Then the long wait is over. This unknown band signs the contract and has a hit song.
Suddenly, all your friends know about this band. Unknown Band no longer writes their own music, they have someone do that for them. To reach a higher audience, the songs are about love and breakups; things they never wrote about before. The songs are no longer "edgy" or "real." Unknown Band has become just like the others. Popular.
What comments do we have to say now? Do we commend them on their success? Possibly. But in this more likely scenario, we do the exact opposite. We bash them for losing their "edge" and becoming famous. We become angry because our little "club" is non-existent. Why? Because they did exactly what we told them to do.
The usual epilogue is that this band lurks back into the unknown, but not because it became edgy again. Because another band took its place with younger, more attractive stars. True, most of these bands rarely hit zero people who like them. There's always those few that still think the songs are cool. But the cooler songs were the ones they wrote before they were famous.
This is something us humans have been doing for quite sometime that quite irritates me. Then again, many things that humans do irritates me.
Things such as bands, books, songs, movies, etc. are much much cooler when they are in the unknown. But not the bad kind of unknown. The kind of "indie" unknown where they record songs in their basement and write "real" music and the entertainment they bring to others is "original." This is not wrong in any way, and is a correct statement. Something that only you and your friends can rave about is much better than something everyone raves about. It's like someone invaded in your own personal club.
But it only makes sense in the band's perspective. Who has time to write their own music when your fans are expecting a new album every year? Writing songs is not easy, even for someone who gets paid to do so. Besides, these bands want one thing: money. So they don't really care if their original fan base who thought they were edgy hates them, because they have a bigger, much broader fan base now.
This isn't what angers me. What angers me is when these few fans of this band go on and on about how they should expand and sign a contract so they get the attention they deserve. Because they should. Right? Someone once told me that once you start getting paid to do a hobby, it stops becoming a hobby. Then you only start doing it for money. I agree with this analysis. Nothing takes the fun out of something more than putting a deadline and rules on it. Instead of writing songs when you want and how you want, you need to write songs by this time, and since you don't have time for that, someone gets hired to do that for you.
So how do these original fans react? Apparently, none of them know how bands change when they become well-known. All the fans have to say is complaints about how the band isn't "cool" anymore. There's that word. Cool. Its meaning is way too broad in my opinion, yet probably the worst thing a band can be called is "uncool." That, and "sucky." You know, as a side note, I would really appreciate if people (teens especially) expended they're vocabulary a little bit more. I am guilty of saying words such as "like" and "awesome" much too often. But learning new words is interesting to me, and I wouldn't mind expanding it more. But I digress. Again. I've been doing that quite a bit in recent blog posts.
Anyway, after the band has had their hit songs they slowly fade into oblivion once more, just as they came. No one remembers them, except the few that were there all along. But even then, those fans only listen to the "cool" songs.
This is why I admire people like Johnathan Coulton, who has never signed a contract, and writes songs as he pleases. Sure he wrote both of the credit songs for Portal and Portal 2, which will bring in some money for him. But he does all of his songs himself. He isn't super popular either, so he still has that "edgy" feel to his music I suppose.
Fans begging for more and then complaining when you do what they want is a concept I will never understand. Even if I go through that myself, I won't understand it. I'm keeping my hobbies, hobbies. Future careers will involve technology. I'm not about to go design a website for fun. Because it's a job for me still.
Ok, now that that's out of the way, let's discuss things I need to work on in this blog:
- Conclusions
