My Video about Elitism (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

I wanted to give a quick update about the progress I am making with this video. When I pitched this idea (along with several others) for you to vote on, I had a reasonable sense of what I wanted to say. In particular, I wanted to push back on a tendency to use the term 'elitism' to dismiss music that requires knowledge or experience on the part of the listener.

However, the moment I began my script, it became obvious that my original concept would end up unsatisfyingly shallow if I didn't investigate the reasons why the critics I disagreed with felt the way that they did. The more I looked, the more I returned to fundamental issues of class resentment along with common misreadings of musical history. And as I tried to unpack these, I became uncomfortably aware of the gaps in my own historical knowledge too.

So, after a lot of reading (and learning) the overall goal for my video has altered somewhat. I still want to talk about elitism in music but in a much broader sense. I want to talk about justified resentment, the reactionary nature of art, the inescapable problems of social privilege and education... and (because I'm me), I also want to talk about how crass commercialism can make some of these problems worse. Ultimately, I want to try and lay blame where blame is deserved and push back on arguments I find to be poorly thought through or historically ignorant. I also want to make a fun video. Not a ranty, self-important one. Believe it or not, there is actually a lot of fun to be had on this topic.

This is not a video where I think it's possible to draw narrative straight lines, so I'm probably going to structure it in a way that is quite different to anything I've tried before. Whether or not you'll massively notice this difference in the end product is hard to predict!

I intend to give status reports on this video to hear your thoughts. More to come very soon.