And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [33]
This true antibuzz for the band, however, was overwhelmed by antibuzz for me—or, I should say, for the character of the anonymous blogger I had created. I had tried hard to develop him as a tragic figure, a man utterly undone by his gnawing hatred for Peter Bjorn and John. He drives from his hometown (which remains unspecified) to Austin, even though the trip will take two solid days. On the first night of the festival, he makes an elaborate plan of the bands he wants to see—noting that he will be sure to avoid the club where Peter Bjorn and John are playing. The next day, though, he confesses that he walked by the club despite himself, and the large turnout threw him into a spiral of rage that wound up ruining his entire evening.
But among readers, sympathy for his anguish proved elusive. Commenters steadily slung epithets against me (him), beginning with “dip-shit” and “fuckface” and then going on from there: “wanker,” “asshat,” “douchebag,” “pretentious douchebag,” “obnoxious hipster douchebag.” “People like you are dumb,” one commenter opined.
The source of the animosity was, I admit, unclear to me. My antagonists seemed to object to (a) my negativity and (b) the leisure time I apparently had to create the blog, and so they expended leisure time of their own to deliver negativity against me in return. A somewhat more coherent expression of this backlash came from commenter “Jim,” who wrote, “Get a freaking life already will ya? Are you aware there’s a war going on? And you’re going to protest A BAND!?”
In a subsequent post, I wrote a reply to Jim. If protesting a band during a war was a waste of time, I asked, then why should one bother to support a band during wartime, either? I went on:
The obvious answer is: because you still think culture is important. But if you think culture is important, then you need not just to support the bands you like but oppose the bands that need to be opposed.
There was a clear hole in my argument, though. My opposing a band seemed to have supported it. Even the band thought so. While onstage during a day party in Austin, on the first day of the festival, Peter Bjorn and John thanked Stop Peter Bjorn and John. I was not there, but I am told they even read out the URL.
EASE MY MIND
Annuals was there too, at South by Southwest. As all the bands with any reputation did, they played multiple shows, of which I saw the first and the last. At the first, in a tented patio adjoining a bar, they shared the bill with a band called Illinois, a dreamily ramshackle, banjo-driven rock act that was just then in the throes of blowup: Idolator, in fact, that very week dissected Illinois’ buzz in almost identical fashion to their post about Annuals six months prior, down to the same cynical “Odds of Backlash”—5:1. The tent filled for Illinois, but most of the crowd stayed for Annuals, and what they saw was, as ever, magnificent.
The last Annuals show of the festival I happened upon by chance, as I walked with my wife up Trinity Street. The band was loading equipment from their big white van into the Austin Convention Center, where they were to tape a few songs for a radio station. While they waited to go on, we all lay around on the floor in the main corridor, a sunny, echoing plate-glass atrium some sixty feet high and three football fields long. Another show had been booked for that night, but news of its cancellation arrived while we chatted. I never saw a band so happy to have a gig scotched. The drive back to Raleigh would take twenty-five hours, and they intended to do it straight through.
They hoped it would be a trip back, if only briefly, to their other projects: the other bands they wanted to be. They had a two-week break, and they were finally going to use it to record as Sedona—Kenny’s band, the band they’d been before Annuals got signed. Adam wanted to finish a few songs for Tundra. “And we might start on BandAnd—” he added, then noticed my quizzical look and explained: BandAnd was a hard-rock band, to be run by Zack.
“I think that’ll have