Whenever I hear people profess their love for Taylor Swift, Paramore or any artist that’s associated with the genre deep trance, I feel a twinge of confusion and embarrassment for them. To be honest, any musician that doesn’t release their music in album-length chunks makes me feel the need to turn up my nose.

I’m not alone in this though. Not all are as guilty as me, but there’s not a person at De Anza who hasn’t engaged in music shaming in one form or another. It comes in many different forms and not all of them are bad either.
Sometimes music shaming helps you find out about better music.

We’ve all felt the sense of warm pride that can only come with listening to a catchy new song before it’s become popular. That’s why pop radio stations are always so quick to assure you that they play the newest music.

It’s the kind of feeling that turns into pity or even superiority when you run across someone who doesn’t know the song yet, or likes an “old” song.

That’s perhaps the most common and banal form of music shaming. Not all music shaming is detrimental though. The further you go into music genre niches the more common it becomes, and for good reason.

For example, for anyone familiar with Modest Mouse beyond their “Float On” single, hearing a new person say they love the band based solely on that song will garner some eye rolls.

But that’s because while that song neatly cut and packaged the band’s brand of left-field delivery and introspective song writing with a catchy lead guitar riff for mass consumption; that song was only skin deep compared the rest of the band’s sprawling earlier discography.

The band has conveyed more heartfelt sentiments, and employed catchier guitar melodies and a more enthusiastic delivery before.
To be sure their older songs can seem unwelcoming at first, and not everyone who liked “Float On” will dig the stuff that came before. But many people who loved that one single would find songs they loved even more if they took the time to listen.

For this reason, music shaming actually helps the music fan in the long run. This paradigm exists for musical acts in every genre.

If you liked Drake’s last album, the two that came before will scratch that same itch just as well. If you loved the robot singing vocoder breakdown near the end of “Get Lucky”, Daft Punk’s earlier albums were almost all synthesizers and vocoders effects.

Honestly, if no one uttered the phrase “The last album was way better” a lot of good music in artist’s catalogs would go unheard.