Circa October of 2011, I decided I needed to refine my taste in music. I was irritated with Rihanna, tired of Taylor Swift and generally found the idea of “the underground” appealing.

And thus began my fateful journey into hipsterdom. Step one: reject anything and everything mainstream.

So I tracked down a friend whom I’d long acknowledged as culturally savvy and in general a paradigm of the worldly, glamorous individual I wanted to become. This friend was more than willing to provide me with a list of her favorite songs. Soon I was listening to bands like Vampire Weekend, the Strokes and Passion Pit. In other words, all the hipster music quintessentials. That week my poor Mac — another hipster quintessential — must have swollen with half a gigabyte of indie music.

But the music my friend had recommended still wasn’t enough. I wanted my iPod full of arcane music right away! So I turned to Pandora for help.

It did not disappoint. In no time I had expanded my musical range to include artists with names like Au Revoir Simone, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Faded Paper Figures and my personal favorite: Does It Offend You, Yeah?. Being able to scroll through my iPod playlist — which I tastefully titled “Indies Potpourri” — and not recognize half of the artists, or songs for that matter, was a milestone I regarded with pride.

But there was a less encouraging development: I didn’t understand any of the lyrics. Especially those of Bon Iver, AKA the king of all bewildering indie lyrics.

I still remember my first encounter with Bon Iver fondly. My first impression was of a bunch of gargling, unintelligible wails set to the melancholic strumming of a guitar. I had to resort to SongMeanings just to decipher what he was even saying; and afterward I still couldn’t grasp what the lyrics meant. “Skinny Love” puzzled me for ages until I blankly decided it was 1) about a breakup, and therefore 2) deeply profound. In fact, most of my now-bloated Indies Potpourri playlist fit those categories as well. Usually both. Huzzah, progress!

I’ll be honest here, though: Most of the time when iPod Shuffle sent such songs my way, I would simply skip them. I just didn’t find them catchy or even all that relatable.

I did assume that, like “Skinny Love,” all were sure to be extraordinarily nuanced and layered with deep meta-symbolism. But I never connected on a personal level with most of the songs, either musically or personally. Mostly I just took everyone else’s word for it that Mumford & Sons embedded pearls of wisdom into their lyrics and that Beach House was spine-shiveringly good.

Did I improve my ability to extrapolate political metaphors and (at least what I assumed was) the subtext? Sure. But nothing beyond that.

But I was still satisfied, because just by having songs nobody knew on my iPod, I was well on my way to becoming an insightful, thoroughly sophisticated hipster with impeccable taste in music. And isn’t that basically what everyone wants out of life?