The Problem with Fandoms

Also known as: The Pernicious Legacy

As a musician I started performing in the late 90s/early 2000s. I had a lot of friends in the music scene in my area and, as a result, I was able to see an emerging trend before it hit the mainstream. Many musicians I met at that time were very into Jeff Buckley (and his 1 (one) album), so their band’s sound would follow suit. But instead of this influence manifesting as a coterie of talented songwriters, penning laments for modern lovers with ethereal arrangements and impressive vocal ranges, in most cases it ended up being a bunch of middle class whiteboys performing self-indulgent, cringe-inducing, whine-fests in tuneless, high-pitched wails. This was just as bands like Muse and Coldplay emerged in pop culture who were middle class whiteboys performing self-indulgent, cringe-inducing whine-fests in tuneless, high-pitched wails. A lot of those bands also began to cite Buckley as an influence too, which undoubtedly boosted the sales of his 1 (one) album and led to the trawl for demos, b-sides, live recordings and unfinished tracks of his that continues to this day. But without Buckley still alive to produce more music or evolve as an artist, how did this attention impact our understanding of Buckley? His effect on popular culture was undeniable but what did all this added attention mean for his influence? For me the answer is clear: I rarely, if ever, listen to ‘Grace’ anymore. The endless referencing and comparison by bands at the time, as well as the monthly articles asking what-ifs about the poor man — that were all given fresh kindling at the tragic passing of Elliot Smith, a similar indie cult hero, in 2003 — did an unfixable amount of damage to my liking for Buckley. And his one (1) album.

This kind of destructive worship of cultural figures or products that I first saw in the early two thousands has gone into hyperdrive ever since. Whether it is the fan base of the video game Portal beating the joke to death with “The cake is a lie” becoming somehow more than a meme and transforming into a kind of religious chant, or the defence of an imagined racial purity of the Star Wars franchise resulting in death threats being sent to Vietnamese-American actor Kelly Marie Tran, these so-called “Fandoms” have ended up having a deleterious effect on the things they wish to — in their words —…