When a band gets played

Posted by admin on Feb 17, 2009 in Arts & Culture | 1 comment

It has happened to every music lover.

You’re watching your favourite TV show and suddenly you’re bombarded with a song from your favourite little band – a band you’re all too proud to have discovered on your own. A week later, people who have luggage for backpacks are asking you if you’ve heard of this great new band. You can only respond, sadly, “Yeah. I’ve been listening to them for a while.”

In high school my girlfriend at the time described to me how unimpressed she was to have a song from her favourite band, Doves, pop up on the third episode of The O.C. I didn’t really understand, as I was still in the Jack Johnson/Ben Harper-phase that everyone goes through.

At the end of my freshman year, this happened to me. That same girlfriend had gotten me into Snow Patrol, and for the last three months of high school Final Straw was practically stuck in my car’s CD player. It was all I could listen to. A few of my friends gave me a hard time for liking such a band. But fast-forward a year and the song “Chasing Cars” from Snow Patrol’s follow-up album, Eyes Open, appeared on the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy. Now the tanning salon-frequenting, Mirage-flocking girlfriends of those same friends had them hooked on Snow Patrol.

Sam Lowe, a fourth-year student, explains her thoughts. “The fact that others listen to it doesn’t matter to me that much, but when a song or band gets popular their music gets overplayed, and all the meaning and beauty is gone, and it gets impossible to still like a particular song.” Overkill is certainly a problem for anything, though it can be especially problematic for music.

I have friends that claim to only like bands that almost no one in existence has ever heard of – unless you actually know the band personally, that is. Even though these people are hard to take seriously as they describe their musical taste, I can understand where they’re coming from: they don’t want to have anything in common with people, in their eyes, less cultured (or nerdier) than they are.

It’s an understandable plight, even if I can’t help but think that their quest for uber-coolness is self-defeating. Shouldn’t we appreciate a band or artist for their musicianship, song writing, attitude and originality, not for who their fans are or how many (or few) they have?

“If we didn’t care about our egos, I think how people appreciate music would be different,” says fourth-year student Rob Van Dyck. Rob has a point. It’s often the case, however, that terrible bands have fan-bases populated by people you feel uncomfortable walking around with – maybe people who possess a wardrobe of clothes from stores you would never look in the window of.

The problem of ego is a very real one. It’s incredibly frustrating to hear your most prized musical find come on the speakers while trying to find a scarf at the Gap.

What’s more frustrating – and fairly absurd – is when a person dumps a band for that very reason. Surely two hundred-odd years ago a person in their right mind wouldn’t have balked at Bach because people began to appreciate his music.