Crap, Prejudice, and Superiority

Yay! It's my 500th post. :juggle:

I got so tired of people insulting each other's threads, I thought I'd start my own. Feel free to tell me how stupid I am for trying if you must, but please keep it to PM's

Anyway, my point:

What does count as "good" anyway? I mean in the context of music or a movie or a brand of chocolate. Why do people seem to feel the need to put others down for their tastes?

Granted, something sloppily put together but successful due to mass marketing will always have a certain amount of justified stigma. But then there are genuine examples of "the cream rising to the top" where something became big because it was useful, very well done, perhaps even truly artistic, AND it was in the right place at the right time. But because it becomes popular and therefore a "bandwagon" there are always people who insist that it is crap. I'm not talking about jealousy, although that is sometimes a factor. I'm talking about people who will honestly settle for an inferior product resentfully thinking that it is better just because the superior one is popular due to marketing.

Or here are some examples:

:book2: It took me many years to read the Harry Potter books in spite of being a fantasy geek because it was a bandwagon, and people were saying it was unoriginal, so I stayed away. I finally started reading them recently. Yes, the elements come from a hodgepodge of every fantasy story that has ever gone before, but the WRITING in the stories is BRILLIANT. It has been years since I was so totally sucked into a world. Many authors try to do that and very, very few succeed. Yet people complain about them being to common.

Dido: my musical guilty pleasure. I’ll admit it. I have heard people put her down more times than I care to think about. The assumption is that she is popular, and very heavily produced, and therefore crap. "They" say that listening to Dido is being too obvious and bland. Yet the reason she sounds the way she does is because her brother is a very talented producer. That ought to count for something, shouldn't it?

The real reason I like her though, is that every song, rather than being a whiny heartfelt "this is how I feel" moment is a tiny short story about all sorts of things. There is a reason (I'm saying this based on personal experience) that aspiring writers like writing novels. In a novel, there is a lot of space to make your point. In a short story, all the elements of a novel are condensed into just a few pages or less. There is no room for error. Once sentence can change the meaning of the entire story. Now try to do that in the lyrics of a song. It's even more condensed. Sometimes one WORD can change the entire meaning. Throw in a chorus that has to repeat and tie the song together, and you've got yourself quite the puzzle. No wonder most songwriters simply resort to personal experience. Me, I like being told stories, and I like when someone puts the effort into making a song a story, therefore I like Dido.

Not only do I listen to people tell me why such and such a musical taste is horrid, but they consider themselves superior for being immune to such trash. Why is that?

Thoughts anyone?