Rant about gatekeeping and pretentiousness in alt spaces/at shows

Because tell me why "what are your favorite bands?" genuinely used to be the most terrifying question that a human person could ask me? Of course "what are your favorite bands" is a perfectly valid thing to ask someone when you're meeting someone at a show or a jam or something, but it just always felt like they were looking for me to name bands that I just didn't know, and if I said "Idk man I'm new to this kind of music but I could really use some recs!" I felt like I'd just get laughed at. 

And I guess I used to think this was just a me problem or just an inevitable result of not knowing a lot of bands but the more bands I listen to the more I realize it actually stems from pretentiousness and gatekeeping in alternative spaces. Like why are we gatekeeping at shows which are literally supposed to be gathering places for other people like you who want to know more about alt music??? HELLO??? So many alt people will act like their music taste is so Unique and Never Before Seen to look cool to the uninformed at shows it's literally just copy and pasted /mu/core shit. Or you'll go to a show and you meet these two people and they start talking to each other like "oh you like this band too? Omg do you like this one too then???" which of course is a beautiful moment for them, except that all of the sudden if you don't know said bands, you're excluded. Which is fine and natural except that instead of them EXPLAINING to you that "oh and by the way, we're talking about early era screamo bands right now and we can explain what that is to you if you're curious or don't know", people just look at you like you could just never get it or something. 

And to be fair I do think this exclusion is unintentional and it might be fine if it only happened every so often, but if you're new to alt music, this moment I'm describing will happen All. The. Time. To the point that what ends up happening is that people who are new to alt culture go to shows, get bullied or excluded for not knowing a shitton of bands, go on the internet and google Top Punk Bands and then listen to them, then go back to the shows only to find out that google didn't give you the Cool Obscure Shit because no one seems enthusiastic about those bands (aka /mu/core or something), so you have to go back online to Cool Gay Alt Kid Online Bootcamp or something, then move to a new city where no one remembers your "poser" days so that everyone thinks you're cool for knowing a bunch of bands. (Deep breath in to catch my breath) WTF??????!!! I can't imagine something more antithetical to the spirit of what punk is supposed to be except that this is kind of just... the norm. And to think, literally all of it could be prevented if people just didn't. Gatekeep. Please stop gatekeeping oh my god. 

And also please stop acting like the person who knows a million bands is cooler than the person who knows one because that definitely only fans the flames and contributes to this culture of being afraid of not knowing bands. Like why on earth should someone ever feel embarrassed to not know a lot of bands? Literally ALL OF US came out of the vaginal canal knowing ZERO BANDS, which, by someone's shitty definition of what a poser is also makes them a poser. What??? 

I get that when you meet someone who likes a lot of similar bands you feel a primal sense of joy and connection, but what if that third person who doesn't know those bands would actually be a huge fan of those bands as well if you would just introduce them to it? Or-- better yet-- what if liking the same bands is actually an incredibly shallow measure of general compatibility and you should still consider befriending that third person that you met at the show on a deep level and prioritize not making them feel excluded? And, most importantly, consider that when you don't gatekeep, the end result is that you quite literally get to talk about your favorite bands for longer. It is good for literally everyone involved. Like consider that scenario I outlined about the fucking screamo bands. The end result of that is that if that third person doesn't know what screamo is, then you get to EXPLAIN it to them, which is FUN!! And now all three of you are friends, and now every time that third person listens to Alexisonfire, they think of that cool night they had with those really welcoming and nice punks who introduced them to an entire new genre of music they didn't know about!!!! 

Which, again, is FUN!!!!! We're all here to have fun and make new friends, right? RIGHT?????!?!??!?!?