The differentiation of fans

May 16, 2008

REM Since it’s release, I’ve been getting a lot of play out of the newest REM album, Accelerate. It’s good. Not Automatic for the People or Life’s Rich Pageant good, but good all the same – a return to when REM was making their style of music, when Out of Time and Automatic for the People had propelled them into the rock stratosphere.

Though I am one of the few who enjoyed Monster, I understand how many didn’t care for that album. For those people, Accelerate may be a godsend – it seems to be the album that was meant to come between Automatic for the People and New Adventures in Hi-Fi. This is what Monster could have been. What it should have been.

Listening to the album, and in turn filtering throughout the entire REM canon, I’ve been thinking about the differentiation of fans, and how the longer a band has been around, the more diverse their fans become.

In the early days of a band, most fans are similar. They like a band because they like the first album, or the first single, or whatever. There’s less to choose from, so every fan is essentially a carbon copy of the next. They’ve all been brought together by one set of songs, creating a community of support for the band that’s near fanatic.

Take that band and look 20 years into the future. The fans aren’t carbon copies anymore. Some have left. Others have grown. The bandwagon has taken on more and more fans until the originals are shoved to the back. Tastes diverge and branch out again, until one fan is hardly recognizable from next.

There are currently three generations of REM fans. The first generation is filled with lifelong fans – those that caught on with REM when they were still a smaller, more independent band – the IRS years through the initial major label signing; Murmur through Document.

The second generation - my generation - caught on somewhere between Green and Automatic for the People. We’re the generation that grabbed a hold of them as radio classics and hung on for dear life. We’ve held on because we still hold great memories from those songs and from the band at its peak.

The new generation probably views REM with a longing nostalgia. I doubt many fans are created through the albums alone, instead relying on an older sibling or coworker who loved the band in the 80s and 90s, or though rock radio (or classic rock radio).

Even with fans grouped together like this, there’s a vast differentiation. If you ask 100 REM fans what their ten favorite REM songs are, you’ll get 100 completely different answers, with the total number songs reaching the hundreds.

It shows the power of a non-tangible creative outlet. There are no right or wrong choices – it’s all dependent upon tastes. Though fans are often lumped in together, the longer a band has been together, the more every fan is different. Like a musical fingerprint, every fan is unique.

What it comes down to is that the larger you get, the more wide sweeping your fan base becomes.

And the harder it becomes to satisfy everyone.

Someday I’ll talk about the REM mixtape that set me up as a fan – and why my favorites are so heavy with IRS year classics even though I’m more of a second generation, Automatic for the People guy.

Until then, here are my choices for the 15 best REM songs. How different are they from yours?

“Begin the Begin” – Life’s Rich Pageant
“Belong” – Out of Time
“(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” - Reckoning
“E-Bow the Letter” – New Adventures in Hi-Fi
“Electrolite” – New Adventures in Hi-Fi
“Fall on Me” – Life’s Rich Pageant
“Find the River” – Automatic for the People
“Finest Worksong” - Document
“Man on the Moon” – Automatic for the People
“Perfect Circle” - Murmur
“Swan Swan H” – Life’s Rich Pageant
“Try Not to Breathe” – Automatic for the People
“Walk Unafraid” - Up
“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” - Monster
“World Leader Pretend” - Green

Tags: The Top..., Music |

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Crossword art

May 16, 2008

I just spent more time than necessary checking out NY Times Crossword Drawings – sketches by Emily Jo Cureton based on key words from the day’s New York Times Crossword Puzzle.

Tags: Random Links |

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Paper. Sticks. Logs.

May 14, 2008

The order is always the same.

Paper. Sticks. Logs.

I scrounge around for newspaper. I find the same box I’ve always found - one that we created when we first moved in, filled with newspapers dating back to June 2003. Each fire brings back the memories of that year, five years ago, when Kerrie and I anxiously awaited our wedding, just months after taking up residence again in our hometown of Sioux Falls.

The newspaper is twisted up like corn chips, creating a nest of instantly flammable organic matter.

The sticks come from everywhere. Sometimes we bring them back from camping trips. Sometimes they’re left in our yard after a prolonged wind storm. They’re made of lilac, birch, oak. They’re dried and thin enough to sustain a fire for several minutes - long enough for the heat to approach the best burning temperature.

The sticks are layered on top of the newspaper twists. They form a bed - a mattress for the logs to sleep upon.

The logs are mostly lilac, though many are left over from the assorted state parks we’ve visited over the years. We always buy our own wood at the park, knowing full well that what’s left over will help fuel a fire at home. It’s what we’d use if we had to create heat from scratch. It’s the earth providing warmth, secondhand, through ingenuity and modern materials.

The logs are set on top. The fire reaches them after a few seconds, licks at the bark and creates a hallow tube for which heat to burst forth.

We look around. We breathe in the smells. We wave at the people walking by. We sip a beer, sit back and enjoy the first fire of the newly warmed year.

Paper. Sticks. Logs.

Okay, summer. We’re ready for you.

Tags: Outdoors |

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16-Page Read: Green Eggs and Ham

May 13, 2008

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss

It’s come to my attention that Sierra no longer wants to read books.

I should take that back. She’s never really wanted to read books. She’s instead sat idly by while I showed her pictures and read through the words, flipping pages for her and explaining the finer points of Where the Wild Things Are far before she could even comprehend what a book was in the first place.

As she’s grown older, she’s taken a liking to the book themselves – not the pages or the words or the pictures, but the solid item of matter that a book is. It’s a piece to chew on, a physical creation to pick up and hold and turn around and – especially – drop on the floor.

Sierra read books with me because she was a captive audience. The books were more for my enjoyment, serving more as a promise of things to come than a cognitive memory.

Now, she’s active. Sitting in Dad’s lap is fun for about two minutes. She likes her books to be fuzzy, soft, chewable and, most of all, quickly read.

This leaves us small chunky books, books with flaps and other movable parts, plush books that double as teething rings and books that simulate animal fur. More Sandra Boynton, less Mo Willems.

I’ve come to accept this. I still try, and she’s becoming more and more tolerant. She enjoys helping me turn the page, and if she’s in a good mood we can often read the book a second time (but never a third – don’t even dare). Of course, there are still some books that are better left for the future.

Green Eggs and Ham, for instance.

Listen, I love Dr. Seuss to death. But his books aren’t exactly the most colorful batch on the bookshelf. They’re often tri-colored with awkward looking characters and even more awkward situations. They’re weird, to say the least, in a way that a two or three-year-old would enjoy, but a nine-month old would ditch in favor of something that squeaks. They don’t translate well to the pre-year crowd, is all I’m saying.

But hey - that’s okay. When I attempt to read it to Sierra (never making it past the page introducing the box and the fox) I really read it for myself, to relive my own childhood, to revel in the words and the rhymes, the lines that I remember from longer ago than any other book I can think of. It was my first love – one that led me to purchase the cartoon retelling of Green Eggs and Ham on VHS from Best Buy knowing full well I’d never watch it and one that led me to choose it as the perfect children’s book to read during Speech class in high school.

And here’s the funny thing: it’s taken me this long to realize that Dr. Seuss’s most famous book is actually an ode to trying new things.

Yeah. I know. Pretty obvious. But I’ve always seen this book from the anti-egg/ham character’s point of view. No, I don’t want those damned sickly green-colored foodstuffs – I want a normal plate of ham and eggs and I would rather they’ve not been in anyone else’s house or next to a filthy fox. But that’s not it at all. What we’re looking at is a classic tale of “just one bite, I guarantee you’ll like it.”

It reminds me of this scene in a Calvin and Hobbes comic, where Calvin will absolutely not eat any tortellini; he absolutely hates it and refuses to even touch it if his mother cooks it. The next image, after a pregnant pause, is Calvin looking up the word tortellini in the dictionary, proving his fear of the unknown – an aversion to anything new, regardless of whether or not he knows what it is.

The moral in Green Eggs and Ham is simple. Try things once. You never know if you’ll like it if you don’t try it. And if it just so happens you absolutely hate it, then at least you’ll know firsthand.

How about that? It’s only taken me 25 years. But I’ve finally found a moral in a Dr. Seuss book.

Sierra would be so proud of her dad. That is, if she’d stop chewing on the corner of the book and listen to me.

Tags: Books, Sierra, 16-Page Read |

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Downsizing

May 12, 2008

For me, music is a big part of my life. Just how big varies. At times, it’s high on the list of valuable mediums of expression. It’s the only thing I can think about in the car, at work, while mowing the lawn. It’s important as both background noise and vehicle for thoughtful consideration of art. It’s both functional and emotional.

Other times, I seem to forget about music, becoming bored with the entire concept and preferring silence, or talk, or sports.

Regardless, I’ve been lucky enough to be fueled by a constant stream of new music for the past 15 years. My parents were purveyors of what is now known as classic rock. My first job was at Best Buy, stocking CDs and, naturally, purchasing the best ones. High school coincided with a rich influx of pop punk and post-hardcore emo. College brought me Napster, then Kazaa, and eventually a group of friends with an almost equally obsessive quality toward music.

I’m still in touch with these friends today, receiving several albums per week via mix tape or samples or whatever. When I purchased my iPod, I was frantically collecting everything I had lost over the years, ballooning my playlist with thousands of songs I may or may not ever listen to. Anything that sounded remotely familiar made the list, anything recommended was added, anything done by a side project’s side project was holed away for later.

In other words, I’ve been adding music to my collection for a very long time. I’ve rarely taken anything out. I’ve never retired something I enjoy, and I barely ever delete something that has even a glint of promise.

Currently, my iPod has 9,230 songs.

My friends, it’s time to pare back.

Seriously. I don’t even know why I have half of the music I do. Air? Sheryl Crow? Warren G? I’ve got albums I’ve never listened to, albums I thought were funny at the time and artists I don’t like on compilation albums I must keep intact lest the gods of incomplete compilations smite me down in a rain of fire.

I’ve had many of these songs for a long time. And my completist nature halts me from deleting songs willy nilly, like a farmer going after wheat with a scythe, cutting down whatever is in my path.

Instead of going after this like a music fan, I’m looking at it as if they were a staff of employees during a budget crunch. The losers will be whisked away to the unemployment line, unable to continue working on my iPod, no longer available to take up precious space.

There are several classes of employees. There’s the tried and true workers – those who have been with me forever and will continue to lock on because they’ve met their five year tenure, bands that I may not have listened to since college, but still hold a place in my heart.

There are the hard workers, the best employees – my favorite bands, those whom I’ll generously give space to, including side projects, rare b-sides and one-star slacker albums.

Then, there are those who came in on a temp contract, still hanging around even after I’d deemed them unlistenable. Those who were hired with a group of songs I really liked, hiding away for a while due to their proximity to better music. Those who I’ve only kept on because I’m supposed to, serving to boost my quota of jazz or spoken word or whatever.

When I’m done, I should have a streamlined iPod, one that is easy to navigate, one where a new album isn’t instantly lost in the shuffle, squirreled away between Air and Air Supply.

I hope to cut the music down to 8,000, though I know that will be difficult to do.

Moderation is such a difficult practice.

Tags: Steinbeck on Random, Music |