watch me whine about whiny people
Dear Aunt of Agony,
I am most very distressed. When I woke up this morning I had the most inescapable urge to listen to a 17 year old girl screaming over crunching distorted guitar, disjointed rhythm and super mario samples. Am I normal?
God, why can't j-rock fans have a sense of humor about the shit they like the way post-rock fans do? Okay, so there are elitists galore in super-underground music genres (I'm talking like post-rock and noise and "unlistenable" stuff like that), but there are also tons of people making fun of them. Every time I start getting more involved with that type of scene I find myself thinking, jesus christ, why can't my fandom be like this?
Maybe it's just because I'm only scratching the surface... maybe if I got more involved I'd find more wankers and start to miss the unreserved positivity of, say, the Miyavi fandom (I doubt any fanbase is EVER going to make me miss Dir en grey fans -- we're a bunch of stupid, whiny, self-hating losers, the lot of us). But the sad thing is, even if you account for that, the j-rock fanbase is still inferior because just looking at its surface, it still looks fucking annoying and lame. You have to delve deeper to find pockets of fans who are intelligent and sane and have a sense of humor, rather than having to delve deeper to find obnoxious people who piss you off.
The one thing I do like about this fanbase is that, unlike in a lot of other social circles (particularly music-related ones, which often tend to be heavily male-dominated, at least for the genres I listen to), I don't have to feel guilty about lusting after men, not even Asian men. Not even cross-dressing Asian men. That's considered abnormal in most North American social groups, and it's nice being able to interact with one in which that's considered par for the course. Of course, then you also get pockets of fandom where people go "LOL YOU THINK THEY'RE HOT? THAT MUST MEAN YOU DON'T ACTUALLY LIKE THE MUSIC! I LOVE INTERNALIZING MISOGYNISTIC STEREOTYPES, WOO HOO!" so not even that's a constant. It's not even always a boon, because dealing with the fetishistic folks, the ones who see Japanese people as sex objects rather than human beings is just as obnoxious as dealing with people who think Asian men are all asexual.
I think it would help if Japanese music became more mainstream. In the hands of weeaboos, the fanbase is always going to be intolerable. This goes for any Japanese pop-culture-related phenomenon. Anime is, similarly, only fun to talk about with people who don't care that much about it. People who are obsessive invariably ruin it. Right now, what I see happening is kids getting into j-rock, getting obsessive, and then tiring themselves out and abandoning it altogether. That's really sad. I hope that's not a permanent trend, because there ARE some great bands coming out of Japan. Okay, so a lot of the bands that get focused on by fandom are VK bands, and a lot of those bands suck royal taint and try to cover it up by slathering themselves in gothy make-up, but that doesn't mean that all VK bands suck, and not all Japanese rock is VK, either. Hopefully the current trend towards mainstream acceptance will continue and lead to there being more people with a casual, not obsessive, interest in Japanese rock. I think that will make a huge difference.
I am most very distressed. When I woke up this morning I had the most inescapable urge to listen to a 17 year old girl screaming over crunching distorted guitar, disjointed rhythm and super mario samples. Am I normal?
God, why can't j-rock fans have a sense of humor about the shit they like the way post-rock fans do? Okay, so there are elitists galore in super-underground music genres (I'm talking like post-rock and noise and "unlistenable" stuff like that), but there are also tons of people making fun of them. Every time I start getting more involved with that type of scene I find myself thinking, jesus christ, why can't my fandom be like this?
Maybe it's just because I'm only scratching the surface... maybe if I got more involved I'd find more wankers and start to miss the unreserved positivity of, say, the Miyavi fandom (I doubt any fanbase is EVER going to make me miss Dir en grey fans -- we're a bunch of stupid, whiny, self-hating losers, the lot of us). But the sad thing is, even if you account for that, the j-rock fanbase is still inferior because just looking at its surface, it still looks fucking annoying and lame. You have to delve deeper to find pockets of fans who are intelligent and sane and have a sense of humor, rather than having to delve deeper to find obnoxious people who piss you off.
The one thing I do like about this fanbase is that, unlike in a lot of other social circles (particularly music-related ones, which often tend to be heavily male-dominated, at least for the genres I listen to), I don't have to feel guilty about lusting after men, not even Asian men. Not even cross-dressing Asian men. That's considered abnormal in most North American social groups, and it's nice being able to interact with one in which that's considered par for the course. Of course, then you also get pockets of fandom where people go "LOL YOU THINK THEY'RE HOT? THAT MUST MEAN YOU DON'T ACTUALLY LIKE THE MUSIC! I LOVE INTERNALIZING MISOGYNISTIC STEREOTYPES, WOO HOO!" so not even that's a constant. It's not even always a boon, because dealing with the fetishistic folks, the ones who see Japanese people as sex objects rather than human beings is just as obnoxious as dealing with people who think Asian men are all asexual.
I think it would help if Japanese music became more mainstream. In the hands of weeaboos, the fanbase is always going to be intolerable. This goes for any Japanese pop-culture-related phenomenon. Anime is, similarly, only fun to talk about with people who don't care that much about it. People who are obsessive invariably ruin it. Right now, what I see happening is kids getting into j-rock, getting obsessive, and then tiring themselves out and abandoning it altogether. That's really sad. I hope that's not a permanent trend, because there ARE some great bands coming out of Japan. Okay, so a lot of the bands that get focused on by fandom are VK bands, and a lot of those bands suck royal taint and try to cover it up by slathering themselves in gothy make-up, but that doesn't mean that all VK bands suck, and not all Japanese rock is VK, either. Hopefully the current trend towards mainstream acceptance will continue and lead to there being more people with a casual, not obsessive, interest in Japanese rock. I think that will make a huge difference.