Success is a funny thing. It's a weird phenomenon where you're obviously rooting for the people that you're fans of, but at the same time, there's a certain level of success, that once they achieve it, you no longer celebrate that success, but instead become disenfranchised by it.
I've had it happen to me twice in sports. The first was in the spring of 1996, I read a Sports Illustrated article about a young high school player named Kobe Bryant. By the time I had finished reading, I had decided that I would try my best to follow his career from that point forward. I was intrigued. Now, I'm not saying that he was undiscovered or anything - obviously, he was a big enough deal to make the pages of Sports Illustrated - but I would still say that if you asked a hundred basketball fans (not just random people, but actual basketball fans) at that time, if they knew who Kobe Bryant was, I doubt more than one or two would have said yes. Especially in Canada.
From then on I followed him closely, or as close as a person could follow a high school player in the seemingly basketball-deprived tundra of Alberta (keep in mind that the internet was in it's infancy at this point, and we were lucky to get more than ten NBA games televised per season back then). Once it was clear that he would be suiting up for the Lakers, I rolled the dice and bought my first ever NBA jersey: a yellow Los Angeles Lakers home jersey, with the number 8 on the back, and Bryant on the name tag. And this was all before he had even played a single minute of NBA basketball.
I followed his early struggles; his battle to win minutes from the incumbent starting guard at his position (the criminally underrated Eddie Jones); his air-ball attempt(s) in a playoff elimination game; all of it. And despite the occasional flashes of brilliance, I was starting to worry that I had put all my eggs into a losing basket. Then something funny happened. He won the dunk contest; he got voted in as a starter to the All-Star game in his second year, despite not even starting for his own team; Michael Jordan seemingly passed the torch to him, as he easily had the best highlights of the game. People were taking notice - more towards the flashy nature of his game, than of his burgeoning talent, but taking notice none-the-less. And for some reason, this meteoric rise made me like him less.
I preferred to walk down the hallway at school and have people ask 'A Bryant Lakers jersey… who the heck is that?' than have everyone think that I was just another bandwagon hopper. I liked seeing him crack the weekly Top 10 plays of the week with a bit of surprise than I did when it became commonplace and even expected. I liked having to go into the settings of NBA video games and move him into the starting line up more than I liked seeing his name in the title of his own game. My fandom was beginning to waver.
Eventually, I even grew to dislike him. I will always respect him as a basketball player, don't get me wrong, but looking back now, I'm glad I didn't remain a life-long fan. Sure, this means that I missed out on having been along for the ride of the career of one of the top 15 greatest players in NBA history - but he still seems like a bit of a douche, and has always been a me-first player, and that's just not what I look for in a player that I admire. That said, every year that I rooted against his team, and they ended up winning it all, could have been a year that I threw my fists triumphantly in the air along side him, rather then trying to punch them through a wall in the anger of defeat.
But, there's no point in wondering what my life as an NBA fan would have been like if I had stuck with him, because the truth of the matter is that by the end of the 1999 season, I had already moved on.
In fact, it was in the winter of 1997, that I happened upon a North Carolina Tar Heel’s game one afternoon at my aunt's place (she had satellite, the big dish kind that took up your entire back yard, and I couldn't get college games on my three channels of peasant-vision at home, so I'd go to her place to watch games), when I saw a highlight dunk unlike anything I had ever seen before. The skinny kid responsible was a relatively unknown player from Daytona Beach named Vince Carter, and I made it my new mission in life to find out every thing that I could about him. It turned out he was barely even the third best player on his own team, and yet the name managed to stick with me right up until that year's draft. I remember the very moment that I found out he had been picked by the Toronto Raptors. I had never before, and have never since, been more excited by a single draft pick than I was about that one. But even I could not have foreseen what was to come.
Again, I had gotten in on the ground floor, only this time, the meager expectations placed on Vince were exceeded almost instantly, and his dunks came to be a staple on Sportscenter highlight packages almost over night. I stuck with him for a while, being a Raptors fan and all, and I rode some pretty big highs in those first couple seasons: the legendary 2000 dunk contest, the Raptor's first taste of playoff success, the Freddy Weis dunk in the Olympics. We did have some good times together, to be sure. But so huge was his popularity so quickly, that long before he quit on the Raptors and forced them to trade him for pennies on the dollar, I had already begun to look elsewhere in my basketball fandom.
In that case, I had chosen correctly, as Vince will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the most talented players ever that never lived up to his potential, and always coasted by and avoided putting in the work that could have made him great. Had I stuck with him, I would have experienced far more moments of frustration than I would have moments of fan-bliss. But that's not the point. Rather, this is just another example of how success can actually turn a fan off. And while it is some-what prevalent in sports, the most common example of this has always been in music.
There's nothing people want more than to have known a band before they got huge. In fact, much like I turned on Kobe Bryant, often times the fans will turn on a band and label them as 'sellouts' as soon as they start having a little success. Is it really the band's fault that they're selling records? If they're good, shouldn't millions of people enjoy their music? It's almost like, as a fan, you want them to be good at what they do, but you don't want too many other people to realize it. I'm sure there were thousands of Nirvana fans that cursed the band's mainstream success the day that Smells Like Teen Spirit started showing up on MTV. They weren't mad because Nirvana stopped being good (although SLTS is a bit overrated, the album that it came from, Nevermind, is one of the greatest ever recorded), it's just that as a fan, you want to feel special. You want to feel like you're part of an exclusive club. And if just anyone is allowed into that club, of course you're not going to feel special at all.
I know. I've been there. In my case it was Nickelback. Go ahead and laugh, but sadly, that's not even the biggest blemish in the history of my musical fandom (I'm looking at you, Vanilla Ice…) As much as it puts my complete musical opinion at risk, I will still argue that The State is actually a really good album, but that's beside the point. Prior to the release of Silver Side Up, and the juggernaut that was it's lead single, How You Remind Me, these local Alberta boys were probably my favourite band. In fact, I remember being asked at my new job what my favourite band was, and having answered Nickelback, I was met only with blank stares. And although they really weren't that unknown (locally, especially), that is still one of the great moments you can have as fan: the chance to introduce someone to a band that they might love.
It's funny, because as we've already discussed, by introducing the band to more people, all you're really doing is contributing to the success that might eventually turn you off of them. Really, if you think about it, people should be guarding their favourite bands the same way some people guard the names they plan to give their unborn children. You know the ones, that won't even give you a hint as to what the name might be for fear that it's so good that by the time they actually give birth, there might already be a million other Mason's or Madison's running around, because they whispered the name to you at a cocktail party once.
I mention all of this, because currently there are two bands that I feel I have gotten in on the ground floor with. The first is Sleeper Agent, a sextet from Bowling Green, Kentucky, whose first single is ridiculously catchy, and probably has the biggest chance of turning it into something big. Whether that ends up turning me off of them or not, remains to be seen, but I've come to realize that, in the end, it doesn't really matter. So long as I enjoy the time I'm having with the band now, what does it matter if I still like them in five years or not. And the thing that is the most fun about being a fan of a band in it's early stages is the accessibility and interactivity.
Tegan and Sara used to sell their own merch at a table in the back of the room after they were finished their shows. That's because they were only playing to 100 people every night, and hiring a merch person would probably cancel out any profit that they had hoped to make for that show. Now, seeing that they can sell out 5000 seats, not only can they afford to have a merch person, but they almost need to. The lineups at the end of shows would be too crazy if they were the ones sitting there handing people CD's and T-shirts. And they’re not even that mainstream. Imagine if Bono tried to do this after U2 concerts…
I've sat in on an online Q&A with Bill Simmons, and I feel that I asked some pretty good questions. Had he seen them, he probably would have responded. But, by the sheer number of people also online for that Q&A (Simmons has 1.5 million followers on Twitter) there was just no way for him to see every question that was being asked, out of the hundreds that were coming in every second. It's not Simmons fault, he's just a victim of his own success. Or, at least, my questions were. But when Sleeper Agent did a Livestream Video Q&A recently, every question that I asked got a response. And it was a fun feeling to be interacting with them like that.
The same goes for the other band that I've been following lately. In this case, a band out of Vancouver that was formed in part by the former bassist and drummer from Tegan and Sara, called Rococode. Again, having gotten on board in the early stages, I've had a fair bit of interaction with them through Twitter (with everything I've ever @mentioned them in having gotten a response). And sure, it's just another social media site, and I shouldn't (and don't) read too much into it, but if I'm honest, as a fan, it does make me feel a little bit special.
And this all (sorry, that lead-in got a little out of hand there, didn't it?) leads to the story of my second B-List (although, no offence to Rococode, but in this case, it might be more like D-List) Celebrity Encounter of the summer. I was still in Saskatoon, and it was still July 3rd. The opening act for the Tegan and Sara show had been another Vancouver artist named Hannah Georgas, whom I had heard of before, but still knew nothing about. As she took the stage, her only other band mate was a skinny blond gentleman, who provided her with backing guitars, keyboards and vocal harmonies. Nothing was unusual about this, except for the fact that I swear that I recognized him from somewhere. In fact, he looked very much like Andrew Braun, the co-lead singer of this new band Rococode.
As the set progressed, at one point Hannah even acknowledged him as Andrew, thus confirming my suspicions, but in general, the crowd just assumed that he was some no-name hired gun, and he received only a smattering of polite applause. Not that it wasn't true, the no-name hired gun thing - it's not like he was some big deal, and she had Bruce Springsteen backing her up, and no one had noticed - but it did make her set all the more cool to me, on a personal level, because of it.
That's when, later that night, as I was leaving the bar in defeat (having lacked the testicular fortitude to chase down Sara Quin a mere ten minutes earlier) I found myself face to face with Andrew Braun. I was getting on the elevator at the same moment that he was getting off. It's funny how awkward you can be when you're completely unprepared for something. Had I known I was going to run into Andrew that night, I probably would have come up with a few interesting things to ask him or at least something funny or clever to say. Instead, I just blurted out that I was a fan, and started rambling - probably incoherently - about how I was enjoying his band, Rococode.
He was perfectly friendly - although I think I had caught him completely by surprise, since he probably hadn't been recognized for Rococode at all that evening - so he did seem a bit shocked and taken aback. That's when I came to discover the part about meeting semi-famous people that you don't really think about. Not that they might be dicks to you, as some people might expect/fear, but rather, that you might accidentally be a dick to them. You see, he hadn't been getting off the elevator alone. He was with Hannah Georgas at the time, and she had stood patiently by as I had ambushed him and lavished him with praise. That's when I thought to myself, that as an actual billed performer, it was kind of rude of me to have gone on this long to Andrew, without having really acknowledged her existence.
I should have realized that I was nowhere near at the top of my conversational game, based on the yammering that I had already been doing thus far. Yet, I still turned to her, in hopes that I could make up for what had thus far been a complete lack of social grace. And, after having just finished telling Andrew how much I liked his band, I didn't miss a beat as I turned to her and said '…oh, and you were good too.'
Yes, it sounded just as douchey in person as it sounded in your head just now as you read it back. I didn't mean for it to be. Her set had been really good, and I genuinely meant it. But in the way in which I said it, and with the wording that I had used, there's no way it came across to her as anything other than how you might address a special needs child that had managed to tie his own shoe lace.
“Good for you!!”
The difference being that a special needs child is likely unaware of your condescending tone, and since your heart is in the right place, all you’ve really done is make them feel good about themselves. Hannah Georgas didn’t exactly strike me as Rain Man; so instead of complimenting her, I probably just sounded like a dick.
I got on the elevator, pressed the button to my floor, and as the doors finally slid shut, I smacked myself on the forehead and called myself an idiot. But I couldn’t dwell on it for long. I needed to shake it off and regroup, because my summer of meeting B-List celebrities was far from over. But, as you already know, that is a story for another day…
.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment