The fine line between 'pretentious' and 'condescending.' Last night while wandering aimlessly around w4th st, I visited a cozy (and cheap) favorite tavern of mine and grabbed a copy of The L Magazine, and soon stumbled across a fascinating article on the soundtrack to Juno. The article was written as a dialogue between the publication's film editor and music editor, and it revealed a discussion about "the One True Meaning of 'Indie'." Now, it sounds a bit strange to me to recommend a movie review from a free local publication of my own city of residence, but I have to say that it was not only well-written but very thought-provoking about a subject I deal with constantly. That being said, here are a few gems worth noting: Somewhere along the line, "indie" stopped referring to the circumstances of a film's production . . . and became an aesthetic distinction, referring to any movie with affected quirkiness and quippy dialogue. It's roughly equivalent to how "indie music" now means "non-threatening white people with guitars." You know, like the Juno soundtrack. For me, the whole debate went out the window when . . . Built to Spill and Modest Mouse signed to major [labels] and just kept right on being... Built to Spill and Modest Mouse. Others have complained that the Moldy Peaches and Kimya Dawson are has-beens. We're setting the bar pretty high here. I'm afraid the backlash against things like Juno or the fucking Decemberists is causing people to abandon the ideals we've all grown up with, possibly just for the sake of being contrarians. I think that with the mainstreaming of indie, or the indification of the mainstream, or whatever, the issue is the commoditization of taste -- that something that used to be personal and hard-earned and (relatively) private . . . can be acquired almost passively. You talk about trying to stay one step ahead, which is something that some people take to be one-upsmanship or inside baseball or snobbery, but I don't think that's snobbery, I think that's curiosity. . . . Contrarianism and backlash, though, are ways of staying one step ahead without actually doing any work, basically just a lazy, self-congratulatory way of calling people out for being lazy and self-congratulatory. The guiding principle here . . . is that people should be aware of and question how things are presented to them. It's probably just as important for people to question the motives behind a critic's dismissal of something like Juno as it is for them to question the public's mass acceptance of it. In the end, if you like something you like it, and I hope for your sake and its you can justify your taste with a reasonable degree of sense and eloquence.
That last one really resonated with me. Now, I've been around "pretentious" hipsters long enough to learn to tolerate them (hell, I wouldn't be surprised if most people consider me pretentious, but I hope you don't), and even learn to appreciate a person who has a refined sense of taste and style. Like the quote above referring to "snobbery" vs "curiosity," I admire a person who is curious enough to look beyond what is trendy and "in," and dress the way they want to dress, and listen to the music that they want to listen to, as long as they are doing it with pure intentions, out of "curiosity" instead of lazy contrarianism. The truth is, I don't think that the air of self-importance that hangs around pretentious culture-snobs is all that bad. These are people who are not satisfied with indulging in the bland excuses for "art" that the mainstream media throws at them, and they work hard to find the purest artifacts they can, and this almost always means digging into the obscure, the "indie." Because this takes a little more effort than flipping on MTV, it reasonable that a true hipster would have a sense of pride when it comes to their personal tastes and aesthetic sensibilities. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, when you refuse to listen to certain music (or films, styles, etc) simply because you associate it with those people around you whom you deem as less cool, or less hip, or too mainstream, or worse yet when you demonize and belittle your mainstream peers simply because their tastes are not particularly as obscure as your own, you leave the realm of harmless pretentiousness and venture into the uncharted territories of condescending elitism. pre·ten·tious [pri-ten-shuhs] –adjective
1. full of pretense or pretension.
2. characterized by assumption of dignity or importance.
3. making an exaggerated outward show; ostentatious.
[Origin: 1835–45; earlier pretensious. pretense, -ious] con·de·scend·ing [kon-duh-sen-ding] –adjective
showing or implying a usually patronizing descent from dignity or superiority: They resented the older neighbors' condescending cordiality.
[Origin: 1630–40; condescend + -ing]
When you traipse along the fine line between these two states of mind, you're not being hip, or indie, or more cultured or more ahead of the trends. Really, you're just an asshole. | 
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