Everyone is allowed to have their own music taste– This shouldn’t be controversial. 

If pop music does nothing for you, that’s fine. If you’d rather spend your nights digging through Bandcamp or replaying the same warped CD you bought when you were sixteen, also fine. Taste is personal. Taste is messy. Taste is shaped by memory, mood, and whatever phase you were in when you first felt understood by a song.

The problem starts when disliking pop stops being a preference and turns into a personality. When not listening to pop becomes a badge of honor (It really isn’t) and when suddenly you’re better, smarter, or more “authentic” because you don’t touch anything that charts.

There’s a very specific type of person who does this. The person who loudly judges, or straight-up hates on pop artists like Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams, BTS or Sabrina Carpenter. The one who dismisses fans as shallow or brainwashed, ones who mock the music and love to lecture about how all pop music is fake and garbage. Then without irony they say, “I bet you’ve never heard this,” and put on Metallica, AC/DC, Pink Floyd or Deftones.

Let’s be serious.

These artists are not underground. They are not obscure, nor are they secret knowledge passed down through generations of vinyl diggers. They are global giants, sold-out stadium acts, cultural touchstones– they are the biggest names of their own respective genres, they are quite literally the same level of mainstream as the pop singers you’re judging. The only difference is that their songs might not be trending on TikTok this week.

Liking Metallica and Deftones does not magically place you outside the mainstream. You are not operating on a higher musical plane just because the crowd you’re in wears black T-shirts instead of glitter. You are just as mainstream as a Taylor Swift fan– you’re mainstream in a different font.

Metallica is Taylor Swift for beer dads. Radiohead is Sabrina Carpenter for guys who think they’re deep because they once watched a YouTube essay OK Computer. Nirvana is Charli XCX for people who insist music was better “back then” while listening to the same three riffs on repeat.

And despite what endless “divorced dad rock” playlists on YouTube comments might suggest, no, you are not niche for listening to Mayhem. You are not niche for listening to Type O Negative. You are not niche for listening to Slipknot. You are not automatically better than everyone else just because you successfully rage-baited Julian Casablancas on his instagram or got a reply from Liam Gallagher on twitter. You people are not unique for listening to the biggest bands in the metal or rock scene. Bands like them sell out venues, dominate streaming numbers, and have been canonized by music media for decades.

A lot of this elitism comes from insecurity rather than taste. There’s a persistent idea that liking popular things makes you basic, uninteresting, or easily impressed. So people overcorrect. They reject pop entirely, not always because they truly hate it, but because they don’t want to be associated with the crowd that enjoys it.

I know this because I used to be exactly like that.

When I first got into rock and indie, I carried the same smug energy. I thought listening to mainstream pop meant you didn’t “get” music. I thought complexity equaled quality, and popularity automatically meant compromise. I hid the fact I held one of the biggest One Direction fan accounts in 2016.

I think it’s a phase many people go through when they start using music to define their identity.

Then eventually, reality hits. I realized people can enjoy whatever the hell they want, that hating pop doesn’t make you interesting. It just makes you exhausting to be around.

Yes, my favorite band of all time is The Strokes, but it also doesn’t stop me going back to my roots and scream One Direction lyrics during karaoke without shame.

Both things can exist at the same time. The universe survives, you’ll live.

Liking multiple genres is okay. Preferring one genre is okay too. What’s not okay is turning your listening habits into a hierarchy of human worth. Music isn’t a competition, nor is it a purity test. It’s a sound that helps people feel something, survive something, or remember something.

So no, you are not special for not listening to mainstream pop. You’re just a person with your own taste, and that should be enough.