The Credibility Gap

This is the first real essay/article on this blog, so bear with me. It's a little long and a bit confusing, but it deals with something that directly affects you. It is the result of lots of thoughts fumbling in one direction, and some ideas inspired by a recent (and very divisive) post at Good Hodgkins. It's about what Ryan calls the 'Garden State effect' - the title describing the build-up of a new Shins fanbase following their appearance in Zach Braff's film. Read it, noting especially the various reactions in the 126 comments. His essay is more about how success can bring irritating people who spoil shows into a band's fanbase - this essay is more about why music fans find these people irritating - and how they react to a band's success in the first place. It's also twice the length. It's a little like what James Dean Bradfield said recently about the explosion of Nirvana into a new mainstream after Nevermind, and judging by the amount of Kurt hoodies, ever since then:
"They (Nirvana) destroyed a generation of people - they gave them a gateway to an alternative world without getting a badge first and took them to that world which, at the end of the day, was just bad metal."
This is the bad taste left in your mouth when you see someone you know you cannot stand enjoying music you love; the same frustrating, intangible feeling. Trying to explain it, I ended up using some sociological terms, so I warn you, this gets deep.
Essentially, this debate is about two things: the forces that form and create a fanbase or target market, and the existence of supposed hipsters/scenestars/ indie kids/ style bandits/ posers/ fakers or OC brats. The latter theme is the hardest to focus on - how do you define a hipster without sounding like one, or worse, without sounding like an elitist musical-taste snob-blogger who will never admit to being one? But let's start with the easier stuff: Marx and Baudrillard (aaarrghh!).
In 'The Communist Manifesto' of 1848, Karl Marx said a lot of things. One of these was his prophecy of the end of capitalism. This downfall would be brought about by a 'crisis of production' resulting from a concentration of property and capital in the hands of fewer and fewer men (the inevitable monopolies) and the fact that they employ more and more workers (who, being so many, earn less and less, please bear with me) - eventually, there is no-one left to buy their products, which they keep making (yes, this is a simplified view of Marxism) - in other words, capitalism as Marx saw it would continue as it always had, by making the rich richer and the poor poorer, and leaving no consumer. Okay?
Today it is the consumer that the system relies on, and less so the worker. In the last half of the last century, companies began to work to build markets for their products, rather than products for existing markets - explaining the popularity of so many things that are no good for us. In one word: advertising. Public relations, press relations - the motto for the 21st century is not 'Workers of the world, unite!' but 'the Customer is always right'.

Anyway. Today, music is, in these strict terms, just another commodity to be marketed at us - something mp3 bloggers are well aware of. If you're reading this, (let's say you are) you probably feel that indie/alternative music ( generally meaning music existing outside the mainstream) is better than popular music. Here's where the debate gets really tricky - while being popular is by no means reason enough to condemn anything, does it necessarily mean it's good?
Oscar Wilde once said that "Everything popular is wrong". Obviously, that is meant to be argued, but nobody could argue that a book like this is anywhere near as good as anything by Wilde, or Nabokov, or Kurt Vonnegut, yet it is known where they are not. Anti-conformity is a vital part of 'indie culture' but it shouldn't affect something as basic as music taste.
To take an obvious example - teenagers who dress in black, and cite Richey Edwards and Kurt Cobain as their idols. It is mostly safe to say that they do not know depression, they do not cut themselves or genuinely contemplate suicide, but they show the outside signs anyway. What they enjoy is the simulation of these feelings (here's the Baudrillard), not the genuine emotion that drives the songs, but the effect of the songs on them. They like the signifiers - the intense world-view, the rock'n'roll martyr, upsetting their parents - but not what is signified: the genuine angst and pain, something which cannot be picked up and marketed, unlike a musician's fashion sense. Crucially: they do not see the difference as important.
As everyone noticed, teenage angst paid well, and therefore it was marketed, often very obviously. Like Coupland's Generation X, our generation (blogs, mp3s and MySpace) are distrustful of being marketed at, though not in an 'anti-capitalist' way. We do not like that things which are personally meaningful can be used to entice us for someone else's gain. When I see people I never liked at a concert I have been waiting weeks for, my first thought is that they took the easy way, the marketable way - they do not know the emotional root of the songs and I do - they do not know that there is even a difference. This feeling does not stand up to scrutiny, it's just the elitist impulse involved.
This is why there is such value accorded to liking something before it's popular - being part of it before it's co-opted into a system of marketing, and diluted to reach a greater audience. It has to appeal to you before it is picked up and designed to appeal to you.
The simple definition of a hipster is the person to blame for something wonderful being coldly analysed and marketed so no-one knows the difference. They fall for the marketing, just like the people who fall for spam emails and keep them coming to everyone else. When it comes to something you can form a real emotional connection to, it's surely better to like them for a reason no one controls than for reasons they do.

You do not grow to dislike something because it is popular, rather because you grow to fear you no longer enjoy it for the reasons you once did. The emotional connection has been usurped - as Marxism suggests, you fear your needs have been manufactured, just like a supposed need for Coke and Nike and other brands that kids learn to demand. One result of a system of non-stop marketing (how many thousands of brands do you see in a day?) is that it becomes hard to tell whether you really do have your own taste in music, or art, or fashion.
Initially, you love a band because they are great - that is your reason. But if they begin to enter the mainstream, that reason is soon under threat from the new ones presented to you. You can become alienated from your original link with the music far too easily. That explains a fear so common among music-lovers, the same anxiety I felt when I heard Joanna Newsom's 'This Side of the Blue' on a television advert: my precious connection with the song - all the times I listened to it alone at night - was to be threatened. And the great, wonderful, essential part of music is that connection, if you feel it, you want it to last, you want to protect it. So we protect it with distrust, the only weapon we have.
It's not surprising that loving music should seem to be in opposition with big business's effort to market it - the greatest recent shock to the music industry was Napster and all it ushered in, the effective communisation of people's music collections. What do we call all this then? The Credibility Gap? The Really Complicated Problem Relating To Music And Marketing? The Hipster Syndrome? Oh well. At least I've offered an explanation for the whole thing, which is much better than feeling frustrated without knowing why.

Very Simple Version:
1 - For capitalism to become humane and survive, marketing was invented. It is a crucial part of modern society.
2 - As a result of advertising's spectacular level of influence, we worry about being marketed at beyond our awareness and control. This extends to all products, including music.
3 - It is easy to get into music for the marketable reasons - that is why they are marketed. Advertising, taken up by a larger audience, makes no room for a personal emotional connection. Therefore, popular reasons challenge personal ones.
4 - We hold on very tightly to our connections with our favourite music, and distrust others who seem to love it for different reasons. It becomes increasingly less likely that others will experience the music in such a natural way.
5 - These people, to us, are fakes. They are happy to settle for marketed reasons, and do not try to form personal relationships to music, instead settling for the comfort of hype and trends. Even crap bands have marketed qualities, and marketing makes it harder to know the difference.
6 - For this reason, people often fear the entry of their favourite bands into the mainstream. And it's not elitism - if it was, bloggers wouldn't be promoting the music they love to as many readers as possible.
7 - You need to read the whole thing.

Play Hipster Bingo!
Read Generation Milchkaffee - a German account of hipster lifestyle

Joanna Newsom - This Side of the Blue

"Carrying his language and his new philosophy like concealed weapons, the hipster set out to conquer the world." -- Partisan Review, 1948

"I don't know if U2 started it, or The Stones or Oasis but a lot of bands think in terms of: 'I'm going to be the biggest band in the world. Fuck all those bands who've got no ambition'. I think that's a total crock of shit.
There's nothing less interesting to me than the idea of marketing the fuck out of something so people are forced to like it. Some bands are just manipulating people to buy music. That's how 90 per cent of the record industry works! It's basically the same as selling a fucking toaster or a cruise package." -- Win Butler, 2007

"I cringe to ever write this post, as if It needs to be said, but some people seem to not have figured out that the NME has never printed an article that doesn't take all the quotes out of context, and put some things in bold that make it seem like people are talking shit about each other!" -- Win Butler, a little later in 2007

"By turning a great song into a jingle, advertisers have achieved the ultimate: a meaningless product has now been injected with your meaningful memory of a song," he said. "The songs and the artists who have created them have power and cultural value, that's why advertisers pay out millions for them. Once you have taken the cash, you, your song and your audience are forever married to the product." -- Tom Waits