Antisocial media

One recurring theme in the music industry today is artists maintaining relationships with their fans. Whether through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, email newsletters, or other means, bands are expected to correspond with their fans. When I talked to Tom G. Warrior, he said that his former Celtic Frost bandmate Martin Ain convinced him to start a blog to appease impatient fans waiting for the next album. That seems wrong. Why should Tom G. Warrior have to manage the expectations of his fans? Why can’t he just be a musician?

One reason is commercial, of course. If people are talking about you, you are relevant, at least in a commercial sense. That is important to someone like Tom G. Warrior, who is a career musician. He shouldn’t have to worry about fickle fans, especially given the timelessness of most of his work. But if you screw up and make a Cold Lake, or if you disappear from the public eye, then your bank account goes down. If you’re Tom G. Warrior, who has made metal his life’s work, that’s bad. He has to maintain “relationships” with fans whom he’ll never meet, much less get to know, so that he can eat.

Perhaps this isn’t distasteful in metal, which has had a culture of correspondence called tape-trading. Many tape-traders were musicians, and many were fans of each others’ bands. Since underground metal levels out things like status and ego, maybe it’s not a big deal for Shane Embury to tape-trade with Joe Metalhead.

However, by definition, tape-trading was a two-way street. That’s not how today’s band-fan correspondence works. A band might send a tweet or a Facebook update into the ether, and anywhere from zero to a zillion fans might respond. Then the band might respond to anywhere from zero to a zillion of the responses. Such interaction may be commercially meaningful, but it’s not personally meaningful. No one is getting to know anyone else. When bands say they “care” about their fans, what do they actually mean?

I’m not saying that bands shouldn’t interact with fans. That has become a necessary evil in today’s over-saturated market. People are bombarded with so much information now that bands compete for their attention by bombarding them with more. If you want to be heard above someone who’s shouting, you shout more loudly, right?

But maybe you don’t have to shout. Maybe silence speaks louder than words. Maybe bands could stand to cultivate a little mystery. Abraham Lincoln said, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt”. That’s completely applicable to bands. There’s a reason I don’t follow them on Twitter. The vast majority are just not interesting there. I don’t care about the ephemera of their lives. If they post multi-part studio updates, I lose interest after one. I don’t have enough hours in the day to parse completed artistic statements, so why should I bother with incomplete ones?

If Led Zeppelin were active today, would their label make them maintain Twitter accounts? (John Bonham: “urrrgh irish flu agin”; Jimmy Page: “Closing on Crowley house today. Excited”) Would they be nattering away on Facebook updates? I hope not. They should remain untouchable rock gods. Bonham and Page wouldn’t ever get to know me, so they shouldn’t make the pretense of doing so. Their job would be to make music. Mine would be being a fan. The only relationship they need to have with me is delivering the hammer of the gods – and making sure it doesn’t suck.