Regarding MM hoarders who collect pieces based on price and never
change the roll, and people who babble cretinously when the music starts
(actually, they just talk louder) or take the start of music as a cue to
interrupt your listening with vacuous nonsense (usually about how they
love *all* kinds of music) --

This is from Sinclair Lewis' "Babbit" (1922).  It is from the speech he
gives to the Rotary club.

  "In politics and religion [the] Sane Citizen is the canniest man on
  earth; and in the arts he invariably has a natural taste which makes
  him pick out the best, every time.  In no country in the world will
  you find so many reproductions of the Old Masters and of well-known
  paintings on parlor walls as in these United States.  No country has
  anything like our number of phonographs, with not only dance records
  and comic but also the best operas, such as Verdi, rendered by the
  world's highest-paid singers.

  "In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby
  bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in
  America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable
  from any other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad
  that the man who has the rare skill to season his message with inter-
  esting reading matter and who shows both purpose and pep in handling
  his literary wares has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand bucks
  a year, to mingle with the biggest executives on terms of perfect
  equality, and to show as big a house and as swell a car as any Captain
  of Industry!"

George Bogatko