Opinions that bother me more and more with the passing of time

[petronia]

A) "I was a huge fan of [insert] but now [insert] is popular and that ruined it for me."

I really

don't

get

this

I can understand if n00bs are bothering you day and night with obvious FAQs on the internets; I have lived that. I can even understand if you are specifically complaining that eg. tickets to the last tour cost $20 and the ones to this tour cost $50 while the quality of the band has not improved by a factor of 2.5. But that is not what I mean. I'm talking about the mentality that - all else being equal - [insert] used to be better because [insert] was your property, and [insert] was your property because no one else knew [insert] existed. The former attitude is what researchers refer to as ownership bias. The latter probably has a specific name too, but more importantly it is WTF. The last time I had this discussion was with That Dude on Glasvegas' tour bus, who was like come on, don't you feel a little pang when the band you like blows up huge? Like you're losing something IN YOUR SOUL? And I was like wtf no, no I do not, why would I be unhappy that people I am a fan of are making money thus increasing their chances of doing more neat stuff, also you are saying this IN FRONT OF A BAND YOU ARE A FAN OF that kind of makes you a dick.

Also? Liking a hugely popular thing (which by its nature means that some lame people and some awesome people like it) does not make you a lame person by association.

B) "I have purchased every release the band has ever put out, including the Japan-only 7" of the drummer's side project with a Tuvan throat singer collective, and I find it a devastating travesty and betrayal that they have chosen to release a singles compilation for the Wal-Mart market that contains no material I do not already own, thus forcing me at gun point to waste my money purchasing an album that I will never have a reason to listen to! Why don't they have any consideration for their fans?"

People. No, srsly, guys I SEE THIS ALL THE EFFING TIME and while hardly everyone shares this stance no one ever remarks on how illogical it is???

Comments

[flamebyrd]

WORD, on both of these.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

2) It is especially awesome when the artist goes the other way by putting a new bonus track or two on the compilation, triggering a cascade of complaints that the fans are now being forced to buy the album for the bonus tracks. XD

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

How dare they have fans who aren't me and my friends? Moreover how dare they ACTIVELY COURT fans who aren't me and my friends? Why are they ruining my fantasy of being part of an exclusive club?

I don't feel this way about the bands I like, but that's only because I usually AM the lame third-wave discoverer. Anyway, early fans should be happy when later fans come along, because then they can lord their early-fan-ness over the later fans.

[arboretum]

1. in other words "can't feel elitist anymore, must abandon for more esoteric lands... life... so... hard..."

2. don't get this either, but don't hang out with music people much, so have very rarely heard it, also! XD;;

[solaas.livejournal.com]

*fervently* AMEN!

[(Anonymous)]

In no way defending position A here. So. I used to go to this bar on Beale Street in Memphis to hear [artist] play. And he is awesome and I loved going to hear him. And then [artist] got big, was on Letterman, is touring nationally, and I am ecstatic that he is doing well and so many people get to enjoy the clever and funny and awesome. And I would never NOT FOR A SECOND wish it otherwise. But there is a little tiny part of me that is sad that I will never get to sit at a bar with 20 or 30 other people and laugh with him at the line, 'When my mom watches Falconcrest sometimes she picks me up late' and then buy [artist] a drink and talk about his music. Not so many opportunities for personal connection, you know? Selfish, but true.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can totally understand that... you're not saying the fact that [artist] got big is ruining the music for you tho!

[cis.livejournal.com]

I have spent so many years at the indie coalface that 'now the kids are into it i don't like it any more' sort of appears logical in the way that old wives' tales appear logical.

There are a few bits of it that i've been guilty of myself:
i. the 'old meme' reaction: not generally with things I'm totally mad over, but things I quite liked, things that had a position in my life similar to an internet meme I thought was funny. Anyone who's a relatively early adopter in whatever subculture gets this one, I think: something seems played out in your mind before a whole other group of people have even heard of it, but it's widely funny enough that they'll take it up and then you spend half your time going 'come on dudes we were putting donks on things like six months ago'.
ii. if it is more obscure then it is better: indie received wisdom says that only dilettante fans like the singles best, which therefore logically means preferring album tracks is more "real", which ~logically~ leads to liking b-sides. (for a while 'alex's song' was my favourite blur song: it is an unremarkable curio, third track on the 'end of a century' single which wasn't such a great choice anyway. but it was mine! no-one else could love it but me!)
iii. "selling out" and etc-- i like idlewild's (less successful) early records more than their later ones, and a lot of that is because their later records are more melodic and radio-friendly and have lyrics that make sense, where the band I loved made a ridiculous racket with a lot of disconnected shouting. Most of that is me no longer being fifteen and them no longer being twenty-one - they couldn't make music like that any more, and I couldn't respond to music like that any more (...sort of). But it would be incredibly easy to assume that there's an intentional 'selling-out' going on, or that there's an... a priori correlation between "getting big" and "getting boring". Plus there's that weird quasi-protestant 'good art is born of suffering' nonsense.
iv. i love [michael mayer] but because of his popularity i can only see him in a very crowded [fabric] and the number of people present in that [club] has a direct and negative correlation with how much i enjoy my night out. [mostly because the fabric clientele contains an astonishing number of super creeps]

Now obv i don't believe "this band was better when only i liked them" - I'm much more of the 'maybe if i bought ten copies this might have a better chance of breaking the charts/she might not get dropped by her label' persuasion - but I have all of these vaguely correlating feelings? And I can see how, but for the grace of god, one might start to anticipate all of these phenomena at once, as a sinking feeling, when a band you like starts to blow up.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is one of those instances where I am fine if you break it down to specifics but the shorthand formulation vastly irritates me because it is quite literally saying "I dislike it when artists I like succeed in their careers." And also the fact that there is a widely used shorthand formulation means that people expect me to agree with them.

i) You should come to North America, I have friends who are just now starting to put donks on things!

ii) To be fair the waters are muddied here by indie bands also subscribing to this received wisdom and/or knowing their fans do and/or bloody-minded contrarianism and/or not being very good at picking singles, all of which can lead to excellent b-sides (though idk if "Alex's Song" is among them XD).

iii) I've encountered this often but I literally cannot think of one instance where this accurately describes my relationship over time with an artist I liked... though I can think of several instances where the fandom consensus was "selling out" followed by "return to form / return to roots" and my opinion was "improved somewhat or remained at consistent quality level with each successive record". ^^;

iv) You should come to North America, he plays to 400 people in a rented art centre (when customs can be bothered to let him in ;_;)

[two-if-by-sea.livejournal.com]

"I dislike it when artists I like succeed in their careers."

YES THIS SO MUCH THIS. :((((((((( GOD I HATE COLLEGE, IT IS JUST FULL OF PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY ARE SO AWESOME BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE THIS.

[cis.livejournal.com]

"I dislike it when artists I like succeed in their careers."

but there are a lot of indie bands for whom mainstream success would not be success, where the criteria for success are some nebulous artistic target rather than units shifted.

(and a lot more indie fans for whom 'artistic' concerns are more important than eg the band being able to put food on the table) (though maybe this is becoming less true since the media's illegal downloading stories have involved a lot of noise about how musicians are going to all be dirt poor now)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Fair enough but I'm not sure there's even an assumption that the artist should subscribe to this model - I'm not sure the thought process goes as far as "what the artist wants"!

[cis.livejournal.com]

i think it gets as far as "what the artist should want"? but, yeah, stops at that sort of... objectification?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

B is completely indefensible but it usually shows up as a mask for A anyway, i.e. "Not only is this NOT FOR ME there's a chance it will actually WORK"

Cis' meme thing is interesting and I think really does apply for some genres of music - we see this on Poptimists sometimes when a song that was a bona fide underground club hit 6 months before makes a mainstream crossover, usually via peoples' summer holidays, and people's regard for it becomes sort of grudging: "OK fine but its moment in my life has passed." This is healthy though, it rests on the idea that pop is disposable rather than something to get all Miss Haversham over.

What's interesting to me is that people don't say these things to be posey, they actually mean them, and for them there's something real at stake in the popularity or not of what they're listening to - which I think goes beyond a fear of personal credibility loss. The knowledge of popularity acts as a kind of pressure, particularly on people who feel cut off or unsocialised.

[cis.livejournal.com]

The knowledge of popularity acts as a kind of pressure, particularly on people who feel cut off or unsocialised.

^^^^ this!

a lot of the indie identity *is* tied up in the basic geek reaction of "if they're not going to want me, i won't want them" - i guess we forget that cos indie seems cool.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

And it becomes even more infuriating if you didn't like it back when it was underground in the first place. XD

I realize people really mean A) - like, despite what others have been commenting I don't think it has to do with a need to be elitist and/or poseur, which makes it even more WTF. Your take makes logical sense and would make emotional sense if I've ever gotten this comment from anyone who struck me as geeky/unsocialized/unpopular/genuinely contrarian. :/ Though of course the further you get from high school the more the mental baggage people carry becomes invisible. I guess I can sort of relate it to the archetypal trauma of having a friend who was just as uncool as you and over the summer holidays she lost weight, got a new wardrobe and dumped you for the cool kids. Though even there, half the time it's the geek who sabotages the relationship first out of insecurity, and that seems to be applicable here too.

Actually don't think B) is the same problem as A), IMO B) is a failure to grok the concept of "this release is not for me"? Like, the complaint is never "they've released something I wouldn't buy," it's "they're forcing me to buy something that is useless." IOW A) is indie kid mentality, B) is OCD collector mentality and seen in non-indie genres also (in fact it only really comes up when there is a Wal-Mart market as well as an anorak market).

Also I actually find B) hilarious, particularly since if the band tacked on a bonus track or something they complain that by doing so the band is forcing them to buy the release for the bonus track. I just dunno why no one else seems to laugh. XD;;

[bell]

Personally, I get irritated that an artist sells tracks that I'd have to cash out $30+ to get access to. I wish they'd sell them all in one place! ...I guess that makes me an enemy to the l33t music fans? *___*

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The curse of formats!!!

[motorbike.livejournal.com]

RE: 1) Irrationally I can't help but feel a band that grows too popular will be tempted to rest on its laurels and somehow ramp down the effort in and quality of their releases. This is the "first and second albums were better" situation. Overproduction and "experimentation to get with the times" syndrome sets in shortly after. See: Franz Ferdinand*

RE: 2) lol but Wal Mart makes buying so easy?

*OTOH the New Pornographers, for instance, have produced consistently phenomenal albums for 10 years and they are ridiculously big

[petronia.livejournal.com]

1) To be fair this actually happens - like, artists do jump the shark with their fourth album or whatever, but I would argue that if they jump the shark it's because there's something structural about them (or the way they interacted with their initial context) that forces that outcome anyway. IOW it's not that success made them worse, it's that if they had had no success they would've broken up after the first two albums when they ran out of ideas. I'm pretty sure that's the case for Franz Ferdinand, anyway. (Which is actually baffling because there are a couple of things they do obviously well but refuse to go down those paths.) As you point out corroboration comes in the form of those bands that do their thing then do their thing then do their thing some more for 10-20 years of fluctuating popularity.

[motorbike.livejournal.com]

Iawtc, and I want my bands to become hugely popular and then slowly go back to weird old fogey status because they refuse to compromise their self-image. I think I am talking about the strokes

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Haha yeah and then 20 years later they start getting cred for being weird old fogeys and all their albums are remastered and reissued with retrospective 5-star ratings in Q (original rating: 2 1/2 stars).

[koganbot]

Not necessarily related to the size of the new audience, but when the character of the audience and how they use the music changes, the meaning of the music can change with it. "Search And Destroy" and "Anarchy In The U.K." simply don't make sense when played to a large, uncritical, laudatory mass. Music that was a lever, a wedge, a cudgel, is now a monument, and that changes what it does. But this process is damn near inevitable. If the music doesn't get canonized, it disappears; but if it gets canonized, it now carries the weight of its acceptability with it.

I can remember when "Satisfaction" and "Get Off Of My Cloud" were terrifying, noisy, disruptive songs (I mean, terrifying to me, and disruptive of my sense of the world). Now they're none of those things. They can't be.

In May 1981 I saw Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five get booed off the stage at Bond's Casino in New York opening up for the Clash. I'm utterly certain, with the smaller and somewhat different audience that they had when I first saw them in 1979, that this would not have happened. This wasn't the Clash's fault - they wanted their audience to hear Flash - but it signaled that the Clash could now be assimilated by the mainstream rock audience, which also meant that what their music could do and what it could mean had hit an unexpected wall. (Perhaps.)

[koganbot]

As a praise word, "punk" was far deadlier than "poetry" was

I'm linking this because it brings up the issue of how music's character is affected by how it's appreciated. Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography was hugely popular in the summer of 2004; now probably no more than a couple of thousand people give a damn about it. If it's to have a resurgence of popularity, and this popularity is to endure, I fear that there is only one possible path, some kind of intellectual and maybe even academic route* that will encumber the music with respectability and make it more likely to be appreciated but probably not as likely to be loved in the way that I love it. But then, if it isn't shoved down people's throats as "art," who will even hear it to have the opportunity to love it?

*But there might be some other route. E.g., think of how American Idol has at least for the time being added Heart's "Alone" to the canon. (Of course, when I say the word "canon," there's always the question "Whose canon?")

[petronia.livejournal.com]

skyecaptain on that thread: "there's something about an openly oppositional, or oppositional-seeming, stance that mixes extra-poorly with approved/sanctioned appreciation." I really wish there were a way out of that for guys like Eminem! Surely there are people who escaped that deathtrap and continued to make stuff of value? FWIW I've been bouncing around in the same borderline-benefit-of-the-doubt tick region w/r/t Relapse (working first line to imaginary review: "it's not called Recovery for a reason"), although I really like "3 A.M.".

I think I've said this about Ashlee - I wasn't listening to her in 2004, so I have no idea who was (other than you XD), but ultimately it's going to depend on them, and if they were mostly 13-year-olds (say) then it's not a predictable process. To take an example from my generation, you can build an intellectual case for hair metal, and I don't think it hurts things any for such cases to be built (it's usually a nice feeling to be told one is right in better prose than one can personally manage), but ultimately it's going to be about what people collectively decide was valuable enough about their 13-year-old experience to pass down to current 13-year-olds in their lives. Corny as that sounds. And in the case of hair metal this mostly happened in the face of a long period of critical derision not hommage.

As an aside, surveys show that the current generation of teenagers is the one least rebellious against and most appreciative of their elders since such surveys were instituted, which IMO in the mp3 era points to the increasing influence of parents' and older siblings' record collections. XD Will be interesting to see this play out, anyway.

I never hear anyone say something is "punk" in real life. As with "poetry" I think the word itself has somehow caught the Critical taint in popular parlance, so you wouldn't use it unless you were ironically affecting Criticism. This despite the idea itself having as much currency as ever. The formulation du jour is "____ doesn't give a shit". Eg. in conversation yesterday: "That guy from Scooter? He doesn't give a shit!" (Of course there are other formulations, this may just be my social circle. The ravers, anyway. But interestingly I also see eg. heroin addict indie fans on BBSes halfway across the world using the same formulation.)

[koganbot]

Busted!

Busted is wayyy better!
1. they're not babies and have a little more edge in their songs.
2. they're grown up and have a larger fan span (notice how almost all the fans for JB are ages 7-15)
3. they write their own songs (James has written a lot of the songs for the Jonas Brothers)
4. they're original
5. they dont give a shit about what people think
6. JB are too boring... too "G" rated

I miss Busted a lot! but they've all done well for themselves. James Bourne is now in Son of Dork and a famous song writers (ask the Jonas Brothers) Charlie is in Fightstar. Matt has a pretty solid solo career.

i think if the jonas brothers were to split up, they wouldn't have much of a future. all they attract are young teen girls

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yeah exactly like that! XD One of those things people say where what they mean is not what the words mean, so they confuse easily if you challenge it on that basis - I never bother to do this though. (James Busted now writes songs for the Jonas Brothers - am I reading this correctly?)

EDIT in order not to make yet another comment, as thread will telescope soonish: I probably will write the Em review in some form but I have to at least decide whether I like this album or not. XD; (It's easier when one likes something for its strengths, or despite its weaknesses; a lot harder when - as I suspect is happening with this one - one likes something because it does some of what it does poorly.)

[koganbot]

The Jonas Brothers write almost all of their songs but did cover two Busted songs several years ago ("What I Go To School For" and "Year 3000").

[koganbot]

Actually, I wasn't listening to Ashlee in 2004 (was concentrating on the Ying Yang Twins and Big & Rich), but Jimmy Draper and Chuck Eddy and Mikael Wood and Rob Sheffield were. Don't know if Dave Moore had discovered her yet. As for someone remotely close to her target audience, Erika may be too old to count, but she's the closest I can think of. The teens I knew were listening to Metallica and System of a Down and the Offspring or whichever emo boys were bubbling around then. If any were listening to Ashlee, it was in secret. I began listening to her in 2005 and played catch up, but it wasn't until the end of that year (after I'd reviewed her second album!) that it really hit me how good her stuff was. Something about the line "I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep" hit me hard, like I wished I'd sung that line, or wished Dylan or Jay-Z had, but also here was a girl willing to make claims for herself that she might try to back up. (Of course, I still don't know what role John or Kara had in these claims.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I wasn't -- I listened to I Am Me first when it came out, IIRC via the Ashlee: Emo or Oh No! (http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=34085) ILM thread, then worked backwards to Autobiography, which you may have beaten me to (we were probably listening to it at the same time, assuming you discovered Ashlee in more depth via the same thread). My VV comoment that year, "When I realized Ashlee Simpson was punk, Lindsay Lohan was emo, and Skye Sweetnam was indie, my world changed," was based solely on I Am Me + "Shadow," "Autobiography," and "La La," or the first half of her first alb (and of course now I personally swear by the second half, though the two together are what make it so special). But I think I'd kind of fallen in love with it before there were any extended conversations of that album specifically. (Actually, I still think there haven't been enough extended conversations of Autobiography specifically, as most of the attempts I've made have been quickly abandoned.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think Ashlee was the sort of "completion" of what I was hoping for from Skye, who I got into with increasing obsession from late 2004/early 2005 (random download onto an iPod I got that Christmas!). She had the balls and the brains (er, so to speak...let's say "guts") where Skye had the balls and the "brains," more savvy than (Kogan word) probing.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

To get back on topic, though, I never would have immersed myself in either of them if I'd had a more facile interaction -- the arguments I could get into with people who refused Ashlee's legitimacy (the only in-person heated arguments about music I've ever been involved in!) forced me to listen in a way that sanctioned praise/popularity wouldn't have. The feeling of being transgressive, even "touched" or something, in seeing this depth that no one around me could see was exciting. It was also short-lived, though -- I think that this was a catalyst to giving the work its own legs. In which sense I think that codified or no, as long as you've experienced or understand that catalyst moment, which may well require contemporaneous unpopularity, disliking it in the future isn't a given. No matter how huge our own critical understanding of Autobiography might get (like reappraisals of ABBA, Britney, etc.), the power of our reappraising it isn't diminished in the aftermath of that moment. But it might be difficult to find the moment again, since what we loved was the catalyst moment, and a catalyst is necessarily a temporary condition.

Longwinded way of saying I totally understand why people resent bands for "getting big" after being something more special, but to expect that kind of energy to sustain itself is misguided. And to find no pleasure in the aftermath is often just as delusional and/or dogmatic as trying to re-create that spark, which has probably long since fluttered elsewhere.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

(Case in point: it would be dogmatic of me to flat-out deny the pleasures of Ashlee's Bittersweet World for not being Autobiography, but I also can't pretend that what was special in her first album followed her undiminished in her future work. Sometimes artists can find new sparks, or at least new zeitgeists, to pin themselves to, but part of what makes that Special Catalyst Moment special is time/place/context as much as it's legitimately within the work itself.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

In the sense that if other people had liked it you would've "liked" it as well but not given it much thought or...? I kind of admire what you're describing here. I love Pete Doherty's records, for instance, which get a blanket dismissal from the venues where I usually go for conversations about music, for about the same reasons that Lindsay Lohan's are dismissed. (I know Lindsay's records less well but the ones I do, I like.) Pete Doherty has his own fans, most of whom I also disagree with violently - now we're down to stuff like aesthetic hierarchies and framing context and "rockism". My sister is firmly on the muso side of the muso/critic divide. I have no one to talk to about these records! Thing is, I don't think it's changed how I listen to the music at all, it hasn't made it more exciting for me, I don't feel special, I just feel vastly irritated against the world with a dash of the cognitive dissonance a la Southall on the ILM Coldplay vs Animal Collective thread where dude listened to an album that GAVE HIM A HEADACHE 10,000 times until he finally agreed with his friends and could get on with life.

Thinking about it maybe my issue in the original post is that I love being an early discover/adopter of things but part of the extended pleasure of the catalytic moment for me (I remember the exact time/place/context I heard so many artists: New Order, the Sex Pistols, Christina Aguilera... whereas it takes me 5min to remember what year I graduated from high school) is the sensation of riding the wave, of introducing other people to it or just standing back and watching the takeup play out, the first time you hear it on the dancefloor or over the sound system in the coffee shop or buying jeans etc. I enjoy having my taste affirmed by liking something obscure that unexpectedly becomes popular. :P Which I think makes me err much more on the side of pretending (or not, subconscious process) the next album was as good/relevant as the first and so on.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

In 2004 I suspect I was acting too much as a tastemaker for the teens in my lives to really know what they were/would've been listening to otherwise. ^^; (I'm sure my sister was digging Coldplay but she now seeks to deny this ever happened.)

I have to come clean about not having heard Autobiography... will remedy that tho!

[koganbot]

FWIW I've been bouncing around in the same borderline-benefit-of-the-doubt tick region w/r/t Relapse (working first line to imaginary review: "it's not called Recovery for a reason"), although I really like "3 A.M."

You should write this review.

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

I..don't understand the last one. At all.

[naanima.livejournal.com]

But Sabina, we are only unique if we are opressed and not the majority. It is like the goths before it became popular to be goth.

(100% agreement to this!)