Passions: In defence of being a music snob, not knowing who Dua Lipa is and why I hate Ed Sheeran

The Scotsman’s health correspondent, Joseph Anderson, argues that being a music snob is a good thing, actually.

Dua Lipa maybe hugely successful, but that doesn’t mean her music is any good. Picture: Getty

I’m one of those insufferable people you meet at house parties who takes pleasure in not knowing who Dua Lipa is, and I couldn’t be happier about it (note - I do now).

Although we each have our separate tastes, there is objectively good music and bad music. There is art which is created to convey human emotion and experience, and there is art designed to make money.

The two are - although there are exceptions - mutually exclusive.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 12: Ed Sheeran attends the Netflix's "Extraction 2" New York premiere at Jazz at Lincoln Center on June 12, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)

The exceptions are those artists whose ability to move you has translated into million dollar music empires - often singer-songwriter-genius types whose voices chimed with their generation. Think Johnny Cash or Kurt Cobain.

Where that contrasts with popular music is the intention of the art. Ed Sheeran, for example, is a wonderful musician who has a background in metal music (he recently collaborated with Cradle of Filth) and an affinity for rap, which is present in his early work.

He has a gift for creating earworm melodies, a gift which he uses to produce milquetoast, mass appeal slop that has made him a multi-millionaire.

Fair play, some might argue - he’s clearly a shrewd businessman, but an artist he is not. The music is not written to speak to you. It is written via focus group - what can appeal to the most people, most of the time?

There are entire genres of music dedicated to conveying specific emotions from the full breadth of human experience. Sad? Lead Belly, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave. Energetic? Turnstile, Die Antwoord, The Prodigy. Anti-authoritarian? A Tribe Called Quest, Rage Against the Machine. Angry? The Exploited, Municipal Waste, Amyl and the Sniffers.

Within each of these genres are multiple artists that manage to convey nuanced and niche aspects of the human condition to audiences that are looking for empathy - to feel like someone else is experiencing the same things they are.

The pop music industry has, through its many focus groups, determined that sex and love are the most universal aspects of human existence, and so produce music that appeals to those drives.

In a former life I worked as a radio adverts salesman - it was sold as an undergraduate scheme in the music industry but it quickly became apparent it exclusively entailed cold-calling tradesmen in Newcastle and asking them if they wanted a radio advert.

During that time, the media company conducted constant research into what the majority of people wanted to hear, and worked backwards from there - that’s why to snobs like myself radio sounds like a bunch of smug-but-friendly people bantering on about nothing.

The music industry works backwards from focus group findings too. The target audience for most radio stations is women aged 35-50, working in an office with the radio on in the background, and according to research, their absolute favourite song is ‘sex on fire’ by Kings of Leon.

It’s bland, it’s non-threatening, and is trying to convey absolutely nothing other than that good sex is fun.

This formulaic approach to music is repeated across song structure (verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus), in chord progressions (I–V–vi–IV being the most popular) and of course in fashions.

Being a music snob is about differentiating between music that is art and music which is not - there’s precious few examples in the UK Top 40 that would fall into the former.

Claiming something is right or good because it is popular is a logical fallacy, because popularity is a terrible judge. I’d go one further, and say that as a good rule of thumb - if something is popular, it is always terrible.