And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [34]
“It’s like avant-garde metal fusion, pretty much,” Kenny said.
“It’s all of us trying to be as technical and heavy as possible,” Zack said.
“We’ve got, like, little riffs that we’ve written for it,” Kenny said. “We haven’t put anything together fully, but we’ve got a lot of ideas.”
The last song Annuals played in the taping was one I’d never heard them do live: a sublimely meditative track called “Ease My Mind.” Kenny had written it; he sang lead vocals and played a blistering acoustic. Where Annuals, lyrically, was achingly broken, this song was elliptically spiritual. It was not an Annuals song, even though it was becoming that. It was a Sedona song: the same thing but another thing entirely. Annuals might have been the perfect name for them, I realized, but in a different way from what I thought. Maybe their destiny was to be a march of bands in themselves, not one fuchsia in the frost, but a thousand blooming in succession. Maybe they would learn to make art, to find narrative, in this churning, viral culture by embodying the churn, embracing it, by envisioning a life not as some decades-long epic, but as a succession of discretely plotted six-month shorts.
MOB #9 (OF A SORT)
At quarter till three, my wife and I took a cab to Waterloo Records for the Stop Peter Bjorn and John event. We had no duct tape, no shirts, no signs. If a protest had materialized, we would have been mere spectators to it. The store was a long and low-slung building, a single story painted fern green on top and sky blue below. In the narrow parking lot in front, people were milling about: were they protesters? We wandered among them; none of them had signs either. There was a TV news van, its antenna hoisted promisingly for signal, but we could see that the reporters were all inside the store, covering the show. We saw a police officer, too; an echo of MOB #1? But she was eating an ice-cream cone, paying no heed to us or to anyone else.
We walked around the corner and loitered. At five till, two U-Haul vans pulled up beside us, and Peter, Bjorn, and John all emerged, looking as weary as I did. Bjorn brushed something off the shoulder of his black shirt before putting his jacket on over it, and then the three strode around to the front, through the growing line (for that is what the milling people had become, not a problem but a pliant queue), and into the store. Not a single protester had shown up. It was somewhat as I expected. At the stroke of 3:00 p.m., I had arranged for a farewell post to be added to the Stop Peter Bjorn and John blog. It began:
To those of you who are turning up right now to protest: I am sorry. This whole campaign against Peter Bjorn and John has pushed me to what I now realize is a total mental and emotional breakdown. . . . I simply can’t carry this burden any longer. I have packed up my car and am leaving town.
As an experiment in viral culture, Stop Peter Bjorn and John had been both a failure and a success. It had failed, of course, to stop the band in question, which left SXSW as popular as ever. (Their oblivion did not arrive for roughly another two months.) I could see now what was meant by the maxim that all publicity is good publicity. In chapter 1, I wrote about “backlash,” as if active hate of something can stop its cultural ascent. But if I can take any lesson from my antibuzz blog, and from my months of subcultural wanderings in general, it is that backlash is about not hate but boredom, about attention no longer paid or extended, about an arc of a story completed. Hate only extends that arc, prolonging a story through controversy; spikes cannot be unspiked through stimulation but only through distraction or forgetting. Like the students in that classic boredom study, we imagine a band (or book, or idea) to be boring only because we hear the next already playing in the other room, slowly turning up its amps. To hate a meme only makes it stronger, if only for a few more moments until it, ignored, expires.
However: Stop Peter Bjorn and John had succeeded,