Believe it or not, there are still people who care about things like “cred” and “selling out” and general “my favorite band’s better than yours” stupidity of the type you thought you left behind, along with gym class and algebra, in high school. Amanda subjects one of them to a righteous beatdown. More power to her.
In a related post, this one inspired by stupid arguments made about comics as well as music, Big Sunny D dishes out wrath akin to Amanda’s. Great minds, etc.
I couldn’t agree more with both of them. It’s taken me forever to get to the point where I’m not worried about being a poseur, or feel the need to accuse other people of being one, or make sweeping judgements about entire genres of music or comics or their fans. Now that i’m there, I feel so much better and, um, wiser, as a person and a fan and an artist and a critic and everything. It’s just… stupid not to engage a given piece of art on its own terms, on its own merits. It’s stupid to make your mind up about How Art Works and spend the rest of your miserable life jamming everything into your framework and chopping to pieces whatever doesn’t fit. This is not to deny the value of categorization–it’s just to recognize that the categories spring from the qualities inherent in the individual works, not the other way around. Categories are descriptors, not set-in-stone definers. Basically I’ve boiled all this down to a little maxim:
Life’s too short to hate emo.