Do you have what it takes to hold a conversation with a music enthusiast?

So last night I found myself somehow immersed in deep conversation with (who they would consider) a complete music buff. There I was being bombarded with names of bands the likes of me have never heard of. As I have made mention earlier, whilst I do share somewhat of a same appreciation for music, you wouldn’t ever find me remembering names of bands to such a degree. It got to an extent where I truly believed that I was playing Trivial Pursuit: The Music Only Limited Edition, where if you got answers wrong, instead of loosing points your existence was questioned and you were seen as a mere empty-less vacuole. So I may be acting slightly melodramatic towards the matter, but is this really a facet to the indie/alternative scene? Is being indie all about the music? I started to get the impression that it was only deemed “cool” to know a band that nobody else knew, and in the rare occurrence that someone else knew about the band, it was then rendered obsolete. Has the indie/alternative scene really hit such high levels of pretentiousness?

I decided to then test a hypothesis that my housemate and I had been coining over some time. It goes as followed… One can hold a conversation with any music enthusiast by stating:

a) a) Their new music isn’t anywhere near as good as their old stuff, ever since they tried to be too main stream pop shit they have really lost it.

b) b) Yeah, how good are they live but… they are so much better live.

Instead of displaying my statistical graph which perplexes even myself I will try to demonstrate my results via literary means. Five out of the six people I tested our hypothesis on, truly believed we actually knew what we were talking about and were on the same level (I have made five new friends out of this by the way). The deviating one of the six was found to have no relevance to the artists they were talking about, as the band only released one EP and shortly after the lead singer died… leading to the demise of the band (I would be completely beyond myself remembering who these people were).

So all in all I believe my hypothesis was a success, and in doing so has helped to question how authentic the people are in the indie/alternative scene are? Was this at all my intention?... probably not, but it did contribute to the idea that this scene holds characteristics of extreme pretentiousness.