Who gets to be a "real" music fan?

I was lurking at the fan site of a well-loved "indie" band a few days ago -- a place I once had an account and occasionally contributed to -- when the discussion turned to Adele and her grammy-gobbling album, 21. If you've ever spent time with rock fans, you probably know the drill: the general reaction was a mix of apathy bordering on derision. See, Adele is popular with women and we all know that being a "chick" artist you can kiss any credibility goodbye.

Of course I'm being obviously sarcastic, and while I've never experienced any overt misogyny at those places, but the undercurrent of judgement -- who gets to be a "real" music fan -- is inescapable. And it's patently obvious whose music is considered art and whose is considered commerce.

NPR's Maura Johnston, who's written extensively about pop and fandom, has a piece  up this week about the blowup between Nicki Minaj and a morning disc jockey who called her song "Starships" bullshit, dragged out the old "authenticity" trope, and ridiculed her fans as "chicks" wanting to sing along with her songs. Minaj's response was surprisingly awesome:

"When you disrespect Nicki Minaj—and I don't care if it was in front of 2,000 people, which can equate to 2 million people when it's streaming live—you're disrespecting my fans. See, I don't have a problem with anyone saying what they have to say to me. But don't make those 3 million people that downloaded 'Starships' or whatever they downloaded, don't make them feel like they're inferior in any way for their personal taste in music." (source )

The sad truth of music fandom is that it's as much about making people feel inferior because their taste doesn't measure up as it as about loving the music. I'm not averse to having a canon, but it's plainly apparent who gets to decide what goes into that canon. Jonathan Bogart wrote on his blog recently about having to be " browbeaten into understanding that music made by and for women is just as truthful, revelatory, and necessary as music made by men," and as someone who came up in the fan world largely dominated by dudes, it's the default stance to take unless you can cultivate the kind of detached irony to love commercially available pop music (but not, you know, really).