Obviously not in the literal sense. I wouldn't joke about spontaneous combustion, it's a serious issue and we need to get our shit together and find out how to cure it before we have an epidemic.
What I mean by 'explode', is how fast some bands appear on the music scene. Some bands will have worked up slowly and have one or two or even three albums by the time they really hit the big time, but others will just suddenly appear out of nowhere and people will be wearing their merch before you even know they exist.
This isn't going to be an in-depth essay on it, I don't think, because I don't really have the expertise in the music industry for that. It's merely some food for thought.
I've been considering this idea because, earlier in the day I was thinking about the band We Are The In Crowd. I've not listened to them myself and I'm kind of apprehensive about it, but the reason why they're relevant to this is because they've been around only since 2009, and they've got one album and an EP. And yet somehow, they're everywhere. I don't remember any slow emergence of the band, I just remember everyone suddenly going 'WATIC OMG TAY JARDINE OMG'. Let me repeat this for some emphasis - I'm not having a go at them or anything, I'm just trying to point out how quickly they've appeared - they've got one album and they've toured internationally with All Time Low. They've played Warped Tour twice. The first I knew of them was when I walked into Pulp to buy clothes and there was this huge sign on the wall saying they were coming in for a signing. When I was at the Pulp Party on the 2nd of April, there was a signed WATIC t-shirt on offer as a prize, and people went absolutely mental.
But then on the other end of the spectrum, you've got, for example, Without A Face (I was going to use MCR, because they didn't go absolutely collosal till TBP and that took like six years, but I decided an extreme was needed for this). WAF is awesome, he makes great music and has been doing so for over ten years, whether he's doing a daft song or a serious one. He's got a small core of fans who support him in a lot of things and will sit up until four in the morning watching his online concerts and talking with him. He's got three albums and two EPs out, and he tours generally within Texas, from what I can tell. But he's not massive. He's not huge, he's not doing Warped Tour or a massive stage at SXSW.
What I was thinking with this is; is it healthy for a band to get so big so fast? Sure, it gets them out and touring and gets them enough money to get by on pretty fast and reduces the scraggy homeless musician stage, but long-term? What about the hardcore fans who follow their favourite bands to every misty pub halfway up a mountain that's let them play a couple of songs? If you're going from nothing straight to, if not everything then quite a lot of things, sure you'll get a lot of people who love you, and a lot of others who'll get swept up in the novelty that is your band. But you won't get those old veterans who've watched all your godawful gigs that you hope nobody ever sees again, the ones where your singer was too drunk to remember the lyrics and all the instruments broke and you had no way to repair them, the ones where you got heckled off after two songs. The ones who accept that sometimes you're absolutely terrible, but they will endure because they have known you and loved you for so long that it would be impossible not to be. That's a different kind of love for a band than the kind you get when you just fall out of the sky. It's the kind of love and support for a band that makes people go out and buy CDs instead of just downloading, and going to every single gig and not necessarily raving about them, but leaving nobody in any doubt who their favourite band is.
That's the kind of support that makes bands keep on coming back until they have absolutely nothing more. The Greeks call it Agape, I think. That's the kind of love and support you need to just keep on coming back again and again, even if you've disappeared for years and you've come back and the media's doubting if you've still got what it takes. The other excitable kind can wane easier, or be distracted by other bands, and can eventually disappear altogether. I'm not saying that if that's how you've gotten into a band you're not as much of a fan, but I'm saying that often it can just be a case of infatuation, and not real love for a band. So if an exploding band just disappears for ages, when they come back, can they count on anybody to still be waiting for them? Can they count on the enthusiasm they had at the start continuing enough for them to viably carry on working as a band?
That's just what I was thinking about today.
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