The Anti-Popular Reflex
I was writing about bands selling out a couple of days ago and the phrase ‘the anti-popular reflex’ cropped up. Now, there are plenty of instances of bands genuinely selling out that we covered in that post and the subsequent comments, but I thought this particular phenomenon needed a little more idle chatter devoted to it. Hooray, I hear you say.
I have an instinctive and barely controllable anti-popular reflex whereby no matter how much I like something, as soon as it starts to become hugely popular I find it very difficult to maintain my enthusiasm. Sometimes this goes so far as to instinctively hate things simply because they are so popular. I can’t bring myself to watch Lost, for example, despite the fact that plenty of people whose opinions I respect keep telling me how good it is. And if I did watch it, it would be with that wrinkled up nose a little child gets when forced to eat brussel sprouts.
I think a lot of indie lovers suffer from this, and I think there are a couple of reasons, one trivial and one a little deeper.
The trivial one is that we indie lovers care quite a lot about music, and the general public does not. We care about music and form close bonds of loyalty with our favourite groups because no-one else likes them and it can feel that our evangelism on their behalf is important for them. Whether this is true or not is a moot point, but it can often feel that way. When these groups get popular it can be impossible to maintain that intense relationship because, well, if they’re special to several million people then it’s stretching the definition of the word special a little, isn’t it.
The slightly (only slightly though, don’t look so scared) deeper reason is this: most indie lovers are alternative types in general. Virtually none of us were from the cool set in school, nor are we amongst the champagne and martinis set now we are older.
To those not at the beating heart of all things cool, this makes the attribute of coolness something which can be oppressive, condescending, and demeaning, not least because those in the inner circle tend to guard their status rather jealously. Many of us react to this by redefining cool as being the things we ourselves most like, rather than the things that the vagaries of fashion and public clamour tell us we should like, but this is still a slightly defensive position. What is held up to be cool in the magazines and on the telly is popularly defined as being better, at the direct expense of everything else.
The stance – well, my stance anyway – is ‘Fuck off, who the fuck do you think you are to look down your nose at me you vacuous, bovine imbecile. What makes you think I give a shit what your opinion is of my lifestyle, or care the slightest fig for your herd mentality, you hollow, empty shell of a human being, you.’ Or some such. My relationship, and I don’t think I am alone in this, with the world of high cool is a fractious one at very best.
So when bands I love go mainstream this hostility towards things in the upper echelons of the hierarchy of popularity can kick in and overwhelm the actual warmth I may feel for the music. And equally, if I first hear of a band or a TV program or a pair of trainers simply because they are already very cool, it is highly unusual that I will think anything other than ‘Ah right, just more shit the masses venerate for no reason whatsoever. Just like they venerated that stringy transvestite Sarah Jessica Parker. Or those vapid cunts in The OC. Or that self-indulgent idiot Pete Docherty. Or that unbearable shitfest Titanic (Oscars, that film actually won Oscars).’
So it may not always be entirely reasonable, but I don’t think the anti-popular reflex is completely unfair.
The Magnetic Fields – Famous
The Endrick Brothers – Star of the Silver Screen
The Beatles – Honey Pie
Ben Folds Five – Underground
The Extraordinaires – Seeds of Jealousy
And now the kicker. Yes, I am actually going to ask you to listen to Meat Loaf. Yes I own this album and no, I didn’t have to go and buy this song just for this post. Snigger all you want, but if you listen to the lyrics and replace the girl in question with your favourite music and the anti-popular reflex (reason #1) is perfectly described.
Meat Loaf – More Than You Deserve
I am confused. What do you want for your bands? That they toil in obscurity? That they remain in poverty? The “selling out” argument has always been a bone of contention with me and mine. Music is proprietary. It defines you as you grow up. As you mature. When something speaks directly to you or you “discover” it, you want to own it, in some spiritual fashion. When the rest of the world decides they like it too, it seems like too many music “lovers” respond like that has cheapened the music. It hasn’t. it has just caught some zeitgeist and your love of that music isn’t diminished because others like it too.
Now, here you are, you’re in a band. Have you ever been in a band? (I don’t mean to seem accusitory, just trying to make a point).
In LA there are over 30 small music clubs. At least. They each need to fill a lineup of about 4 bands each night, 7 days a week and they don’t want to repeat within a month and they would prefer you haven’t played in another club around 2 weeks of your performance. Okay 4×30x7 840 bands in LA. So, you need to double the number because not every band is playing all the time and there are peripheral neighborhoods to central LA. So, about 2000 bands in Los Angeles. One of 100 major cities. (More, really, but stick with me)
So, 2000 bands in over 100 cities. That’s 200,000 unsigned bands all trying to “make it”.
I would actually triple that number just to be safe, count for Canada and Europe as well as many many many minor US cities. 600,000 groups calling themselves “bands”. Many of them recording, more of them toiling in the underground.
So, your favorite little band gets a little nibble from a small label. Hey! Guess what! They get to go on the road, play 200 dates in a cramped van, playing to 5 people on a Thursday. (An A&R guy I know said this was common practice: send the small band out to the wolves, they either made it or they didn’t with little expense to the label)
Okay, so you love your little band and they are playing their asses off and then a single of theirs catches blogfire. Their year on the road has shown them one very important thing: Being in a band is fucking hard work.Especially since they are now pals with a dozen or so bands that didn’t make it but are slugging it out in bars every night. Those 40 year olds scare the shit out of these guys, with their mortgages and their shitty little jobs. (Bands Reunited didn’t help, especially when the drummer for The Alarm turned up in some Insurance company in northern California)
And these guys are offered an opportunity to sell their song, their hit song, for a million bucks. Okay, that’s $250,000 per member. After taxes and the label and the publishing, maybe, MAYBE, it’s $80,000. But, now that guy can put a down payment on that house in his hometown. And get out of debt a little.
But, he’s nowhere near the dream.
except that the single is pushing the album and the album sales push ringtone sales, push concert sales, push t-shirt sales, etc.
Well, of COURSE, they are going to put their song on that soundtrack, or go on the Tonight Show or wahtever they have to do to get more people to hear and buy their album. You know why?
Because music is cyclical.
1975-77 Disco
1977-1979 Punk
79-81 New Wave
1982-1984 dance
1985-1989 glam metal
1991-93 grunge
etc etc etc
And these guys know that. They know that “Indie” is popular now and that The Strokes and The White Stripes opened those doors. But they also know that Bubblegum Pop seemed like it would last forever and that’s gone, too. They have a window.
They are catching a wave and they need to get as much as they possibly can.
Like a football player who knows that his entire career is really only 6 good years.
So,they “sell out”. And you should be happy for them. Because it means they can keep making music you like.
Music is proprietary. Keep repeating that. Why is it personal to you? Why do you feel such a “connection” to it. Why does it speak to you? But it isn’t yours.
I’m in a band. When people go on about “selling out” it pushes my buttons.
I really am not talking about selling out – I genuinely want the bands I like to do as well as possible. Even The Arcade Fire have a pretty small fanbase in a global sense, and I am not complaining – I think they’re brilliant.
I am talking about how the types of people who like something – particularly if it is the sort of painfully, determinedly cool types I have come across at certain gigs, such as The Fratellis – can actually put me off things.
This is not the band’s fault at all, and I really wasn’t trying to imply that it is. This is about my instinctive, emotional reaction and how that can put me off. In other words, my contrary relationship with the uber-cool types of this world can put me off things they like because I don’t like the cool types themselves.
I know it’s not the band’s fault, and I am not trying to blame them. I know it’s unreasonable too, in fact I said so above, but I thought it was an interesting phenomenon and that perhaps other people did the same thing from time to time.
I knew you felt that way.
It’s interesting that you bring up the Fratellis. I heard their album when it was released in Scotland, when a friend sent me a track. I then bought it as an import here in Los Angeles. I wanted to review it for Daytrotter (at the time I was doing some reviews for them) and the editor wasn’t interested. No one had heard of them. I started sending the tracks out to friends. Suddenly blogs like “Water all around” were posting the entire album, and Last Visible Dog was putting them in his podcast. This was just my impact, teensy weensy, but, as I heard them on the itunes commercials and, believe it of not, for Albertson’s Supermarkets here in LA, I began to feel slight loss. A sense of “hey! I knew of them first, they’re mine!” When my wife and I were at the movies and the Fratellis were featured in the trailer for some upcoming flick, we were now a little put off. It was hypcritical and sad. That record was in such heavy rotation in my house, that and The Hold Steady’s new one (more on that in a minute). ANd now, they were part of the underground, soon to be, above ground consciousness. There was a slight sens of loss.
The Hold Steady’s Boy and Girls in America’s embrace by the Indie community cracks me up, by the way. This is stadium rock, circa 1976 of the highest order. Virtually every song would fit fine on the Dazed and Confused soundtrack. And, had it come out 30 years ago, it would be called “Corporate Rock”.
As it is, it’s just brilliant. “Indie” is a funny term. It’s like “War on Terror”.It means nothing. Like Gore Vidal said, “Might as well be called a ‘War on Dandruff’”. Yeah, that’s what I like. My favorite music is dandruff.
Oh, and there wa one statement you made I wanted to address, briefly:
“The trivial one is that we indie lovers care quite a lot about music, and the general public does not.” This is patently ridiculous. For it is subjective. And, as long as a song or piece of music can conjure up a memory or a feeling or give one satisfaction, it really doesn’t matter if it’s “Indie” or Disco. Love of art is subjective. The dnager is when we decide that,proprietarily speaking, our taste is better. Or, we are more deserving because we “care about it more”. This is impossible. On many levels, but mostly, it is impossible to gauge because you alone are the arbiter of taste. Since art is egaliatrian it isn impossible (and in bad taste) to say that one’s taste is better than another’s, simply because you claim to like it more. You have no idea how important music is to an individual. And really no place setting those bars.
My wife’s absolute favorite song of all time is Soft Cell’s version of Tainted Love. She can listen to it forever and always dance. She knows nothing of the rest of their work, nor does she care.
Is her love of that song less than a Soft Cell fanatic who has devoured all the music by Marc Almond and knows every bit about his life? I think not.
She just loves the song.
Well my Mum loves music. Virtually non of the music I love, but she loves music. She likes to dance so pretty much anything that makes her dance, she loves.
I don’t particularly think that indie taste is better than other taste. Or actually, that’s exactly what I think, but I know it’s not exactly something I can argue without being completely unreasonable!
What I was contrasting indie lovers with was not other music lovers but people, like virtually everyone I know, who don’t go and look for music but pretty much accept whatever is on the radio station they tend to hear the most. I wouldn’t say that my taste is superior to theirs exactly (given some of the anti-social guitar bashing I love, I would accept the opposite argument quite happily) but I would say that they engage with music in the same sort of casual, laissez faire way I engage with movies.
I love good movies when I see them, but I don’t bother that much and generally I am happy to watch either silly comedies or something with plenty of explosions. I love the intelligent, thought-provoking stuff a lot of the time, but I can rarely be arsed watching it. So I would pretty much shrug and defer to real movie lovers of whatever taste – I’m a casual consumer.
I think there is a major difference between a casual consumer and a enthusiast – we care more, we form more meaningful bonds (from our own perspectives, not that band’s, obviously) and we genuinely support the industry in far more active ways with constant and passionate word of mouth.
It’s not that I love, say, the silly films I watch any less than a movie buff might, but I would certainly say that his or her relationship with pretty much all movies was in some way ‘more’ than mine. I’m not sure how – more meaningful, deeper, more passionate, devoted, I’m not sure – but somehow ‘more’.
Such a gadfly.
A cool one though.
god, i hate this. first i read toad’s opinion, and i’m like, oh yeah, baby, i hear you so loud and clear. then i read allen’s and i’m like–holy crap, this guy’s making some good points. then i read toad’s and i’m swayed back–and so on and so forth. either i’m a total waffle or you’re both making a whole lot of sense. hmmmmm . . .
I see your point, but I still think it’s subjective. I mean, does your purchase of the box set of, say, The Police (totally arbitrary choice here) have greater value than the $250 loge seats some “casual” fan buys? Because you love the band more (again subjective) that doesn’t really have any impact on the value of the band, you or any other consumer.
I could say that my buddy in New York LOVES music and really really really cares about Indie rock and is a total freak about new bands. I mean he goes on and on vociferously about the state of music and it’s import and the like. However, he has illegally downloaded over 50gig of music over the past 10 years. Is he more or less of a fan because he spends no money, but I pay for what I like?
Just food for thought.
Rock on!
Yikes – there are a couple of interesting points there.
In terms of ‘value’, fans have no intrinsic value of their own unlike, I would say, musicians who actually make stuff. Fans have a value to musicians in three basic ways I can think of off the top of my head:
There’s the emotional satisfaction of having someone connect with your music, and the dollar value of people paying for it (t-shirts, albums, gigs, whatever) and in both of these sense any sort of fan is pretty much equivalent. Except perhaps, the more someone loves your music, the happier you are as a band, but that doesn’t differentiate between the casual fan and the enthusiast.
The third way is in terms of providing advertising and momentum. I would say that casual fan is of more value in terms of momentum, whereas the enthusiast is of more value in terms of advertising. So a draw, pretty much.
The real difference in value or depth of love is more at the end of the fan, and largely irrelevant to the band or the world at large and is, as you say, entirely subjective. Music simply means more to me and is more important to me than to the vast majority of people on this planet. Equally, movies mean an awful lot more to movie buffs than they do to me and the vast majority of people on this planet.
And as to your mate who takes music without paying for it that is, from the looks of it, just plain wrong. He can offset his stealing by spreading word of mouth, but I don’t think that makes up for it.
But that is a whole other discussion!
People who *genuinely* adore a band or artist really shouldn’t give a toss whether 1 person or 15 million people also happen to like that artist too. It’s just completely and utterly irrelevant to me.
Then you are more grown up than me. If the same people who love Big Brother like anything I like it makes me question myself quite thoroughly.
Unclean!
Matthew, thank you for the honest and smart debate. Too often a dialogue like this descends into a miasma of name calling. This has been a treat.
As someone who has been in a band there were things I noticed about ours and many many others whom I came to know in my travels around the LA circuit.
Ultimately, the gratification that an listener got from my music was infinitely less important that the gratification I got from watching them respond in a club to the live performance. As far as the record went, all I gave a shit about was if they bought it.
When I would give the music to someone and their reaction was positive that was a great feeling, but, intrinsically, it didn’t last. I already knew the product was good and the response didn’t fortify me or spur me on.
Ultimately, it boiled down to “can I make money from this?”. Which is what it boils down to for everybody. Because who would want to wait tables or work in a cubicle when they could be on the road, playing their songs, drinking and getting laid by anonymous fans?
I will submit that you have some good points but this one is probably the achilles heel in your argument:
“Music simply means more to me and is more important to me than to the vast majority of people on this planet.”
Because it is subjective. Just what music “means” to you is a value judgment that you have placed on music. And while, yes, I imagine that music has a huge and pertinent import for you, that doesn’t lessen what it means to someone else.
And you know what? That’s okay. Because recorded music is an incredible thing. It’s ephemeral while at the same time longlasting. Nothing else exists like it. The way The Nutcracker can bring me back to my days as a toddler bouncing around my parent’s apartment. Or the way I feel when I put on my scratchy vinyl copy of “Kings of the Wild Frontier” by Adam Ant and I am transported back to college and listening to it, in it’s entirety, in bed with the first platonic girl friend I ever slept with, then finding out the news that Andy Kaufman had died. Or the tears that stream when I hear Pearl Jam’s “Black”, it being the song playing on the radio when my late daughter was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Or how Mika’s “Big Girls (You are beautiful)” makes me recognize a future memory I will have of me and my newborn daughter who dances to it while I hold her under her arms.
Music is freaking great.
Hey, if you wanna hear my band’s stuff, go to my personal website and click on Throttle Back Sparky. The songs are all there. They are on iTunes as well. Just to show you that I am, at the very least, a lover of music as well. http://www.allenlulu.com http://www.throttlebacksparky.com (But you can download ‘em at my site…shh, don’t tell anyone!)
Ciao!
This is, as you say, the best bit. No matter how much meaning music has for you, me or anyone else, it doesn’t get used up so that there’s none there for the next person. It has been a most enjoyable debate actually – much appreciated indeed. And apologies for making Marcy’s head spin!
I love this debate! It pops up on blogs all the time, but not usually as clearly as here. Whenever I think or write about it, I usually get stuck into marketing, and the use of such notions as ‘indie.’ I wrote a big post about this a year ago, and people still disagree with me about it.
anyway, good show matthew!
Thanks Shane. I think having someone to debate it with in a reasoned manner helps get your thoughts straight sometimes. Allen certainly helped me sort out exactly what I was trying to say.
[...] of the fan – the notion that the band are no longer “their’s”. (If you’re interested see Song, By Toad for more on this sort of [...]