Fair enough.

I don't have a problem with Lil Wayne. I don't think he's particularly distinguished as a musician, though. He doesn't do anything that's really pushing at boundaries, and so when I go looking for music he kind of slips away. The moment I was trying to illustrate wasn't one where I hated somebody for liking Lil Wayne. Earlier in the evening I'd been belting out Katy Perry with some people, and Katy Perry's far "worse" than LW is.

The alienation, though that's too strong a word for what it was — this is a friend we're talking about — was more that some people were sitting around in the mood to talk about music, and she picked Lil Wayne. That's background dancing music, not sit-down music. So it wasn't like a sudden hostility based on Lil Wayne. It was just a disquieting moment that I thought would illustrate what I was writing about well.

It's not about some predefined special quality. I'm the biggest narcissist you'll ever meet, but that's because I love me, not because I love something in particular about me. But it is a trait that you find in some people and not in others, and I'd never seen an article written specifically about it so I figured I'd write one.

In the article I defined it as worshipping human creation. More specifically: It's an attitude some people have towards what they consume in which they try first to understand the goals of the producer, then appreciate that for what it is. So, some people approach music looking for hooks and that's it. Classicists will look for certain traits in music — melody, harmony, counterpoint, chord progression — and disregard every other musical element. My approach towards music is what you'd call deconstructed: First I try to figure out what the music is trying to do, then I appreciate it on those merits. So I don't look for melody in a minimalist composition, I ignore lyrics and focus on production if I'm listening to pop, and within those constraints I decide what I like and don't like. So I prefer Lady Gaga to Britney Spears, and I understand that neither of them is comparable to Mozart and that you couldn't compare Mozart to them, either. The stuff that I love is the stuff that meets its ambitions on a spectacular level; stuff without ambition is what fails to grasp me.

The reason that's important is that it's a very open, embracing, and somewhat odd way to approach art, but the people who approach it tend also to have other traits in common, which I also tried to define. The Joyce instance is one of them. Writers who like Joyce over Hemingway are also invariably writers with a more open stance on writing, and focus more on the craft than about the story. It's not like I get in a tiff when people say they like Hemingway more. It's that Hemingway developed one limited style and used that to tell the stories he cared about, whereas Joyce's style was constantly expanding. This happens in every field of creation you can name.

So the loneliness and alienation doesn't come from people having opinions. There are people with such narrow worldviews, but I'm not one of them. I like almost everybody I meet to some degree. But there aren't many people who understand that distinction between the Joyce types of artists and the Hemingways, and when your personal outlook on life is so reliant on the difference between them, it means you can't really talk about what you're thinking on a deep level. That's occasionally frustrating.

Does that clarify somewhat? Or am I still babbling?