Thursday, September 17, 2009
Award Tour - A Tribe Called Quest - Midnight Marauders - 1993
And so speaking of the frustration of following things that used to be a cool little niche that are now more and more mainstream...it's actually become harder and harder for me to be an American soccer fan (A soccer fan who is American, not a fan of the generally awful MLS).
Again, like Indie Rock, it's counter-intuitive. I would have thought, 10 years ago, that living in a world in which everyone knew who Pavement and The Pixies were would be AWESOME! But instead, I find it sort of troubling and frustrating. Well, Soccer has sort of become the same way. With EPL games becoming increasingly broadcast on Fox Soccer Channel, Setanta Sports and starting this season ESPN2 I have more opportunities than I ever did to watch the sport I love...but the problem with this came up yesterday.
Arsenal played the first round of the Champions League group stages yesterday against Belgian Champions Standard Liege. The game was live at 245 and was being shown on FSC at 5 PM. I set my TiVo, stayed away from the Internet in the afternoon and prepared to go home and watch my game. As it turned out, do to some collasally stupid defending Arsenal went down two goals in the first five minutes of the game (This is exceptionally fast, for those that don't know)...and within ten minutes after that I received all sorts of messages from various friends and acquaintances that know of my strange obsessions "Dude, sorry about your team", "Are you watching this, yikes!" and "Yeah, you may not want to watch this game..."
Now fortunately, we did come back to win 2-3, but...even as little as 3 years ago, no one I knew, besides my fellow soccer fans would have had any clue that there was a game on. And certainly none of them would have been watching...but there it was.
It's hard being me.
Anyway, this Tribe song is a further result of my girlfriend's attempt to broaden my horizons. It's fun, I don't hate it...that's about all you can ask, right?
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2 comments:
The whole problem is defining yourself using any sort of 'niche', isn't it? Why narrow things down like that? Why say that you like Indie Rock as opposed to saying Music, which includes Indie Rock, Urban/Rap, Classic Country or Blues, Jazz, etc?
I think there's a great deal of genuineness that is treated dismissively in our culture. Or perhaps it's not dismissed so much as it's derided if it doesn't also involve a genuine desire to sneer at the other side. It's not like I don't get the irritation of having something I love being suddenly the next cool thing but I do keep in mind that if it is just this decade's trend then the hoople-heads will eventually pass on and I'll still be left with the thing I cherish. And maybe in the process a few new people will have discovered something they genuinely like and my circle will expand.
We all want to keep our passions for ourselves to some extent so that they aren't diluted by overexposure and thoughtless consumption. There's a pain when our favorite restaurant gets so popular you can't get a seat or tell your friends about this great, undiscovered gem. But therein lies the crux of the issue: we want to share these things. We get points for finding them and spreading the word but the very thing that we love to do (expose ourselves and our friends to something new and potentially great) means that we run the risk of others finding out about it.
So if you don't want your niche to explode than you gotta follow the first rule of fight club, right? Otherwise, give up on the idea of the niche and leave the Pyrrhic victories of being an early adopter to someone else.
I tend to agree with Chewy. I mean, I admit to being an obscurist of the first order, but that whole "someone else likes it, therefore I must stop" always struck me as even less genuine than someone just being a conformist. At least they just like it and move on.
I don't mean to say Josh is saying this exactly, but there's a sense in which the Pitchforks of the world have created a cool bubble (and they aren't the first, of course, just the latest) with which to define themselves.
But isn't having conviction more definitive than worrying so much about what someone else thinks that you can't just enjoy a good song?
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