Keep those cards & letters coming?
Blogs: not from the fan but the recipient's p-o-v? How do the musical budding geniuses regard the process that demands MySpace, YouTube, a band's own site, and lots of rapid responses to besotted fans IM's? Not as good as it could have been, or at least what I was looking for regarding a certain quintet of distinguished Irish gentlemen of a certain age, but this article does tie in to today's research project about Horslips, the CBH site (see my own link from my blog homepage) and how a band deals today with creating music while the fans are looking over their shoulders.
Clive Thompson in the NY Times Magazine's "Sex, Drugs, & Updating Your Blog" discusses what pressures grow as musicians find they are expected to keep up appearances, upload songs, and answer all that fan mail. Where would the Beatles have been if they started out today, 300 e-mails to answer daily from the Hamburg rathskellar? (Ok, my image is of a kohl-eyed gamine and not a goateed denizen of a Brooklyn coffeehouse at a laptop that accompanied Thompson's entry. My wife the silent film scholar probably can identify the lass who was probably a borough babe herself. Update from the source: admire the grin of America's Sweetheart, Miss Mary Pickford.) The first mass medium to utterly change was the song due to the Net, so says the scribe, and now the process of sharing music and getting feedback on it itself has been opened up to the public's scrutiny.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/magazine/13audience-t.html?ex=1336708800&en=1d5b472eddd4dcad&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
1 comment:
O Fionnchu. When you have wrapped that scholarly paper of yours, I hope we'll have a chance to sit down and tawk, as they say Back East.
But it is interesting that you bring up the relationship of the Fan to the Musician. I believe the Beatles did have to perform certain vapid responsibilities to their fanbase, and like they did with other trappings of the popstar machinery, managed to transform them into survisive missives of discontent. As shown here:
BEATLES FAN CLUB CHRISTMAS RECORDS
And I, at this age of 40-something, am uneasy with the label of 'fan' as in a breathless "I'm your number one..." Surely this is not the stance to have as the one who operates the most google-rank-grabbing unofficial fansite in the Horslips community?
Indeed not.
And there's the business of being an American. I never forget that. (For "I never forget," read "I am never let to forget...")
But oops! That's 'second pint' talk! And it must be held over pints!
Finish that paper!
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