TheBig3

There was quite a bit of speculation a few months back on how this site was going downhill. With Jackhammer's recent departure, its come up again with the Mods and I wanted to offer my 2 cents about why it happens, not just on musicbanter, but with the world at large.

Theres a reason people continue to watch political punditry even after the same issues are dredged up every 2 years. Theres a reaon why everyone hates Rolling Stone, despite being the biggest music oriented magazine state-side.

With regard to the former, in the heat of opposition, opinion becomes conviction. With the latter, opposition forces take on a "king of the hill" role. Eventually there is a position taken, it is standardized which is held as truth after a given time period becomes fact.

Rolling Stone is bull**** because the same useless and tired old warhorses are trotted out for their annual blow job and we're all supposed to stand and applaud as these elitist journalists with $5 hair cuts tell us about authenticity and "freshness" with a thesaurus's remix of the same old line. Once this line of rhetoric becomes standardized, those who rebel to rebel take up a counter-culture camp with the hollow rationale of "rebellion" but they do little to move on a given opinion. Most are happy to call the Beatles terrible, or announce their undying passion for Daniel Johnson. These are not opinions, they are part-time filler for empty personalities. The character-equivelent of foam shiping-peanuts.

Message boards co-opt that musical snobbery that is so prevelent in the music/journalism industry at the very cost of the interest in the boards. It does this because of two major reasons; for one thing, the pseudo-intellectual posturing that occurs is rarely based in logic. It would be near impossible to do this given that music is traditionally an emotional response. Still, because there is no right or wrong answer, arguments are reduced to horrible posturing and medals are often given to the loudest, with the snarkiest lines. This atmosphere of bullying lends itself to the solidification of opinion.

Secondly, and I think this is bigger - most forum posters are ****ing vaginas. I've said prior, most show up here with whatever opinions happened to stick to them as they walked through life. No one comes to MB as a "scholar" because those people are generally touting how great jazz and classical are, and they find no responses here. That and their *******s. So your average Joe shows up to these boards and is promtly savaged with a 4-Iron by clueless dopes who not only think Minus the Bear is Jesus, but revers them with the same regard that the scholars revere Jazz and Classical. The larger differece being that Minus the Bear sucks, and we do respond to Indie threads.

Once these Johnny 6-packs are abused enough they either leave, or start to conform. And they don't kind of conform, they jump in whole hog and beat the hell out of the newbie wave behind them. They are assisted by the few that had just finished beating them, and who are now just as snarky but with less fire.

Eventually those folks become established or leave, and the final tier of a forum poster becomes somewhat of a seasoned veteran in musical exploration and argument. Even still, old habits die hard and conventional wisdom is questioned but rarely explored. And thats the problem. This penthouse class of posters doesn't weild its experience like a weapon to slaughter sacred cows, they sit, kowtowed to the systems and norms that were in place when they showed up here.

In an ever-evolving world like music, how could discussion ever become boring?

With access as easy as it is now, how could the well run dry?

It can't, and it doesn't, still people look across the forums, through a large expanse we've all paved with two hands and a keyboard and we think to ourselves that its all been done. This is because we've agreed that Nirvana actually sucked, Radiohead is so untouchable they shouldn't be put into groups with other artists, and that there is no redeeming features left to the countless genres we hear on the radio.

These ideas are only challenged when some doe-eyed newbie shows up, who only wants to come to a place to talk about music and is quickly questioned on his intellectual abilities by a group of hatemongers (sorry Urban) who were too weak-minded to defend themselves at the gates opening.

People have said in the course of this discussion that they were thinking of leaving or that this place had become so boring that would check in weekly at best. I'd guess that few things would be better for the longevity of the boards. Your opinions are here, you're here in spirit. But we've survived a liteny of great posters leaving before; Pastor of Muppets, Ethan's 42 user names, Swim, Satchmo twice, Jr, and despite his part-time *******ry, Bill good make a great point when he wanted to.

I understand wanting to show up here for battle and seeing the field abandoned can be frustrating. But the effort of one new point, in a world of a countless trillions, can't be that hard. And if we all did it, even once a week there wouldn't be a problem. But in order to do this, we're going to have to challenge our own ideas, and the musicbanter conventional wisdom, if we're going to make it work.

I'm going to go post about the problems with Metallica. Feel free to tell me I'm wrong.

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