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hmpfA lot of music seems to be made by truly weird people, people who don't seem like they would fit in easily anywhere - yet their music, if successful, typically ends up getting embraced by a "cooler than thou" kind of audience.
How does that happen?
Or maybe this is a misperception - and perhaps even doubly so, as neither the first part nor the second part of it may be in accordance with reality. The artists may be less strange, and the audience less conformist, than they appear/have appeared to me.
This may be an artifact of my particular history - loving music, yet always feeling like it was "inappropriate" for me to care about it because music - the music I cared about anyway - really "belonged" to "cooler" people (and I didn't even *want* to be cool like that, it struck me as silly - I wanted to be allowed to love the music, but I did not want to be part of the in-group that it belonged to).
As a science fiction fan (though I didn't consciously identify as one yet at the time I'm talking about here) I'm struck by how different these two subcultures are, or seem to me. Science fiction (etc.) fan culture, though often fiercely cliqueish in parts, generally seems more about accepting people into the fold (hence the "geek social fallacy"), whereas music-based fan cultures have always appeared to me more about establishing a sharply defined in-group and *keeping other people out*. Where in sf fan cultures it mostly seemed enough to love the same things as other fen, with music fans it always seemed to me as if loving the music was insufficient; in fact, loving the music could be socially inappropriate if you didn't also wear the right clothes, listen to *all* the right bands (and none of the 'wrong' ones), have the right kind of hairstyle, etc.
Hm.
How does that happen?
Or maybe this is a misperception - and perhaps even doubly so, as neither the first part nor the second part of it may be in accordance with reality. The artists may be less strange, and the audience less conformist, than they appear/have appeared to me.
This may be an artifact of my particular history - loving music, yet always feeling like it was "inappropriate" for me to care about it because music - the music I cared about anyway - really "belonged" to "cooler" people (and I didn't even *want* to be cool like that, it struck me as silly - I wanted to be allowed to love the music, but I did not want to be part of the in-group that it belonged to).
As a science fiction fan (though I didn't consciously identify as one yet at the time I'm talking about here) I'm struck by how different these two subcultures are, or seem to me. Science fiction (etc.) fan culture, though often fiercely cliqueish in parts, generally seems more about accepting people into the fold (hence the "geek social fallacy"), whereas music-based fan cultures have always appeared to me more about establishing a sharply defined in-group and *keeping other people out*. Where in sf fan cultures it mostly seemed enough to love the same things as other fen, with music fans it always seemed to me as if loving the music was insufficient; in fact, loving the music could be socially inappropriate if you didn't also wear the right clothes, listen to *all* the right bands (and none of the 'wrong' ones), have the right kind of hairstyle, etc.
Hm.
