Image via Complex Original
It happens. You're at a cocktail party, enjoying a drink and the vegetable dip and some casual conversation with a group of people you're just meeting. The conversation turns to music. Contemporary music. Your breath catches in your throat because the last time you bought an album was in 2002 and it was the Counting Crows Hard Candy.
You are afraid you will embarass yourself.
Someone mentions Migos and you don't know who or what that is.
What can you to do? You could be honest. You could just say, "Eh, I'm not really that into music. I watch C-Span every night." But surely, everyone at any party held anywhere in the world would immediately turn their back on you if you admited that. They would hate you. Everybody would hate you and you'd go home alone and die unhappy. So, obviously, lie.
What can you do? Try these: 10 Things To Say To Make Yourself Sound Well-Informed About Current Music (Even When You're Not Well-Informed About Current Music)
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"This is so derivative."
"I liked Interpol a lot better when they were called Joy Division." "Hey, Action Bronson-Ghostface called and he wants his cadence back." If there's one thing that people who know music love over all else, it's accusing a thing of stealing from another thing. Whether it's an instance of tripping over "influence" and falling into "homage", or updating seminal songs in a new beat, it's important to present as heavily indignant. Treat every sample you recognize with total reverence, and act like you always just found out that somebody's doing a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho again.
"I like their older stuff better."
The trajectory of most music careers is southward. Rarely does an artist walk away with a mint reputation. Everyone eventually falls off. (Well, unless they die at age 27.) This pattern makes it all too easy to announce that anyone with over three albums in circulation has their best work behind them. The stronger the debut, the more people agree with you that it was all downhill after Reasonable Doubt, regardless of any Blueprints or Black Albums standing in the way of accuracy.
So it's easy. One simple phrase. But be careful. In Spike Lee's 25th Hour, Anna Paquin asks her professor, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, whether he's a fan of "DJ Dusk." Hoffman claims he is, "but I like his earlier stuff better." Unbeknownst to him, though, DJ Dusk is 17 and his current stuff is his early stuff.
"They're okay, but they're not artists."
Being considered "commercial" is always poison-juice for any artist's reputation. Despite steps toward a collective reconciling with the fact that today's professional musicians often need to align themselves with brands in order to survive, among "serious" music fans, independence and obscurity are still a virtue. One way to come off as a heavily cultured audiophile, though, is to have one glaring exception to this rule at hand at all times—one massive Black Eyed Peas-level hit on your playlist that puts your other "better" tastes in sharp relief. (At this moment, it would be, maybe, "Blurred Lines.") The way to qualify having this monster jam up in your mix, though, is to slag off its creator as a mere entertainer and not a true talent. The idea being: even kings are susceptible to royal fools.
"This album was recorded in a barn in Marrakech."
If you happen to know any trivia about an album's production process, it's a short leap in associative logic to imagine that you were present in the studio, drinking lychee mojitos with Diplo the whole time. It's not enough to be able to cite the parties involved, though. You have read the part of the review that mentions either how the album was mixed, mastered, or sequenced—the oral equivalent of having a record engineering degree from DeVry University. Also, read the liner notes, so you can where an album was recorded, geographically, as though that information has any impact on the resulting sound. Citing these locations is definitely a cool thing to do, and you can be like one of those movie directors who describe the city their movie is set in as being "like a character itself."
"They're good, but [insert artist name]'s solo album is better."
Some music fiends thrive on constant discovery. The coolest thing that exists is the thing that nobody else knows about yet. Once you've figured out what that is, how much of a boss do you look like when you put everyone else onto it? If it's not some young buck just starting out, it's the deep cut on a known album, the unpopular album everybody agreed was garbage, the side project, the solo album, the distant affiliate. Right now, for example, the thing to say as far as New York hip-hop is concerned is that A$AP Rocky played himself, but A$AP Ferg, though...
"They're good on a 'technical' level."
Mentioning an artist's technical proficiency is a pimp-slap of a backhanded compliment. It means that your discerning ear picked up on musical specifics that people who just listen to music for fun might miss. The "technical level" diss is also just thoroughly authoritative-sounding. It's what Rakim might say about Joey Bada$$, or Eddie Van Halen about Yngwie Malmsteen.
Some other words to sprinkle liberally into your vocab to sound in-the-know include: "angular," "textural," "atmopsheric," "undulating," "boom-bap," and the use of "hipster" as an adjective.
"All of the songs sound the same."
This statement has a thin veneer of truthiness protecting it against rebuttal. On some level, every dubstep song does sound the same. Ditto every country song, chillwave tune, and Mumford acolyte. Sometimes a broad, sweeping generalization is just the thing to show everybody you're a macro person with impressive opinions. You've seen the big picture and you know better than to go for a closer look. "Get on my level!" is something you might scream at anyone bothering to find the nuances that make each genre worth a deep-dive. Bonus points if you also claim the offending category is "everything that's wrong with music right now."
"You've got to hear them live to understand."
Dismissing a group's entire studio output in favor of seeing them live accomplishes several things at once. It establishes that the band in question is a shape-shifting beast with hidden strengths, that only especially perceptive people are aware of such, and that you happen to be one of these lucky mutants. In the unfortunate event that the person you're talking to has in fact seen the artist in question perform live, you'll have to up the ente: "The only way to see them is in a tiny crawlspace in the back of a happy-ending massage parlor in Stockholm... at their very first show."
"Pitchfork gave it an 8.4."
The decimal-based Pitchfork rating system has long been synonymous with music snobbery. It's so widely known that you can float an album's grade without an attendant opinion and it still counts as a statement: that number speaks for itself. You might, however, find yourself in the company of people who despise Pitchfork, so you'll need to take a temperature read of the room right away, to know whether the script calls for scoffing at the band itself, or at the false-prophets who coronated/eviscerated it.
"It sounds like a hurricane punching a Dracula in the solar plexus."
Speaking of that bastion of taste-making realness, Pitchfork is also famous for occasionally posting reviews clogged with clunky metaphors. Those belabored couplets convey enthusiasm over expertise, but mimicking their patterns might trigger a sense memory of reading a 5,000-word treatise on Bon Iver's relationship with Kanye, which will work in your favor. Simply describe a band's sound as similar to a [flightless bird] using an [extinction-level event] as a [sex furniture].