I already feel like too much of an individual. I have too many obscure interests that I wish more people knew and liked, so I’d have someone to share my enjoyment with. I think it’s great when something I like becomes popular. (Not to mention that I’d like to see a few “starving artists” I know be able to make a decent living with their work.)
But as long as there are people who have your attitude, there will be bands (writers, movies, shows, etc.) whose main appeal is that nobody else likes them.
It doesn’t matter whether you jump on the band wagon or jump off the band wagon. Either way you’re letting other people’s opinions make decisions for you.
If I’m a fan of someone, I hope he or she is an enormous success. I want others to appreciate what I like. And I like to see them make some money and get recognition. The quality doesn’t change when more people like it.
I don’t want to pick on you bubastis but that strikes me as a rather immature attitude. I fail to see any difference between the “cattle” that like something in the mainstream and those “cattle” who scoff at something simply because it is the mainstream. Different sides of the same coin, you understand where I’m coming from?
(relatively) recent experiences with my own indy snobbery.
Modest Mouse is one of my favorite band, and have been ever since one of the cool older kids in high school played Lonesome Crowded West for me at a party I went to.
I have seen them play several times over the years and have watched with growing resentment as the audiences have changed recently from hardcore fans, to teeny boppers who though “Float On” was a neat little ditty. The last show I went to (right at the height of their mainstream popularity) I was up front with some friends and there were about 6 or 7 girls who couldn’t have been more than 15 years old up there with us. My friends and I all rolled our eyes and complained loudly about the KROQafication of “our band”, and how these kids couldn’t have been more that 12 when “The Moon and Antarctica” came out. How they were only here because Modest Mouse was suddenly cool.
Cut to about 3 months later:
I was at the Pixies reunion show, again right up front (it was general admission and we had gotten there hours early to be able to get a good spot) Right next to us, and a little behind us, were a bunch of guys in (I am guessing) their late thirty’s early forty’s, complaining loudly about how “Most of these kids probably never even heard of the Pixies until after they broke up”. My friends and I started looking at each other and talking, quietly, about what total douche bags those guys were. Yes, we were all to young to have know about The Pixies in their heyday, but dammit they were an awesome band, and we were here because we loved their music, not because we thought it was cool.
The show went on and we enjoyed ourselves but wondered why the old folks were griping. Shouldn’t they just be happy that we all love the band?
So yeah, I used to be a snob like that too. Some people never grow out of it, to a certain extent I am sure I haven’t either. I still have a tendency to make moral judgments about people when I find out what music they like, even though I know fans of System of Down or The Killers are probably good people too. But I was thrilled the other day when I heard Bright Eyes on the radio, called just about everyone I knew. So I am getting better, the OP will too.
But why is it irritating? Do you want to impress those people? Are they snubbing you because they think you, too, are a bandwagon-jumper?
When it comes to things you really, truly enjoy, I can’t understand why anyone should care what anyone else thinks. You know the truth - isn’t that good enough? If it’s people you care about, they probably know the truth, as well. So the only people who will think you’re something you’re not… well, they’re probably strangers. Who cares what strangers think? If they’re going to flash judge over something so petty, they’re probably better off staying strangers.
Help me to understand, here.
Am I making any sense? I had a wee bit of wine and I can’t feel my lips, so I feel like I’m manifesting some divine truths, but it might just be the fermented grapes speaking.
What bugs me is a slight variation on the OP’s theme - you spend all your life supporting a struggling football team through thin and very little thick and as soon as they develop a star player or win a few games on the trot suddenly all
these supporters come out of the woodwork and start braying on about how thery have always loved the club. No - I have always loved the club, along with the other pitiful handful who stand in the rain week in week out watching the floggings - you guys just love it when it’s fashionable to do so.
You are cooler than them?
I’ve met a thousand bands… maybe a dozen of which I said, “I hope they make it” (because IMO they deserved it).
But if they then “made it” I’d be fucking happy about it. I could say, “I knew them back when”.
I wouldn’t say, “This band now sucks because you like them”.
I just DON’T FUCKING GET IT.
And for all you weirdo holier-than-though-no-shower-make-your-own-soap-but-sell-it-rather-rather-than-use-it dirty stinking hippies, I used to party with Wide Spread Panic in Memphis and Oxford, WAY before they were famous, but I ALWAYS thought their music was shitty and lame.
Ok, simply because for me these fairweather fans devalue the emotional investment I have made in my football club. I have paid dues for this club, I have seen the 54-0 hidings, I have seen the star players lured away to the silvertails and I will be here when the bad times return. The freeloaders will not. If it weren’t for me and my fellow long term fans, there would be no club. The freeloaders want to live vicariously through my investment, my pain and what should be my joy. And that annoys me.
Perhaps you don’t undertsand it, fair enough. But I’ll betcha everyone who supports the perennial losers of the sprost world does.
Hah!
How far can this oneupsmanship go?
I, for one, bought my first Birkies way back in '77, several years after I had read LOTR and discovered this new dude named Bruce Springsteen.
And that was about the first and last time for me to be cutting edge.
As an oldster, the shoe for me is now on the other foot.
NAF1138
You were too young to know the Pixies in their heydey, I was too old. (I was changing diapers and stuff like that in the mid-80’s, just couldn’t keep up with new music.)
I only discovered The Pixies maybe about 2 years ago.
But being in this position is kinda fun.
Being irrelevant, as another (younger) oldster said, is rather humbling but very liberating.
Let’s see. The OP disdains those who were “bamboozled by blanket media advertising” to like a particular artist. And how did the OP discover that artist? “…hearing him on TV one night.”
So the OP decided to like an artist who was so firmly mainstream that he was being featured on TV, and now disdains anyone who discovers an artist after they go mainstream.
I had the same experiance with those who read the Lord of the Rings books before the movie. I wanted to read the book few months before the movie came out and they were quite snobbish towards me. Apparently you have to read the book, years before the movie or something like that.
I don’t know why the should care though.
