Bands/Artists whos fans are even more annoying than the band itself....

Cafe Society
41

Ugh- you said all that needs to be said with the bolded comment. Pitchfork Media attracts more hipper-than-thou freaks then any other place I can think of, with their columnists being the foremost among them. I don’t mind admitting that I do sometimes become hipper-than-thou when speaking about music, but mostly that is me being excitable or executing teenager-given rights of snottyhood. Plus, I always apologize if I realize it happened. Not so for the fans of many of the bands on Pitchfork.

Anyways, with that, these are some of the bands that attract annoying fans to me:

A) As you said, Neutral Milk Hotel. The number of times that people have blindly credited Jeff as a genius songwriter with the sole evidence being “he just is!!!1” only compares to the number of fans LBJ lost after Tet. Honestly, I’m not even really sure if you could judge him as a songwriter, with only two records to his name. For that matter, their b-sides and bootlegs, IMHO, aren’t even that good.

B) Saddle Creek Records. Tilly and the Wall is good. Rilo Kiley is good (if they are even with Saddle Creek). Many other bands are good. But Conor Oberst is not the greatest song writer in the history of music, end of story. Hell, he isn’t even that deep - just numbingly pretenious. Same goes for Tim, most of the time.

C) Miscellaneous supposed punk bands, like Underoath and Something Corporate, and miscellaneous supposed emo bands like Dashboard Confessionals and whatever else. These are the kids that I loathe the most - the suburban rich kids who want to rebel against society by spending money, watching Fuse, and being trendy all the while rebelling against trends, commercialism, and “pop” music. Some of the fans are fine, I don’t mind them - it is the hypocrites I can’t stand.

D) My last nomination I’m going to go out on a limb for. They just started out, but sometime in the near future I have a promising premonition that the Arcade Fire is going to become the hippest band in town. Well, the band that cool people don’t admit they listen to “because they were so much better before they were popular.” Before then, the same people are going to name-drop them like a strifing F-18 to show their indie-cred. I’d like to see someone disagree, so I can be wrong about the possibility of a good band getting confused with horrible fans. Ah well.

42

Elvis.

Have I said enough?

43

You know what irritates the living daylight out of me about Pitchfork? They were insufferable back when they were writing reviews…but now all of a sudden they’ve started to post all these James Joyceian nonsense stream-of-thought masturbation-on-paper (well, internets) “reviews” that have nothing to do with the CD/band they are purportedly synosizing. I mean, tell me about the goddamned band and its music and the CD, I am not interested in reading your wank-as-thought-posing-as-art.

44

Yep, that’s the stuff.
I’ve never been to an ICP show, but evidently it gets really wacky, with the spraying, and the uh…spraying and such.

45

Stee-rike three! {Sorry, Mr. Blue Sky, yours was too easy, and showed a sense of humour} Game over. Beatles fans are now officially the most annoying on the planet, not to mention the most thin-skinned. All too easy, really.

Did you actually trouble to read the OP? It wasn’t about which band was the worst or most over-rated, it was about whose fans were the most annoying, regardless of the band’s merits. Like I said in my first post, the Beatles were a good band, with some great songs. I quite like them. So were a lot of other 60’s acts, and I like them too.

However, the moment anyone writes anything that can be construed as even remotely derogatory of the Beatles, the fans come swarming out with the same tired old refrain about how important and influential they were. This makes Beatles fans very annoying, and I thank you for illustrating this far more clearly than I could have ever hoped to.

46

I think you for not reading my post twice, you self-justifying, smug person.

47

I haven’t even read the rest of the thread, I have no need to anymore, as this is the perfect answer.

48

[QUOTE=Mississippienne]
Postal Service. A very dear friend of mine is obsessed, OBSESSED with Ben Gibbard. I’ve been subjected to several enforced listenings of “Transatlantism”. The guy can’t even freaking rhyme! My 3-year-old cousin can rhyme. Granted, it’d still be sh!t even if he could, but if he could rhyme I’d at least give him a point for that. Right now he is negative points, negative. But all these adolescent-early twenties girls sighing over how deep he is and how much they want to give him a hug. Bleh.

[QUOTE]

Um, “Transatlanticism” is by Death Cab for Cutie, which is Ben Gibbard’s main band, not the Postal Service, which is his side project. The Postal Service’s CD is called “Give Up.” I don’t mean to be a fangirl (I don’t think he’s all that deep and I wouldn’t give him a hug), but if you are going to talk about a band, at least get the right one.

Anyway, the Postal Service is much better than Death Cab, at least in my opinion, although “The Sound of Settling” is the jam.

49

Sorry, that was supposed to be “THANK.”

No, I skipped straight to your post so you could taunt my unthinking, knee-jerk responses. :rolleyes:

Please let me know in advance if you’re going to skip this post so I can save the bother of writing it. I get that you don’t like them and I DON’T CARE. You wrote “No, they weren’t visionaries,” and I understand - despite how stupid and stuck-up you obviously think I am - what you’re saying. It’s not hard to understand. But I felt you wrongly downplayed their impact. Capische? Should I call in some diplomats to iron this out?

50

And Ringo will outlive them all! Muhahahahahahahaha!!!

51

Yeah, I gotta agree about the Beatles. That said…

Straight up, I’m not a Beatles fan. I think some of their stuff is entertaining, but I’d only very rarely choose to listen to them over something else. And you’re absolutely right–there are far too many of people who just can’t deal with the notion that you don’t like the Beatles, and they can get pretty rabid. They’re obnoxious.

But it’s just factually wrong to state that the Beatles weren’t pretty much the most innovative band out there, or that they were not the most influential. There have been better and more progressive bands since, IMO, but there’s a reason that everything gets compared to the Beatles.

52

It’s weird. I’m finding most of my favorite bands listed here…yet I’m completely agreeing with most of the sentiments.

As a veteran of many Phish shows, it was only about 25% of the people at any given show that actively annoyed the hell out of me, but that 25% tried its damndest to make up for the rest. (That 25% is in addition to the legions that showed up in the parking lot and never actually went to the show.)

I’ll generalize it to two groups of fans that bug me:
–The ones who believe that their pet band (Wilco, Radiohead, Bright Eyes, Arcade Fire–all of whom I love, BTW) is the greatest thing EVER and that other bands should just pack their shit and give it up. This is annoying when the band in question is actually good, and mind-bogglingly annoying when the artist in question is, say, John Secada.
–Any group of fans that refers to itself by a name. I’m willing to give Deadheads a pass on this one, not least because I sort of am one, but Juggalos? I’m looking at you.

I’ve probably been accused of being hipper-than-thou, but when the folks at Pitchfork dismiss some band I’ve never heard of because they sound too much like some other band I’ve never heard of, that’s annoying.

53

I’m pretty sure I said that I did like them, although I admittedly qualified it with “quite”. Where was it now? Ah, yes, quoted by you in the same post I extracted the above quote from. You seem…confused.

As for the rest, I’m not concerned with their impact, their importance, their personal hygiene or their taste in interior decoration: in line with the OP and the tenor of most of the rest of this thread, I’m claiming that they have the most annoying fans, a claim I see no reason to modify or retract.

54

You haven’t said anything that could be confusing.

I still get it. Repeating it doesn’t make it easier or more difficult to understand because your statement was simple. Your annoyance at the idea that the Beatles are visionary, unless there’s some complex third dimension to this, would seem to indicate that you think they aren’t. I disagreed.

55

You’re one of my favorite posters, Case Sensitive, but it does seem like you’re going a bit far in your derision for the Beatles and its fans in general and your posts to **Marley **in particular. All he said was that their impact is undeniable and didn’t make any other qualitive remarks about them. Ease up a little, mate.

56

Okay, on preview I’m not saying anything new, but…

I must say it never occurred to me that, whether you like them or not, the statement “The Beatles were a significant band in the history of rock and roll” would be in any way controversial. The idea that agreeing with that statement makes one “rabid” “oversensitive” and “annoying” is just…baffling to me.
“I don’t like Elvis, I don’t like his music, he was a minor figure at best, and his fans are all oversensitive assholes.”

“Well, his music is a matter of taste, but you can’t really dispute the fact that he was a major figure in rock and roll.”

“Aha! Thanks for proving my point about Elvis fans!”

“???”

Am I misrepresenting here? I freely admit that I’m sometimes not all that bright.

57

All this reminds me of Rocket From The Crypt fans – that whole “get a tattoo of our logo, get in cheap to our shows” thing. Or is it get in free to their shows?

Which reminds me of Elvis fans, who can sometimes be annoying, but personally I just find them amusing. If anything, with those fans, you have to admire their enduring commitment. Plus when you’re an Elvis fan, you get such benefits as tons of Elvis movies and Graceland. I mean, who cares about Tori Amos’ house? Oh, wait, that’s what that MTV show is for. Nevermind.

58

In my defense, I did specify Ben Gibbard, before mentioning Transatlanticism.

However, I cannot tell Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service apart, nor have I ever tried very hard.

59

I nominate Weezer. I’ve known way, way too many people that think Weezer is the second coming, or at least, that their second coming was the greatest thing ever. IMHO, they’re a decent band with a few good songs, but hardly anything to get worked up over.

Actually, I could say the same about Nirvana, even if they were a great band.

60

In college (late '80s) my answer would definitely have been Billy Joel. I like the guy and his music, but the dozens of girls in my school who would spontaneously start singing his songs were annoying beyond belief. It was particularly bad in history class, when they’d start singing any time anything from “We Didn’t Start the Fire” got mentioned (unfortunately, they couldn’t actually identify more than a quarter of the people or events he listed).

A close second at the time would have been R.E.M.