On counting crows and comebacks
April 3rd, 2008 by rturner1Hello all. The inspiration to this post is the release of a NEW Counting Crows album followed with a tour!! For any of those interested, check it out at www.countingcrows.com .And to see a video to their new single, check out this website: annabegins.com
Now many of you are probably asking why this is at all relavent to the class. First, for those of you who read my fanifesto- you may (but probably don’t) remember that I have never seen a Counting Crows concert, despite my obsession with their live versions of songs. I am proud and extremely excited to announce that this summer, it shall be remedied! On July 31st, I will have the Trekkie equivalent of seeing Spock speak at a convention in person. I cannot wait.
Also, the release of this new album was also exciting seeing as it has been quite a while since they have produced much (two years since the release of their last album, which was a live album recorded in 2003 and did not include many new songs). Due to this I had begun to fade interest in keeping up with the band, seeing as I already had most of their songs and plenty of live versions to keep myself occupied. But this new album has certainly spiked my interest level way back up. I’m going to make this a long stretch and connect this to how the the Tolkien movies really brought attention back to the original book series. The parallel lies in that the original fan generation had all the books and simply passed them onto their children, reducing sales and some of the interest in the series. With the revamping of the tales through a hollywood movie, much of the suppressed fan notions were brought back to the surface. While watching the rather interesting “Ringers, Lord of the Fans” documentary, I couldn’t help but relate it to my own re-awakened fanish practices with Counting Crows in reponse to their album. (I am embrassed to admit that I did not know until recently that they even had a new album coming out! I was too caught up in 1994 with “August and Everything After” to even check up on them!)
This then made fan fiction click with me. It is a way to keep excited about the object of the fandom, and gives the fans something to look forward to as well as something new to process. I was struggling a little with the concept (seeing as fan fic does not really translate over to music, except maybe into revamped versions of old albums like the “August and Everything After Deluxe Album” ), but it certainly falls into place seeing the significant response I had to something new (finally!)
Sorry if I have begun to gush, but I wanted to share this with all of you. I also thought it would be cool to open a discussion about fan objects that are not producing new material anymore, and ways in which fans maintain interest, interaction and contact with.
PS: For some reason, the blog won’t let me add links to this post. Sorry.
Posted in music | 3 Comments »
I’m jealous you get to see them live for the first time because I had a blast seeing them for the first time. The first time I saw them was a really amazing night and looking back it was actually a very fan-oriented experience.
I saw them at Jones beach in Wantagh, NY co-headlining with John Mayer and it was something else. I heard a lot of old standards and then heard some more obscure stuff as the night went on and I couldn’t help but notice how invested everyone was in the show. By the end of the night I was hooked on Counting Crows and I ended up finding the bootlegs on their official site’s messageboard.
It reminded me of first becoming a fan of Lost and just seeing fans going absolutely berzerk on forums and blogs about the show. I wanted to get a greater understanding of it because I saw how it was resonating with people and seeing a live show like this is one of the best possible ways to be introduced to a fan community.
Your connection to the Lord of the Rings made me think about my own experience reading the books and watching the movies. Me and 2 of my best friends starting reading the books at the same time because we were in the same English class, and we all had to do a summer reading assignment going into ?9th? grade. We each chose the Hobbit and loved it so much we started reading our parents’ copies of the books.
This happened to be like right when they started advertising the Fellowship movie. Originally I was really excited about the time I started to read the books. It was really cool that all of this Lord of the Rings attention was coming on strong right when I was getting into it. I thought it to be pretty apt timing. But then I started to feel worse about it. I found LOTR to be this really cool set of books me and a couple of my friends would talk about and no one else our age really knew what we were talking about. But sooner rather than later, it seemed like we were just jumping on the new attention band-wagon. It makes me think of an aspect of fandom we havent spoke about much: the enjoyment of exclusivity. A lot of times we talk about fans being shunned from the “norms” of society. But what about the desire to be exclusive? I feel like it is a pretty important aspect of a lot of different fandoms, but something we do not talk about much. Maybe something to think about.
I just want to piggy-back on the point Dylan mentioned in the end of his post. This question is actually one of our discussion questions for Tuesday’s class on Music fandom. In high school, especially, I knew a lot of people that were into the “underground” music scene, and would get extremely upset when their band went “mainstream,” i.e. when they had a song on the radio or, even worse, appeared on TRL!
We talked in class about how there are sometimes ‘barriers to entry,’ if you will, into certain fandoms. In other words, there are certain practices that one must learn in order to really become part of the fandom. This leads to the fandom being a bit exclusive. However, in music, while there are maybe barriers to entry in orer to gain a greater knowledge of the music, music is one of the most easily communicated objects of a fandom.
So I guess this leads me to my questions: Is the upset-ness about becoming mainstream a desire for exclusivity or a worry that the artists will change their music? Is there something about the connection with music that makes exclusivity in music fandom an even stronger desire than in other fandoms?