Excellent point. Also, who cares if someone is 'a great guitar player' in the sense of mere technical virtuosity. Youtube is full of guitarist videos with GREATEST and !!!! in the titles, a million notes a minute, sound and fury signifying nothing.

Your comment reminded me of Hendrix - most if not all of what he did seems to fit under 'stuff found by messing around on a guitar, moving chords/bass notes around, experimenting with sounds', mostly with no 'theoretical base' whatever except for developing what sounded good, what was fun to explore. In a word, playing.

Personal note: Someone played me Radiohead a few years ago for a while, I'd never heard them before. I remember thinking - I can see why this would sound amazing/mindblowing to someone who'd never heard anything but mainstream/charts/popular/etc rock. Like someone who'd only seen Hollywood movies discovering the whole world of movie-making for the first time. (I'm into jazz, classical, funk, reggae, indian classical etc etc)

The last paragraph is rather hipsterish.

No idea what you meant by that sorry. And now there's that other meaning..something about metrosexuals with beards or something. But either way, not clear to me at all what you could mean.

Hipsters care a lot about signaling that they prefer fringe/niche/"non-mainstream" culture. Since it is all about social signaling rather than actually enjoying a wide variety of culture, it is just as important for them to signal what culture they don't associate with, and that is decided not by the quality of the music/film/food itself, but rather based on whether other people why enjoy it are "down with it" or "mainstream".

Radiohead is a pretty popular and well-known band, so you have to pretend you don't know them, while at the same time disparaging them - not for anything related to their actual music, but for the people liking them not being hipsterish enough. This is the epitome of hipsterness.