For someone who doesn’t go to many shows, smoke many cigarettes, wear tight pants, or criticize people’s music tastes, I listen to and get exposed to a lot of music. It is far beyond cliché to make the claim that I listen to “everything” but I would actually challenge most everyone on the planet to a duel of MP3 playlist eclecticism and going into said battle, I would be entirely confident that my random samples of music would spread so many genres that the opposition would be bewildered and forced to sing my praises.

Truthfully, the only major genre of music that my playlist does not sample is country, which, admittedly, is a fatal flaw in marketing myself as the man with the biggest breadth of musical taste, but I try and convince myself it just goes to show how truly distasteful that genre is.

For quite awhile my interests were settling in 80s music which was miraculously eclipsed by a disparate mix of hip hop and pop rap with indie music. Oscillating between those two poles for a couple years has revealed to me one important thing, there is far less of a difference between pop music and indie music than both of those camps would lead us to believe. Both are full of pretension, are meticulously designed and packaged, and are desperate to sell records. Both have horrible music with a few shining stars and both have largely disgusting and vehement fanbases with short attention spans. The perfect example of this very close relationship would be the annual crossover indie/garage rock band that jumps the fence (usually pushed by a salivating manager), lands into enemy territory and becomes wildly successful for one year and then, after being devoured, returns to obscurity. The simple fact bands such as The White Stripes, The Strokes, and Franz Ferdinand are capable of this is a testament to how similar pop and indie music are.

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