Top Five Ways (Almost) Every Music Fan Is a Hypocrite

"Put your phones down, assholes! I want to take a picture!"

Hypocrisy is as essential a part of the human condition as shit and TV reruns. Our capacity for saying one thing and doing another is stupendous: Find a full, unredacted record, and we bet you'd find examples of self-contradiction even in the otherwise pristinely principled life of Ghandi. Even Mother Teresa's rep has been tainted.

Hypocrisy among music fans, while far less consequential, also knows few bounds. We all break the rules of music fandom we claim to support (and often feel empowered to enforce). How? Let us count down the five most common ways you (and us, and her, and everyone else) practice hypocrisy in our daily music-loving lives:

5. You dismiss -- consciously or unconsciously -- entire genres about which you know next-to-nothing (while vociferously defending the ones you love to others who know nothing about them).
Notice how quickly your eyes roll toward the sky the next time you hear someone mutter about chillwave or brostep or country. Then stop to think about how much of any of that you've actually listened to.

4. You slam Pitchfork (or whatever publication) when they give an artist you like a bad review, while defending Pitchfork (or whatever publication) when they give an artist you like a good review.
You know you do it. You can't help it. It's natural. Just own it.

3. You judge other people for their guilty pleasures, while savoring embarrassing music of your own.
Rail against the soul-numbing effects of Katy Perry all you want. We know your karaoke song is still "Party in the U.S.A."

2. You fiddle with your phone a lot and/or talk too loudly during a show, but bitch self-righteously when other people do the same.
God, it's so annoying when people at a show blather drunkenly, block the view with their huge, light-blasting smartphone, and spend the entire night looking down, texting with friends and posting nonsense on Facebook. But damn the lights onstage look really cool right now, and my friend A_____ (who couldn't make the show) would love to see a picture of that. Also, I just thought of the funniest thing to say on Twitter...

1. You download music illegally (or at least used to).
Support artists! Pay for things you like! Buy stuff! Yeah, those are the right things to do. But at least before the days of Spotify and Rdio, being "right" didn't stop you from grabbing what you wanted if it was easily available. Sorry, but we know you didn't pay for all 216GB of music on that external hard drive with the money you made slingin' cappuccinos.

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