Musical culture is a misnomer, it only serves to cultivate the ego's of people who'd behave like asses no matter what type of music they listened too. Damnit, music stops being fun when all these trappings of trendiness take themselves too seriously. It cannot just be ignored. The entanglements of popular music are nigh universal constants. It didn't take too much of them to get my fill and perhaps if my vices amounted to more than computers and chocolate, then drugs and alcohol may have been the secret to a prolonged ability to take it all seriously. People make music stupid and even people who took the blue pill awaken to that understanding at some point. Five years from now, nobody is going to care about how real their scene was anyway.