Fandom

[Sicko FanAtic]

Thinking a good deal about this topic lately. What makes you a fan? And are you proud of said fandom? If so, why?

An example of fandom that I'm not particularly proud of but can't seem to shake: I am a die-hard Washington Redskins fan. It came about because my older brothers were fans when I was a kid ( they all moved on to other teams, or moved on to not following the NFL at all). Some of my close friends as a teen were also Redskins fans. For some reason I haven't been able to shake it. I fully agree that their name and logo are unacceptable, I don't own any shirts or hats or whatnot anymore as a result, but when it's Sunday and they are playing, I just gotta watch. Something happens to my insides... However, were they to change their name and logo, (even though I do think they should change both) I likely would finally be "cured" of my fandom, for what am I rooting for that resembles the team I liked as a kid, other than they wear the same uniform? Logic and reason be damned...

Then there's music fandom... I'm a Sabbath fan, but I wonder to myself, how much of that is actually attributable to the quality of the music and how much simply to the same sort of feeling I get when I watch the Redskins play? And how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?

Sent from my Moto G (5) Plus using Tapatalk

[Zzzptm]

Good questions... a follow-on question would be if a band you were a fan of made a terrible album, would you still buy it and cherish it and defend its reputation in public because "Even their worst is better than anyone else's best!" or would you be able to be objective about it and say, "You know, I'd rather listen to something other than recordings of the band whistling in elevators..."?

I think there are some people, they'd buy an empty jar if it was purported to have air actually exhaled by their idol.

It's a human temptation, I think, to want to be given over so completely to someone or something else that one doesn't have to think objectively about it. Pushkin said men would deny a thousand truths to preserve the lie that sustains them.

If you're excited because there's a new Sabbath release coming out, that's an OK thing, I reckon. If it turns out to be crappy and you can't enjoy it, then you know your fandom doesn't blind you to reality. But if you say you love it and you don't have any reason why other than it's a Sabbath release and that's good enough, then I'd say your objectivity isn't working properly in this case.

I see stuff like that happen throughout history in relation to political parties. People get very attached to anyone that gives a source of easy answers.

[Sicko FanAtic]

Good questions... a follow-on question would be if a band you were a fan of made a terrible album, would you still buy it and cherish it and defend its reputation in public because "Even their worst is better than anyone else's best!" or would you be able to be objective about it and say, "You know, I'd rather listen to something other than recordings of the band whistling in elevators..."?

I think there are some people, they'd buy an empty jar if it was purported to have air actually exhaled by their idol.

It's a human temptation, I think, to want to be given over so completely to someone or something else that one doesn't have to think objectively about it. Pushkin said men would deny a thousand truths to preserve the lie that sustains them.

If you're excited because there's a new Sabbath release coming out, that's an OK thing, I reckon. If it turns out to be crappy and you can't enjoy it, then you know your fandom doesn't blind you to reality. But if you say you love it and you don't have any reason why other than it's a Sabbath release and that's good enough, then I'd say your objectivity isn't working properly in this case.

I see stuff like that happen throughout history in relation to political parties. People get very attached to anyone that gives a source of easy answers.

As far as Sabbath goes, I'm decidedly not a fan of the Tony Martin years, so I guess I'm in the clear there, lol. Even within the main lineup, I do have songs and albums that don't do it for me, but I still am enough of a fan that I could tell you all the lyrics and play them all on guitar ( not necessarily play them well, mind you) from that timeframe.

That brings up another point: if the band you are a fan of puts out some trifling crap, wouldn't you, by denouncing said trifle, be in fact more a fan of the true spirit of the band than the one who puts everything they do on equal footing?

Good point with the analogy to politics. Another mass shooting here in the states, and folks post memes that support their political leanings on the issue of gun control, supposedly presenting arguments that show how they are on the side of reason and logic, but it seems that they are in fact to cherry picking the arguments that support the allegiances of their chosen tribe. Reason doesn't appear to be the actual basis of most opinions, but rather some sense of identity they want to project.

Sent from my Moto G (5) Plus using Tapatalk

[Zzzptm]

Yeah, emotional topics will definitely cut both ways. It's why forum admins are quick to make rules about no discussion of gun control, abortion, immigration, and other sensitive topics. People can get worked up on either side to where they can't see straight.

Back to the idea of being a fan to the "true spirit of the band"... I suppose that's a sort of fandom in which you're loyal to a particular aspect of the band. Imagine a person self-described as the biggest Black Sabbath fan ever, but who insists that the only good song they ever did was "The Wizard" and everything else was total crap. Said fan plays that song 24x7, listens to nothing else... we got us a use case for mental health services, here.

I'm hesitant to say something is in the true spirit of something that I'm not part of. After all, I wasn't in the studio with Sabbath as they cut their first few albums, so the spirit of the band is really my own invention, based upon my feelings as I listened to their work. I can say something is a faithful rendition, is true to their original sound, sounds right for them, all of which basically say I like the tune and it's more or less what I expected.

I'm a passing fan of Queens of the Stone Age, but their latest album is definitely not in the same style as their earlier stuff. I'm not interested in exploring it further. Is it true to the spirit of the band? Hell if I know. Is it what I wanted to hear or expected to hear? No and no, so it's a pass for me. If I went off and started saying it's not true to the spirit of the band, that's like saying it's such a shock to my system, I might do myself or someone else a "desperate outrage," as Shakespeare put it.

Getting back to the mass shooting elephant in the nation... to me, the solution begins in looking at data and allowing what we see in the data to guide our thinking. If we cling to notions that originated from our feelings born of mass marketing campaigns, we're not going to find a solution. What data do we look at? Other nations' rates of gun-related deaths vs. rates of gun ownership. Look at nations with high rates of gun ownership, as they're most like the USA today. Then look at their laws, society, culture to see why it is that they can still have a large percentage of the population with personal arms but not a correspondingly high rate of gun-related death and injury. For a fair number of those nations, they have mandatory military service with mandatory reserve duty. If that turned out to be part of a solution, how many politicians in the USA would basically put themselves out of a job by bringing back conscription?

On the other hand, that would basically make the VA into a source of universal health care, so maybe there's something to that idea? But we can't be able to weigh the costs and benefits if we simply fall back on emotional arguments, either for or against.

[Sicko FanAtic]

Yeah, emotional topics will definitely cut both ways. It's why forum admins are quick to make rules about no discussion of gun control, abortion, immigration, and other sensitive topics. People can get worked up on either side to where they can't see straight.

Back to the idea of being a fan to the "true spirit of the band"... I suppose that's a sort of fandom in which you're loyal to a particular aspect of the band. Imagine a person self-described as the biggest Black Sabbath fan ever, but who insists that the only good song they ever did was "The Wizard" and everything else was total crap. Said fan plays that song 24x7, listens to nothing else... we got us a use case for mental health services, here.

I'm hesitant to say something is in the true spirit of something that I'm not part of. After all, I wasn't in the studio with Sabbath as they cut their first few albums, so the spirit of the band is really my own invention, based upon my feelings as I listened to their work. I can say something is a faithful rendition, is true to their original sound, sounds right for them, all of which basically say I like the tune and it's more or less what I expected.

I'm a passing fan of Queens of the Stone Age, but their latest album is definitely not in the same style as their earlier stuff. I'm not interested in exploring it further. Is it true to the spirit of the band? Hell if I know. Is it what I wanted to hear or expected to hear? No and no, so it's a pass for me. If I went off and started saying it's not true to the spirit of the band, that's like saying it's such a shock to my system, I might do myself or someone else a "desperate outrage," as Shakespeare put it.

Getting back to the mass shooting elephant in the nation... to me, the solution begins in looking at data and allowing what we see in the data to guide our thinking. If we cling to notions that originated from our feelings born of mass marketing campaigns, we're not going to find a solution. What data do we look at? Other nations' rates of gun-related deaths vs. rates of gun ownership. Look at nations with high rates of gun ownership, as they're most like the USA today. Then look at their laws, society, culture to see why it is that they can still have a large percentage of the population with personal arms but not a correspondingly high rate of gun-related death and injury. For a fair number of those nations, they have mandatory military service with mandatory reserve duty. If that turned out to be part of a solution, how many politicians in the USA would basically put themselves out of a job by bringing back conscription?

On the other hand, that would basically make the VA into a source of universal health care, so maybe there's something to that idea? But we can't be able to weigh the costs and benefits if we simply fall back on emotional arguments, either for or against.

I agree about looking at the data. One thing that stands out when doing so is that no other country comes close concerning per capita gun ownership

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country

I think we can say something about the true spirit of a band, but I won't press the issue.

Sent from my Moto G (5) Plus using Tapatalk

[Zzzptm]

I think we can say something about the true spirit of a band, but I won't press the issue.

Then I will... I thought about what I said, and I totally forgot about the bond made between a band and its audience in a live performance. That *is* a shared thing, a shared spirit, and I was wrong to say nobody can know that. It's a knowable thing, and we can say if a band is keeping true to that spirit or if it's moving away from it.

[Sicko FanAtic]

I think we can say something about the true spirit of a band, but I won't press the issue.

Then I will... I thought about what I said, and I totally forgot about the bond made between a band and its audience in a live performance. That *is* a shared thing, a shared spirit, and I was wrong to say nobody can know that. It's a knowable thing, and we can say if a band is keeping true to that spirit or if it's moving away from it.

That sounds about right! That being said, for me what matters is if the new direction "works", for lack of a better term. Pink Floyd changed directions immensely without Syd, but I like both spirits. Alice Cooper changed immensely when Bob Ezrin took the reins, but I like both versions of that band as well.

Sent from my Moto G (5) Plus using Tapatalk

[Zzzptm]

I think we can say something about the true spirit of a band, but I won't press the issue.

Then I will... I thought about what I said, and I totally forgot about the bond made between a band and its audience in a live performance. That *is* a shared thing, a shared spirit, and I was wrong to say nobody can know that. It's a knowable thing, and we can say if a band is keeping true to that spirit or if it's moving away from it.

That sounds about right! That being said, for me what matters is if the new direction "works", for lack of a better term. Pink Floyd changed directions immensely without Syd, but I like both spirits. Alice Cooper changed immensely when Bob Ezrin took the reins, but I like both versions of that band as well.

Sent from my Moto G (5) Plus using Tapatalk

Whereas, lots of people complained when DP took a funky turn with Bolin on guitar. Not what they expected, and not what they wanted.

But, some didn't expect it and still wound up wanting it. Worked out ok for those guys.

Sent from my SM-N900P using Tapatalk