The Belligerence of Fandom

 I’m sitting here listening to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s “A Tuba to Cuba” and it occurs to me how little I still know about jazz in general and how I know practically nothing about Afro-Cuban jazz, so little in fact that I had to type some words in the ol’ Google box to make sure “Afro-Cuban jazz” was the right term.  Despite my utter ignorance I thoroughly enjoy this recording that I purchased entirely because I was listening to it at a listening station in the excellent record shop Louisiana Music Factory and Snooks the store cat wandered by and looked at me which I took as an omen.  Sometimes the store cat knows what’s best for you. 

I’m glad to be listening to this at home, alone, working because if I was listening to it in the old office that I occupied before my employer’s ill-fated migration to the disease-friendly open concept that led to everyone wearing noise cancelling headphones all day and instant-messaging colleagues sitting six feet away instead of actually speaking to them someone might have wandered by and started asking questions about it, questions to which I would have no answer.  In my younger days there were some folks (and I was sometimes guilty as well) who would smirk and spit out some random fact about the music and be convinced of their superiority as a “music expert” because they knew that bit of trivia.  It made one almost feel as though they had no right to listen to some new artist or band or genre without doing some kind of homework for crying out loud. 

There’s an over-romanticization of the 1980’s independent record stores scene which suffered an even greater degree of toxic fandom.  The people that worked in those places back then were, generally speaking, sociopathic losers who just happened to have a rarified taste in music.  I suppose they were that way because they were bullied in other walks of life (say, high school for instance) and were generally unsuccessful in the romantic field as well.   Contrary to the image that’s projected nowadays there was no less friendly atmosphere to browse and try to learn about music than a New York City independent record store in the late 1980s.  Whatever I learned back then I learned from my fellow college radio DJ’s and music magazines.  I did my purchasing at the Tower on 4^th and Broadway.  Around that time, I did an internship at an independent record label of some renown and my job in addition to envelope stuffing promotional mailings, getting coffee and making copies was to call independent record stores around town to see how many copies of certain record they had sold.  The responses to said phone calls ranged from the vaguely unhelpful to the outright hostile.  The absolute worst place was the famous Bleecker Bob’s where I would routinely be abused, cursed out and hung up on when I tried to get any information.  There were some glowing memories when the place closed and when the asshole owner died he got a glowing obituary in the New York fucking Times for god’s sake.  If he behaved today the way he did then he doubtless would’ve been me too’d or cancelled into the dustbin of history.  In 198whatever that was just something you dealt with when you were a powerless college intern and the behavior of was excused as “eccentric”. 

Anyway, that was then.

Nowadays the belligerence of fandom is receding because anyone with a pocket computer and a passable ability to use a search engine can come up with factoids in an instant so that currency no longer has value.  Contrary to what a lot of other old folks might tell you that’s not a bad thing.  Now we can just listen to the music and go where it takes us.