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Bobatron Speaks: The Sin Of Fandom

I do not like people being in the position to manipulate me. I do not appreciate people who assume they know what is better for me interfering with my life. That sort of reliance and influence can and will often lead to exploitation. In the case of religion, God is this being or entity that, for whatever reasons as a human being I will never comprehend, will control my life, throw obstacles, make the whole experience a struggle and ingrain the notion into my thick skull that free-will is inherently evil. Why am I supposed to be praying to this again? In politics and economics you will find pretty much the same patterns: you pay your taxes, you send your kids (or drag yourself) to war, you pay some more taxes, you bust your ass at some 9-to-5 until your heart packs in, out of fear of being marginalised and dying at some old people’s home or cardboard box in your own shit and piss. Why am I supposed to be supporting this way of life? You get the picture. Think for yourself and don’t take anything for granted.

Warning: Popular Music Journalism is a gateway drug to fandom

Now, when it comes to music, it’s the same sheepish mentality I find in “serious” aspects of life (like the aforementioned religion and politics) that I have very little time for. More specifically it’s the audience-stage dynamic that I cannot stand. I think it’s pretty lame when artists will put themselves on a pedestal, under the assumption they are somehow of a better quality than everyone else. What I find even lamer is when people will fall for that sort of ego-driven bullshit and allow others to put themselves on pedestals to be worshipped, to give meaning to their own lives. The sort of people who fall into that trap are the sort of people who find themselves manipulated by cults (and by cults I mean the ones you end up drinking arsenic-laced Kool-Aid in a field, not the “lets hold hands around a tree and play D&D” social gathering types).

Look at The Beatles, arguably the biggest pop group ever (if the mainstream music press is anything to go by) and the amount of crap they got into because of their fans and people somehow connected to their music and mythology. Yes, I’m talking about Chuck Manson, that crazy guy who capped Lennon and all their hysterical female fans that congregated outside airports and hotels. The common thread I see is their susceptibility to absorbing the sort of PR bullshit they were all fed at the time by the media and the band themselves, mostly about their awesomeness, sex appeal, charisma and the dwarfing of the Christ. I doubt the Beatles’ intentions were to inspire mentally unstable people to go on murder sprees, but they sure sold a fuck load of records to hysterical teenagers. If you tell people enough how awesome you are, eventually they will fall for it and after you do that, you can sell them whatever it is you’re selling. In any case, there are a million assholes out there who want nothing more than to be worshipped and it’s a lot easier to make a career of it in music than claiming to be the Messiah or becoming the dictator of a war-torn nation.

Fan Tributes: Originality is paramount. No really, it is. Somehow.

Underground music, before it starts getting mainstream coverage, on the other hand, has less of that fan bullshit. On a practical level, this is largely due to the significantly smaller number of people involved. The smaller number of people means that everyone ends up knowing each other, so rather than having a faceless audience of ticket-holders, the band has an audience of friends and acquaintances; they are more like equals, by simply being there and supporting something new. Call me a naive, but I like to think that you are less likely to fuck someone over if you know them. On an ideological level, underground or alternative subcultures have the very real potential to act like mediaeval carnivals. In those carnivals, social structures and norms were totally reversed: guys would dress like girls, girls like guys, the poor would run around like kings for the day, the rich would roll in shit, everyone forgot their religious fears and got bombed and had the biggest gang-bang ever. There’s a bit of dramatisation there, but that was generally the idea of it before the Church went “No” and it got colonised by the capitalist interests. Alternative and underground subcultures will often reverse certain aspects of mainstream and pop culture. That’s why rock addressed racism, heavy metal religious oppression, punk rock homophobia and so forth. And that’s why you’re not going to hear Britney or Christina sing about anything risqué like the World Trade being a death-machine or Jesus being a cunt.

It was all pretty sweet being into punk and hardcore in the 1980s and 1990s for a while. After the Pistols and Clash finally died the fuck out, the culture industry kinda gave up on picking up on the whole Exploited scene and invested in New Wave as the future of “punk” as a commodity. So we had Black Flag, Dead Kennedys and Minor Threat taking it back to its roots, without a lot of the poser bullshit that came with the brightly-coloured mohawks. Up until Nirvana fucked it up for everyone again. Nirvana are largely credited for “opening boundaries” and “expanding horizons” or whatever it is their press releases and mainstream media agree to these days. What that basically translates as is that it was time again for the record companies to rape and pillage what underground music scenes existed because the last two wells (glam rock and techno) were dangerously drying out and they didn’t want be caught out. So after relentless radio and video airtime, idiots across the world found a brand new(?) fad to latch on to and brought all their misery to it and the rest is history. Going to shows back then you could tell who discovered “moshing” from the ‘…Teen Spirit’ video (who’d also latch onto the next “big thing”) and who figured it out for themselves. Fans reared their ugly face as guitars became popular once again.

A stereotypical analysis of the common fanboi, Homo Herimiticus

A fan, short for fanatic, is someone who never thinks and merely follows, nothing more than a pawn or foot-soldier. They are like worker ants in a colony; they move around a lot, look like they have a purpose and some serious business to attend to, but in reality they are simply working on automatic because they know no better. Unlike ants however, which are manipulated by pheromones, fans are manipulated by their base emotions, by being kept in a state of emotional distress. A fan will listen to some ballad rock and think that every song was written about themselves, putting themselves in that same emotional state over and over again. One of my favourite theorists, Theodor Adorno, wrote about this around the time Nazis started busting heads and jazz was all that and pretty much nailed it when he claimed that “they [the consumers of popular music] consume music in order to be allowed to weep” and that “one who weeps does not resist any more than one who marches.” That is something that Joseph Goebbels was more than aware of and as Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany made it his mission to control culture and art. Hell, look at how fashion trends get passed on from pop-stars to their fans and from then on to popular culture as a whole. What’s to stop potential harmful ideology getting transmitted in that way? I’m not going to claim to know which is harmful and which not, but would Hitler be sporting a fringe if he were around today? You can bet your Project X test-pressing he would. Don’t be a tool.

The Seven Sins of Fandom:
1. You know your idol is infallible.
2. You know more about your idol than your parents.
3. You own the same record in more than two formats.
4. You buy the same record in obsolete formats.
5. Your fashion sense is dictated by a record cover.
6. Your tattoos reflect your playlist.
7. You can’t handle suicide without your favourite song