Does being a fan make you hate fun?

but the pixies, cure, black flag: you have to understand that backlash is typically legitimate. bossanova was an unbelievable letdown, not very tuneful and not very witty and not very violent. trompe le monde was almost incomprehensible [alec eiffel vs. debaser? totally lost the plot] until the frank black record, then we understood, "ah, think small, think rinky-dink."
the cure and black flag... similar huge drops in quality [the cure backlash began at mixed up, really, apart from the goth fans they lost after the glove fizzled and the followup pop throwaway like lovecats. black flag needs little explaining i hope? damaged = excellent. a comp of the early stuff = excellent. the rest = who cares].
there is massive relief and congratulations when any indie band goes major and their records sound the same. why? because 95% of the time the very first major label record is far more slick and less edgy and less loose etc. etc. etc. it's not always that the slickness is unwarranted - nevermind is to most better than bleach - but a fan of bleach wouldn't have liked nevermind even if nevermind was by a different band and nirvana had simply made an incesticide-like 2nd lp. most fans of nevermind also prefer nirvana unplugged to any of the other records; they hated in utero. more legitimate backlash.

What! are you talking about? Those are terrific albums! I like Alec Eiffel just as much as Debaser and I've never even bothered to listen to a Frank Black album.

Hahaha...I'm a HUGE Kiss fan (recovering), but I normally cringe when I read interviews with Gene or Paul in that "oh please, don't be stupid, embarassing or overtly crass this time!" manner.

This is debatable...

Don't see how Spinal Tap exist any less than K!SS do.

This is a key point, I think, because it shows that 'sellout' accusations are about more than just fans' inability to accept when a band change up their style. It's like a Jane Austen novel where the lower-class heroine marries an aristocrat, and all the other lower-class people are expected to be happy that they've managed to escape the dreary circumstances of being poor. If you're an acne-ridden teenager, seeing Metallica land a big number one hit that all the cool kids are listening to feels like a major betrayal. All of this is pretty obvious, I assume.

So here's my theory: if we treat the idea of cool (read as 'socially adept') as a kind of social currency, then only the kids who are already cool can afford to move freely between Devoted Fan status and Casual Observer. If you're not very social, being a Devoted Metallica Fan gives you automatic entry into a community of like-minded others. Since that community is based on shared values, someone who no longer shares those values risks being tossed out on their ass - say Jimmy Metalhead admits to his friends that he listens to and enjoys the new Britney album. Voila, they are no longer his friends, and he might catch a savage beatdown. The cool kids won't like him either, because he's still stuck with the social ineptitude that forced him to seek out other Metallica fans in the first place. Jimmy can't afford to do the things that we do, ie. openly discuss listening to Britney and Metallica in the same breath, because it threatens to compromise his social position.

The point I'm making is that the openness of pop is the openness of the socially privileged, that the reason people invest so much in (and subsequently feel so betrayed by) particular bands or genres is that it's a social construction that has very little to do with music. My question is, does the fact that very few ILX discussions have to do with Nu-Metal, New Country, Adult Contemporary (no 'what are you talking about i love Teena Marie answers, please') show that these genres are more about identifying yourself with a community of likeminded fans than actual music?

a. All music is a social construction

or

b. What's wrong with social constructions anyway?

I'll get back to you after I've tossed a coin.

Definitely NOT in the case of Adult Contemporary, a genre that is just about defined by its listeners' *absence* of commitment. Not that there aren't hardcore devotees of Celine Dion or Matchbox 20 out there, but the genre probably makes less demands in terms of attitude and devotion than any other.

Otherwise your analysis is spot-on, Dave, but I think you might be overstating how excluded fans of Metallica or [insert cult band here] really are (I always thought of the metalheads in my school's smoking section as fairly popular - they were badass plus they had each other, y'know?). But I suppose it's how excluded they *perceive* themselves to be that matters.

patrick you make a fair point about AC, though a lot of people i lived with in the suburbs of Toronto were hard-core Celine Dion fans, went to her concerts, got excited about buying her albums, etc etc. i want to say that where loving New Country is about proclaiming your identification with a certain set of cultural ideas, loving AC is about being proud of your mediocrity. but i can't say that, it's really mean.

what i was trying to get at by mentioning it, though, is that the genres i listed aren't foreign enough to be fetishized as the exotic Other, and they're not old enough that their threatening Otherness (ie the real threatening Otherness that, say, Toby Keith fans represent today) would seem removed from our present context. they're also not very danceable, nor are they avant-garde or particularly intellect-oriented either. as a result, even though these genres are as worthy of our attention in theory as, say, mainstream rap, ILX tends to ignore them. and maybe with good reason, since any music that fits all of these criteria would almost have to be pretty damn boring, but i think our lack of interest in these genres is probably tied to the fact that we don't need/can't appreciate the social benefits of identifying with them.

why is this important? because i think our willingness to latch onto anything and everything (Disco Tex! Sachiko M! Mobb Deep! Hurrah!) is a reflection of our lack of need for the kind of community that devoted fandom offers, of the fact that we don't NEED to care about any music as desperately as a metalhead needs to care about Metallica.

I miss the old poppist days (which didn't actually exist, but never mind).

New country is particularly fascinating because even though it's hugely popular, you can pretty much spend your entire life without getting much exposure to it, unlike nu-metal or AC (this could be an age thing, though - or urban vs rural+suburban).

but i just don't buy this argument AT ALL. enter sandman wasn't rejected by metalheads because it was popular; it was rejected for obvious stylistic reasons. just think of it at the time. who bought that record first? half a million metalheads. you think they all listened to it, liked it, then six months later convinced themselves it was crap [because it became popular] or lied and pretended they thought it was crap?

look at some cases where bands suddenly become huge WITHOUT changing their sound. do all their hipster fans leave them?
white stripes
outkast
ibrahim ferrer
get up kids
rage against the machine

i honestly cannot think of many cases where a band gets popular, changes their sound, and retains much of their old fanbase... the jesus and mary chain? so it seems like a simple cause effect deal to me.

as far as the nu-metal/young country/adult contemp, shouldn't you also be wondering about yanni? and the wonderful world of lite classical and jazz? straight up kids music like raffi? and even opera? what about death metal? and what, i ask you, about yanni?

i have to laugh as you try to insult adult contemp. the whole point of ilx for me is that it helps me enjoy music that i used to think was totally without interest: top 40 pop r&b n hiphop. the idea that the kind of country played on today's country stations is mostly crap - that's just as muddleheaded as the way i used to see top 40, and when i was 13 the way i saw punk rock. you can't ever prove that harlequin romance books are junk and shakespeare is the best except in a popularity contest, by a tainted jury.

What I would like to hear, and cannot, is OLD country.

mig - I don't see anyone making fun of new country on this thread. If you got the impression I was doing that, I apologize. I know very little about the genre, and I've just recently started listening to a country station on the way to work, and I'm surprised at how much of it I've been enjoying.

Country = geographically defined
A/C, nu-metal = economically defined

So you can avoid Kenny Chesney (or even the Dixie Chicks if you live in NZ) as easily as you can avoid fellow multi-million seller Aaron Kwok. I doubt my Mum's ever heard a Linkin Park song, but I couldn't avoid Celine even when I was trying. The reason is in the "economically defined".

personally, i suspect that these genres resist the kind of diverse listening that ILXors engage in, and promote the benefits of their own internal community instead. this doesn't make new country a bad genre, it makes it a genre that seems inacessible to a lot of us. if i can make a gross generalization, ILX is a bit anti-fandom. when people admitted on the Metallica thread that they loved earlier albums but felt betrayed by "Enter Sandman", there was almost an air of 'oh you used to actually *care* about them. how passe' to people's responses. but metal is easy to care about, to invest in personally, because it has that community thing i was talking about, and pop just doesn't. there's no clique of nerds in a high school somewhere huddled at the back table in the cafeteria, united by their love for Jessica Simpson. pop simply doesn't work like that - it's so fluid that to love pop is to love little bits of everything, and it's really hard to build a community around that (though i would say that ILX itself is the sole major exception to this). pop is not a genre in the same way that new country or nu-metal are genres, because where pop is mega-inclusive, these genres seem to resist inclusiveness.

i mean, indie is fairly inclusive: look at how much different shit falls under the banner of indie right now. same with britpop when it was still a going concern - it was tied up with rave from the beginning, up through electronica. but new country sounds to me like 80s adult contemporary with a twang, and when nu-metal has anything to do with rap, it sounds like it might have caught up with the revolutionary sonics of 1992. outside influences come in through the back door in these genres (eg how nu-metal seemed to get rap only by way of RATM). again, i don't think it makes them Bad Genres, just that the way they work tends to alienate people who don't want to listen to one genre nearly-exclusively, and who don't need the communities that these genres offer.

damn, i didn't mean to write a book. does any of that make sense?

Back in the days when I was a fan of bands what eventually turned me off wasn't the big commercial moves. It was the feeling these bands were repeating themselves. Often I've come back to them since and discovered that they weren't - it was me feeling tired.

No time to read this entire thread (which seems pretty interesting, actually), but I really have to clear up this silly misconception --fact is, pop country (and quite a bit of adult-contemporary) are AT LEAST as danceable as indie and brit-pop and techno and metal are these days. C&W and AC definitely has more r&b and rock'n'roll and disco throb in them these days than most of those genres do (i'd say "all," but I suppose "techno" does include stuff like garage rap and big beat.). As for being "not particularly intellect-oriented," god, don't even get me started. You sound like Geir Hongo. And you really overrate indie's and britpop's and techno's (or whatever's) "intellect". (As for your third adjective, here's Frank Kogan on Will to Power: "There's avant-garde, and then there's just plain weird." All things being equal, the latter wins, if you ask me.)

I meant "have."

And I'm not convinced at all that indie music (or indie culture) is more exclusive than country is, either. But I won't go into that.