What a time to be alive, am I right?! After a three-month coke bender (well-documented in my last editorial), I am now out of money, unemployment has run out and bars and businesses are boarding up left and right. The unprecedented global pandemic is only partly to blame, too. We should all know that rampant, unregulated capitalism is mostly at fault for laying the flimsiest of foundations for us peasants, that just the slightest of economic breezes can knock down. And, yet, the system remains...so, might as well take advantage of it. I’ve lost count how many times on social media or streaming services I am face fucked with an ad that starts with, “In these trying times…” Why the crapping hell are you trying to sell me something?! You know I don’t have any money. Like, read the room, ad. We all lost our jobs and can’t go outside!
And, yet, the ads persist. The beast is hungry and demands consumers. So, ol’ Blazer is going to stop complaining and start selling.
Taking a page from our Dear Leader, yours truly has finally discovered some worthless thing to sell to you peasants. Did you know that entire “universities” exist online? You can print out fucking degrees! And, feel good about ‘em!!! Hell, they’re about as valuable as an actual degree in Art History or English or some useless major from Harvard. Education is just about the most lucrative and least risky grift there is!
You see, in these trying times, there’s no better way to spend your countless hours at home, than on learning some completely unnecessary—but, ego-inflating—discipline. We all know that there’s no way to make a career out of music. Academia has tried, in several pathetic ways, to craft a collegiate path to a job in music, with virtually no success. I mean, you can play in an orchestra for 400 dollars a month. Whoop-de-fucking-do! I suppose there are music production degrees, however, you’re much more likely to get a job in that biz by moving to L.A., sleeping on couches and doing about a hundred hours a week of unpaid internships, until the right rapper likes the weed you sell. And, you’re probably gonna do that after graduating with your worthless music production degree, anyway.
However, one thing academia is good for is learning things so that you can tell people that you’ve learned them. What’s one field in music where this is literally all you do? Music snobbery!
I know you think this is the kind of thing you could be come a master in, just by spending hours on Wikipedia and Pitchfork...but, think about it for a second, dear sucker *cough*, I mean consumer. Could you not also get the equivalent of a Master’s in Eighteenth-Century French Literature or Ancient Greek Poetry simply by, ya know, reading a bunch of it?! You one-hundred percent could, but no one would care and you wouldn’t have a fancy piece of paper showing that you did, *twirls mustache* ya see?
And, before you think that I just made up Blazer University for the sake of swindling you dumb bastards out of your hard-earned money, just remember: if our Dear Leader can do it, why the hell can’t I? Everything is online these days—even this goddamn magazine (I actually haven’t been outside in months and am still sweating cocaine boogers).
If you think I’m just setting up some PowerPoints and YouTube videos of me ranting about the difference between goth and emo, think again sweet mark *cough*, potential student. Blazer University’s Master Of Fine Arts in Music Snobbery is an intense, research-heavy, two-year program. Below are just a taste of some of the complete wastes of time *cough*, academic series, that you will need to complete before receiving your Master’s.
This series will take all year and cover every delivery service for music that the average person (hereby referred to as “poser”) has never even heard of. You will literally be kicked out of this MFA program, if you so much as mention vinyl—that’s hipster undergrad shit! If you wanna be a true music snob, you need to step up your game!!! How are you gonna sound like an elitist prick, without making up the subtle qualities that make 8-track and laser disc superior?! There is a small, introductory course to cassette tapes and annoying anecdotes about their importance in helping spread punk and new wave to the popular kids, but we’ll soon be dropping that course due to the hipsters making them cool again for some reason.
Highly recommended, if you’re planning on doing your dissertation in the field of alienating people trying to connect to you at parties. These courses will give you in-depth timelines and histories of jazz artists, who helped pave the way for you to sound like you’re a cultured white guy at a casual get-togethers. Miles Davis and John Coltrane are for posers. Now, when you scoff at people for not knowing who Art Tatum is, you’ll have a couple one-liners to back up your mood-killing jabs. And, no, I promise this isn’t just a bunch of word documents basically copied-and-pasted from Ken Burn’s Jazz series. That would be plagiarism, duh.
At the time of this publication, our series on Joy Division has unfortunately been removed. Now that the album artwork of Unknown Pleasures has gone the way of Ramones and Misfits t-shirt logo fodder, there is no justifiable reason for knowledge of this band to constitute anything even resembling music snobbery. Sucks, ’cause it was a fun course. And, it left you loaded with ammo to make fun of posers for liking New Order.
The most difficult aspect of being a music snob is thinking of ways to belittle your peers’ music knowledge on the fly. This program is not for a Bachelor’s Degree in Music Snobbery, but a Master’s, damnit! This is the most difficult series we offer and not for the faint-of-heart. While most useless arts and letters courses revolve around diligent memorizing and regurgitating, this part of our program is very active and we almost got approval from the state to make it count as a P.E. credit. When someone talks about how they found an artist on Sub Pop, you’ll be able to own that poser’s pleb knowledge, by casually spinning yarns about how K Records is not only older, but provided a much larger and longer-lasting influence on alternative rock. If some jock at a party puts on a William Onyeabar record and you see him getting female attention that clearly belongs to you, just breathe heavily in those ladies’ ears about how this is amateur hour compared to Fela Kuti or Thomas Mapfumo. It’s all about bringing a gun to a knife fight, that isn’t really a fight and that you weren’t even invited to.
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This and much, much more can be all yours, for the high, high price of some arbitrary number I will eventually come up with, when I launch the site. Tell your friends! You could do worse! Why be some dime-store, quick-google-search music snob, when you could spend thousands (or tens of thousands...I haven’t decided yet) and have a piece of paper to prove you are a true music snob!? These are trying times, and after all, you may be reading your favorite magazine or rag as a PDF. You can’t do worse!
