Exhibit A: I don’t have any cites handy, but I’ve always gotten the impression that George Lucas feels a bit annoyed with earnest theatergoers who didn’t get the “joke” that Star Wars was supposed to be some kind of homage to the brainless plot-thin shoot-em-up adventure serials of his youth.
Exhibit B: Andy Kaufman.
How common is it for artists of any genre to feel contempt for their own popularity, and despise the audiences who made them popular? How should such artists be regarded?
Possibly it has to do with having an artistic albatross around their neck? Randy Newman is a great songwriter and film score composer, but he’s best known for a dumb joke song “Short People”. Warren Zevon did so many great songs, but he’s remembered for “Werewolves Of London”. I wouldn’t blame them despising members of the public who love their weakest songs but are completely ignorant of their serious work.
Well, Journey broke up after it became clear that their fanbase was mostly less-than-hardcore screaming teenage girls and they failed to break into an edgier market.
It’s not precisely what you’re thinking of, but the most recognizable Green Day song out there (in terms of people saying “Hey, I know that song, kinda”, not people saying “Oh, that’s Green Day”) has got to be “Good Riddance/Time of Your Life”. It’s completely unrepresentative of the rest of their work, but that’s what people know.
Well, A. Conan Doyle is reported to having come to hate Holmes, killed him off once, and then had to bring him back, twice to satisfy his fans.
OTOH, I don’t know that Holmes was ever subjected to a Jar-Jar Binks.
Andy Kaufman!
ANDY KAUFMAN!!!
(Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch…)
Ahem…I think they should be regarded as schmucks. Their audience is what enables them to do what they do. Without their audience or fanbase, they’d be performing alone in their bedroom.
Near the top of this list, now that the despicable Andy Kaufman is dead (and I don’t know if he actually felt contempt for his audiences or just thought it was cool to piss everybody off), I would put Bob Dylan for his notoriously sloppy and incomprehensible concerts, and Miles Davis, an incredible musician and asshole extraordinaire who was known to turn his back on his audience or even to walk offstage in mid-performance if the mood struck.
Actors are notorious for developing annoyance with fans they encounter in everyday life, often adopting the attitude that all they owe their audience is a good performance and using that attitude to excuse rude and brusque behavior to fans they meet in public.
I’d say contempt for their audience and/or fanbase is pretty common among entertainers…the more successful ones anyway.
I can understand that. I guess what I’m really curious about are artists that use their annoyance as an excuse to piss on their work and come out with something like Jar-Jar Binks. “Heh heh, let’s see those sheep lap this up”.
It’s been said that the fact that Curt Kobain saw the same types of people who would beat him up in high school moshing away in front of the stage at his concerts is part of what drove him to self loathing and eventually, suicide.
Billy Jo Armstrong has actually said he considers “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” one of the most punk things Green Day has ever done because it’s completely unrepresentative of the rest of their work.
They wanted to do it. They did it. Fuck what everybody else thinks.
Poet Charles Bukowski was infamous for his live readings. he pretty much hated doing it, would get very drunk, often a mean drunk, sometimes have an extremely acrimpnious reading, offend both the promotor & audience. damn, i really wish i had seen him live.
Did Andy Kauffman despise the audience? I’ve never heard that.
I could be argued that fans who expect anything beyond a good performance are the assholes.
Something about every movie by director Robert Aldrich (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane) makes me think that he really held the movie-going public in contempt. Nothing overt or sloppy, but his use of Frank DeVol (the Brady Bunch theme) as his composer is an indicator.
There was a duo who wrote and performed – or maybe produced – tremendously successful dance/rave songs. I can’t remember their names, though; all I can remember is a stunt they did where they set fire to a million dollar bills, presumably to show contempt for music done for money and the people who buy it.
RR
I saw Bright Eyes perform a year or two ago and I got the sense that Connor Oberst really disliked his audience. Some people hold him in Dylanish poet-genius esteem, and he was doing a run of about eight shows at Town Hall, so there were some hardcore fans in the crowd. I found the audience annoying, but not as annoying as his attitude. I didn’t like his performance either.
I think Alec Guinness hated Star Wars fans.
It was Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of The KLF.
They burned a million quid on the Island of Jura in 1994.
I think he’s one of those guys who grew to hate the way Obi-Wan overwhelmed the rest of his distinguished career, but didn’t hate it at first.
The latest issue of Entertainment Weekly (summer movies) has a interview with Lucas and Speilberg about the upcoming Indy 4 flic.
Lucas is already saying hard core Indy fans are going to hate it.
There is a fight inside the warehouse where the Ark is being held. This hardcore Indy fan thinks it’s going to be the bees knees (it’s the 50s in Indy’s world now after all).
Neither had I. He was, however, not really a comedian (pause for someone to say, “Really? I just thought he wasn’t very funny.”) but a performance artist, and performance art tends to be aggressive as it tries to force you to reconceive your preconceptions. Yes, artists in general often consider themselves somehow superior to the masses and Kaufman loved to jerk people around*, but all I’ve heard was that he was a nice guy who was gracious to his fans.
I put off seeing him for, say, 5 years exactly because of this. But last fall he came to our town, a huge group was going, and it was really cheap. So I went. And he was an incredible performer. I’ve seen dozens of indie bands, and that one was at least top 10. He joked with the crowd, asked for requests, played all the classics you know he hates playing, then completely killed with an encore of Tom Petty covers. All the while, he really seemed to enjoy it, too.
Of course, my experience is one of the few positive ones I’ve ever read about the man, so I got lucky, but he can play live if he wants to.