Reflections of: A Fractured Fan Base

Concerts, and the music that generates them, help make me whole. Nothing can replace the awe and amazement when you can hear thousands of fellow fans singing together in unison to a favorite song. The energy and implied comraderie cannot be topped. Venues would fill to capacity the whole night long. And yet, sadly, outside of major concerts, you just don't see a lot of this. Most people seem to stick to the one band they want to support and show up for that band's set only.

Now, granted, the more specialized a scene gets, the more scattered the fanbase can be. There are hundreds of bands in the "metal" genre, ranging from heavy metal, death metal, doom metal, "speed" metal, thrash, and many others. You can have one person who loves In Flames but not At The Gates, and another that's vice-versa. But both of them may love Metallica.

When the band is smaller in popularity, that divide seems so huge that, if the bands share a card at a venue, you may have people show up for only one band and not the other. Not only does such specialized fandom hurt the other bands' chances of gaining a larger fanbase, it also hurts the scene.

I can't say that any particular scene is different from this. I've seen this in the punk, metal, post-punk, and even easier-listening genres. It's like people have become fans of bands rather than genres.

Scattered Thoughts

- Miraculously, I'm making headway through the various mounds of crap in my apartment. Some of it materialized as a part of my attempt to be organized. The file cabinet helps. However, I'm fighting almost thirty years of disorganization. I don't think I put things away in any sort of order except for "it fits there". As you can imagine, that can make it rather difficult to find things.

- Facebook scares me, but I think it does it in some sort of good way. Just by looking through people's "friends", I found profiles for people I went to school with in grade school and middle school. Some of these people I haven't seen since fifth grade.

My only reason, at first, to check it out was to see if it'd be a suitable replacement of my personal web site. Sadly, it isn't. I decided to have fun with it anyway.

- How cool it had to have been to be one of the militia people in Public Enemy's entourage. Long Live Chuck D! (Un)Fortunately, we won't see anything like Metallica teaming with E-40 on a track.