Hello, my name is Galen Mitchell, and I’m a music addict and snob. I’ve been living with this condition for over 12 years now. I still remember the first CD I ever owned, the one that started it all. … It was The Beatles—Past Masters: Volume One—and I “stole” it from my father when I was seven years old. Sure, it was a compilation disc, and sure, it was of mainly pre-Rubber Soul cutesy pop music, but it was The Beatles. From that day forward, I was no longer a slave to my parents’ Dan Fogelberg collection and adult contemporary radio of the 1990s: I was free.

It was in the hours upon hours that I spent with my dad’s portable CD player (which seems now to resemble a small microwave rather than a portable music device) that I developed what could be considered an unhealthy obsession. As my parents drove my brother and I around town in our Toyota Previa minivan, I would sit in the back, hunched over the stolen CD playing in my borrowed CD player oblivious to the outside world. I was too young to realize the danger of the repeat function on that CD player, and my “Paperback Writer” addled brain was swimming in a sea of sounds—I was hooked. Little did I know what would happen as a result of my addiction.

My eighth birthday marked the day that my dad’s CD player was officially given to me, and on my ninth birthday I was scrambling to listen to the newest addition to my collection: The White Album. By age ten, I was listening to VH1 every morning and afternoon, memorizing every single Pop-Up Video in some sick, demented attempt to know everything about the songs I loved. It was during this time period that I took a brief and ill-advised foray into the music of Aqua—the minds behind such great feats of musical horror as “Barbie Girl.” I’m not proud of this fact, but it was one of many times I have chosen poorly, and it would happen again a couple years later with Creed.

A small amount of redemption lies in the fact that this was also the period in which I became an avid fan of Incubus and turned away from the then-mainstream music, only to watch it follow me a couple years later (damn you “Drive”!).

This eventually led to the true dark ages of modern music. Suffice to say it was nü and it was metal. We like to think that disco was the worst it ever got, but we’re only kidding ourselves. The nü metal, rap metal (with the exception of Rage Against the Machine) and gangsta rap period of the late 1990s and early 2000s took a lot out of our society, only for us to be attacked by the resurgence of a zombified country out to eat our brains and stain our white T-Shirts with barbeque sauce. I have it on good authority that this zombie infestation is still going strong out there in the real world, but the last few people I sent out from campus never came back.

My experience seventh grade through sophomore year of high school can be boiled down to a series of genres, one following the other: hard rock, pop-punk, ska, classic punk, emo and hardcore. I had been saved from the inky blackness of the vacuous minds that collectively referred to themselves as Staind and Limp Bizkit, respectively, but I was oblivious to the fact that the music I had traded them in for wasn’t much better. My junior year, I came out of a daze, confused, alienated from other high school students content with mainstream music, and I grabbed onto the past to keep me steady during the tough musical times.

The Smiths, The Cure and David Bowie redefined my addiction and saved me from a fate I don’t dare think about.

I learned a lesson then: nothing is any good if anybody likes it. It seemed so plain and simple. In the past, I was simply ahead of the game: I was just catching onto the horrible mass media bands before my peers did. However, I was now equipped with the knowledge that the best thing to do when it came to music was to avoid the mainstream—to listen to bands no one had ever heard of. It was with this revelation that I became a true music snob. By the end of junior year, I was the guy blasting Duran Duran from my car, I was the guy playing Cure cover songs on his acoustic guitar in the hallway and I was the guy who everyone else would have liked to beat up for those reasons.

But along with these bands came others: bands with Ben Gibbard in them and bands … with people other than Ben Gibbard in them. My junior and senior years were so full of new bands that I had likely deleted more bands from my iTunes library than I had actually listened to. My addiction was evolving into true snobbery. I had always been opinionated; now I was confrontational.

This pattern has only continued throughout my college experience, though I have made certain necessary concessions to mainstream media. I suppose you can listen to Ben Gibbard, too, so long as you know that you don’t know him the same way I do. I suppose I can stomach seeing everyone and their mother singing the songs I love. But so help me, if the day comes when you ruin Wolf Parade for me, I don’t know what I’ll do. And I suppose that’s the point of this column. I’m about to be shoved out into the real world—out into the masses—and I’m scared that I’ll walk down the street one day to find someone singing “Modern World.” On behalf of the other music snobs on campus, please … don’t ruin this for us.