Last week, I heard a lecture by a developmental psychologist, in which he said that high school is not just a scholastic experience, but a "great opportunity" to learn "important socialization" - which I interpreted as being the unwritten and inscrutable codes of social hierarchy and one's place in the food chain. During high school, I never understood why it was that some kids were "better" than others, too good for most to even try to talk to, and others were deemed unworthy of being seen talking with. Since I had moved through different school systems in different towns and states, it all seemed totally arbitrary. Why did the rich kids snub the poor kids, and why did the poor kids not snub the rich kids? The poor kids were just accepting their place in the caste system, and thereby legitimizing it. My own situation was such that I never felt that I were above talking to anyone, nor that I should be gratefully privileged for some "popular" kid to be condescending to talk to me. To me, we were all just turds flowing through the same sewer toward oblivion. The sole consolation was that the Black girls liked me, since the White girls were snobby and had no sense of humor. I hadn't cared whether the Kool Kids' Klub (a/k/a the KKK) would have me as a member or not, but if it had, I wouldn't have wanted to belong to it. The uncool kids were a lot more fun to hang out with.
This socialization is "important" because it unfortunately governs the rest of one's life, and one's success in adulthood is contingent upon having internalized this psychological matrix. A musician friend of mine told me of an instance of an encounter with another musician, who had started in the same local scene as he and had been his regular buddy in it, and whose present band was on an aggressive ascendance of fame. My friend went up to his friend as the latter was setting-up for a gig, and suggested that they hang out after show, to catch-up and such. His friend told him, in fairly blunt terms, that he couldn't be seen hanging-out with my friend, since there were "industry" people and journalists everywhere – as though they were spies who might rat him out as being socially inferior. Fame is a social currency, and this guy couldn't afford to lose it because of association with my friend, nor to transfer any of it to him. It's happened to me, as well: friend gets famous; friend is "really busy;" friend runs into me and has a cornered-animal look in their eyes, and says something like, "Let's have lunch some time;" friend otherwise acts like they're scraping doggy poo off their shoes and leaves me feeling like I've just been snubbed by some humorless White girl in high school.
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Rough translation of the above: “I’m the same age as Trent, and I’ve lived my whole life identifying with, whilst idealizing, a succession of celebrities of my peerage. They make me feel insecure about my own place in the food chain – but I reconcile that by attributing to them characteristics that I secretly wish would be seen in me, with my reverence as a way of aligning myself with commonly-accepted greatness, participation in the spectacle of another’s success as I wait for the crumbs and morsels of their life’s bountiful repast to drop onto the floor, where I dutifully rest as their obsequious domestic animal.”
My response: Isn't 50 well beyond the cut-off age for being a fanboy? After age 40, weren't you waking up every morning to a load of personal regret, and bearing the weight of an unprecedented sense of personal history for which you'd like to see some acknowledgment? Projecting that onto some rockstar whose music you had followed since before your "life's pains and it's (sic) ups and downs" had accrued, as though that artist has been your longtime personal companion – "representing our age group like a boss!" – is really kinda pathetic. Celebrity entertainers are the extrapolation of the "popular" kids in high school, who would probably not have deigned to be seen chatting with you. Why would you suppose that someone who'd snub you would be speaking "for" you? Because they have access privileges that you never will; so therefore, they're wiser than you? Because they're favored over you for survival? Let 'em tell you what to think and how to feel about prefab political issues, while you're at it. And you never tried to learn to play guitar, even though you'd needed a way to express yourself, because some rockstar, whose supremacy was at your expense all along, did it so much better than you'd wanted to believe you ever could.
Another articulation of high school-style socialization is the idea of the "outsider" artist or musician. An "outsider" artist is generally considered one whose art is created outside of academic tradition, whereas "outsider" musicians are understood to be those who make their music, autonomously and privately, with disregard for commercial convention or for acceptance. However, since the music world is steeped in adolescent snobbery, the term "outsider musician" also implies the musicians' being people who would normally be ostracized or overlooked by the Kool Kids, but whose music is either "so bad, it's good" (a snobbish assertion in itself) or has been slathered with a patina of hipness by some elite cadre of luminaries' talking-up the musical artists. For bonus cred, the "outsider" musician should be mentally ill, crippled, disfigured, much-older, and/or incarcerated. They're less of a threat to the vanity of young/attractive people to be conspicuously defective or "other;" all the better to secretly look down on them. It compounds the mythos, for those who can't appreciate music on its own, but need backstory and biographic factoids to "inform" their listening.
The truth about "outsider" musicians' fans is that they don't really like the music – it's just considered cool to be "into" the "outsiders." These fans will nod in complicity when someone mentions the name of the oddly-fetishized nutjob, gimp, criminal or old guy in a tone of voice intended to elicit such a response when fishing for hipster cred or to signal how in-the-know they are. Documentary films about the "outsider" musicians either justify for fans years of feigning to being into them or demonstrate to their friends with mainstream tastes in music, "See – I'd been right all along."
Regarding the term, I have to ask: "outside" of what? The club that normally wouldn't have them as members? The music industry and its soul-diluting conventions and standards? The dumbed-down range of "what people like?" Constraints preventing one from expressing oneself as authentically as possible? The infotainment Matrix from which people are afraid to be red-pilled? The factory that cranks-out imaginary playmates with which all the little Nobodies out there develop superficial affinities and one-sided relationships, discussing what would be good career moves for them, while not lifting a finger to try to help their unemployed neighbors or friends find jobs? Being able to go guitar-shopping like chicks go thrifting? The condition of doing mediocre music that people like because it's been made popular, rather than doing truly inspired music that no one likes, because no one has heard it, because they've not been told that they should?
At what point does the "outsider" get matriculated into the "insider" set? Well, never. Once branded as such, they're treated like the brain-damaged uncle who is invited to Thanksgiving dinner, but because he is given to violently bleating obscenities at random, is made to eat his dinner in the living room, lest he disrupt decorum. If the "insiders" were to fully embrace the "outsiders," the social order that runs on condescension and sycophancy would be dismantled.
Watching the documentary The Sparks Brothers brought something related to mind. Although I should recommend the film to anyone either unfamiliar with or a fan of Sparks, as well as to anyone unfamiliar with the fickleness of the music industry and popular acceptance, on the other hand the significance of the subjects and the poignancy of their history were diluted by the industry-standard formula of popular-music documentaries. This aspect of it even deprecated the inventive animations and other artful embellishments. What was so dismayingly "basic" about this film was the talking-head interviews with well-known musicians, with the addition of people whose principal relevance was being personal friends of the director. (Who was the actor-guy who seemed like he was hired to play the role of an actor who's a fan of Sparks? He's presented as being famous, but I've never heard of him. Is he some "outsider" actor?)
This amounted, essentially, to having to spend a couple hours listening to gossip from people who looked like old drunks with stylists. Their mannerisms were those of people whose opinions have carried weight among people who tell other people to listen to them. Their perceptions of themselves, formed by their publics' coordinated perceptions of them, seemed hyperbolic in comparison to an average person's self-image. Like when a famous person looks at you in a way that says, "I know you know who I am." Whether you might or might not know doesn't even occur to them.
These are the "insiders," with whom fans aspire to align themselves by consuming product by and information about them They can spew some embarrassingly naïve political diarrhea on social media, and some acolyte in some Villa de los Ningunos in South America will laud them for "telling the truth about politics in America." They can also convince people who've never heard of Sparks that Sparks are cool – and even to think Sparks' music is good because it's cool, not the other way around. They also insinuate having been hip enough to have always been into this band of which "no one" (meaning, you Nobodies out there) has probably heard. This is one reason why "insiders" need "outsiders" to remain as such: so that "insiders" might have some cachet of specialized hipness to wield, like some perfume derived from the perineal secretions of some antediluvian species of six-legged cat cloned from fossilized DNA and bred in a secret facility inside a mountain in Norway. No one else but they can reek of hipness so rarefied as a long-extinct sextapedal feline's bunghole.
I myself had listened to Sparks in the '70s; their album Indiscreet made an everlasting impression upon me. So, does that qualify me as an "insider?" Or does my creating music without regard for what anyone might think of it peg me as an "outsider?" Whichever be the case, my prized Mason jar full of Sasquatch piss renders me too cool for school.