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Some years ago, I harboured a very special hatred for the band Weezer. This had little to do with the band's music, which is mostly inoffensive dork-pop. It didn't even really have anything to do with the band's name (though it does bug me for reasons I can't explain).
No, I hated Weezer because they were the most popular band on Livejournal. If you had checked Livejournal's list of popular interests sometime in, oh, say 2002 or so, Weezer would have beat out all other bands, including all the teen sensations, classic rock, and arena charity megastars you could think of.
For years, this datum about the Livejournal demographic filled me with incoherent rage. I'm not a huge Rolling Stones fan by any means -- to be honest, I don't even like them much -- but it still seemed unfair to me that a band that had been recording top-40 hits for longer than I've been alive didn't even brush against LJ's radar. Sure, we've all hummed along to My Name is Jonas once or twice, but for God's sake: Weezer? Is that the best LJ's iPods have to offer?
I was planning to node about this today, so I quickly checked the popular interests page to make sure that Weezer was still at the top. To my surprise, they've moved quite far down the list, having been surpassed by the likes of Nirvana and Green Day. "Hah!" I thought. "A passing fad, just as I expected!"
But there is a new band at the top of the popularity list, and it's a band I'd never heard of before today. They are called Taking Back Sunday.
I cannot tell you anything about TBS, because I have not heard them. But I can tell you that I hate them. I hate them for stirring up the shallow emotions of the world's teenage bloggers; and this hatred will remain, burning slow and orange, even if I eventually discover that I really enjoy their music. The only time I will stop hating them is the day some other callow emo-core kids catch the attention of LJ's fickle population.
As of today, 135,250 people have Taking Back Sunday listed among their LJ interests, compared to 117,893 for The Beatles, 83,473 for Pink Floyd, and an inexcusable 62,764 for David Bowie.
Come to think of it, the top-rated bands list on LJ is quite instructive: it's crowded by emo, grunge, and pop-punk bands from the 1990's, with vanishingly few bands from before that decade. Where else but LJ would more people side with Death Cab for Cutie (74,749) over Led Zeppelin (63,982)? Where else would nearly twice as many people have expressed their interest in Dashboard Confessional (98,559) as opposed to The Doors (52,529)? Where is Bob Dylan? Where is Johnny Cash? Why is Elvis Presley not even on the list?
Part of the answer to these questions will be obvious: LJ is inhabited by a lot of college students, and college students generally don't care about Elvis. Fair enough; I don't care about Elvis either. Nevertheless, I am still annoyed, and here is why: I imagine that many of the LJers who enjoy AFI (100,289), Linkin Park (99,855), and Tool (74,151) actually think their tastes are alternative. Who thought we'd live to see a day when listening to The Who is edgier than listening to Slipknot?
It intrigues me that the music that's in the top 40 charts on sites like Billboard and American Top 40 -- Kid Rock, Justin Timberlake, Kanye West, and so on -- do not appear in the Livejournal list either. In that sense, LJ does seem to attract a kind of "alternative" crowd; the music on the LJ list is for the most part harder and gloomier than a lot of commercial radio pap. And yet, and yet, it's all so samey, so emo, so... Weezer.
Now, whenever I hear any of that stuff, I think, "that song is just so LJ." And I hate it. I hate it, even if I like it.
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