Entitled?
A non-musical post today.
An emergent phenomenon of recent years is the notion of ‘fandom’. In the internet age of social media, there has also been a rise of toxic fandom with its petulance and entitlement. My general view, which has developed over time, is that fans are lovely but fandom will inevitably fall prey to toxicity. Lurking in this is the now-familiar notion of entitlement, the feeling by an individual that he or she (but most usually he) can demand something from an artist as of right.
But this is not a new phenomenon and not a product of social media, though social media has amplified it.
One of the albums from 1969 that was immediately recognised as something new, important and influential was King Crimson’s In The Court of the Crimson King, but the year began with news of the departure of Ian McDonald and Michael Giles from the band after a US tour to support the album. The news prompted the reproduced letter to Melody Maker. What caught my eye wasn’t the despair of the fan, who could not know that the Crims would go on to greater musical strength and glories in years to come, but the very last line of the letter and the tacit demand that a new album be cut immediately. That looks a lot like a form of fan entitlement to me.
More generally, I’m not sure what the criterion was for having a letter selected for publication in MM, but there are some weird and wonderful ones that caught my eye through 1970, and I’ll return to them.
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