Idle Worship and Sheltered Ideas
By: Mark Runyon | Category: PM Music Commentary | 08/06/05 | 09:09 PM
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 Everyone is a critic whether they care to admit it or not. We all have our own peculiar batch of ideas and opinions on everything from the best dishwashing detergent to who is trashier -- Britney or Christina? One of the more interesting parts of running this site is stumbling across artist message boards that pickup our articles. There really is no middle ground in the discussion. If I loved the album and showered it with praise, they are ready to invite me over to dinner and set me up with their hot sister. If it was mediocre or offered up some well-placed criticism, it's execution day where the townspeople gather round the gallows to hiss insults and hurl rotten fruit. You learn to develop a thick skin quick or your objectivity can take a major beating when you start blowing sunshine up an artist's bum so you don't have to suffer the potential fallout. What's life without a little adventure?
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Now I'm very aware of the purpose of message boards. Back in the days of stratospheric climbing Internet stocks, I had a little money to play with and a job with way too much spare time on my hands. I camped out on the Motley Fool message boards reading about how the likes of CMGI and Cisco Systems were going to end world hunger and spark world peace. The board was hemorrhaging with cheerleaders who gathered around praising their favorite Internet seductress of the moment. They also sat in wait, licking their chops, for a juicy bear to poke his head out of the cave so they could pounce on his simple-minded ideas. Tempers ran high which makes sense because if you made the wrong call you could stand to lose hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars. While money might not be in play among musician focused message boards something more valuable is -- the emotional attachment that comes with music. Anyone who has ever skipped mom's birthday dinner to dine on the spectacle of Depeche Mode at the [fill in large impersonal arena here] knows the pull of this blinding force.
Now message boards have a lot to offer. It is a community of music lovers who are finely tuned to scour the Earth for the latest news and happenings about your favorite artists. You can find out, before anyone else, when Tori will be pianoing through your town or discover where that obscure Morrissey t-shirt advertising "Jon Stewart for President" came from. It is a yearlong summer camp for fans to huddle around and dissect someone's life, at times for lack of their own. The more sinister side of these boards comes in the sheltering of views. Everyone lives in eerie harmony where you don't have anyone questioning much of anything. This is much different from an arena like Blogcritics where you constantly have the ebb and flow of ideas since there isn't a central focus to the site. This is a place for lively discussion, a place to hone your debating skills and to solidify your ideas on a topic. This is largely absent in the traditional message board format.
Message Boards should probably have topics posted for everything but the artist's music. If you are on the board, it's pretty much a given that you think the artist is something special. Aren't mini-cheerleading sections a tad bit redundant? They should have thoughts from the artist, an area to discuss other music you are jamming on and maybe a place to swap concert tickets. In risk of biting the hand that feeds me, I have to say love message boards because they get my thoughts out to the people that love the music. The person who is passionate about music, films, and television is my target audience. I want those people coming to PM to see what we have to offer. But I think message boards should be taken with a grain of salt and swigged in small doses. After getting high on people praising your already favorite musician, you're likely to begin deifying them and brushing over their flaws. Artist's are human and, no matter how much you love them, they need to be called when they hit the wrong key.
Personally, I take a rather perverse thrill in getting used as a punching bag in these forums because I've accomplished the one thing I've set out to do -- triggering an emotion. I don't care if you write my name in hearts all over your Trapper Keeper, or you've fashioned a voodoo doll in my image, chocked full of needles. If I've caused an emotional response from reading something I've written then I have succeeded. In my mind there is no greater good. Life seems structured to minimize emotional extremes, and I'm happy to contribute to the deterioration of that societal norm. So I promise to keep telling it like it is and save the sugar coating for sugar cookies. For all those foaming at the mouth at my obvious lack of musical taste, my writing is dedicated to you. If being your lightning rod jars your mind forcefully enough, it might actually start to crack open to the possibilities of new ideas. As long as civil discussion can be had in the neutral middle ground, instead of hurling insults from opposite hilltops, we might actually expand our thinking and learn something from one another. By focusing on our common passion, we can accomplish so much more than taking personal offense to comments regarding artist's we adore. Because at the end of the day you have to realize it's just one person's opinion.
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