The Exposure Whine

As I sit here at my computer, thinking about this weeks subject, “overblown”, a number of recent occurrences come to mind. One of which is the recent release of a few cubic feet of Beatles merchandise. I like the Beatles. I feel that they live up to their colossal, perpetual hype and adoration. But after hearing all of their albums enough times to develop the ability to mentally play most of them back Andy Dufresne style, there’s only so much of the Fab Four I wish to hear, or hear about. Their legacy paired with the continuation of human reproduction will afford them an eternity of remastering, redigitizing, recompiling, merchandising, and whatever else can be done to make the music sound better, honor them, and please their fans (or generate money). But that’s all I really have to say about the subject.

Another recent thing I could talk about is Kanye West and his overblown ego. But this subject is so overblown, I’m sure the sight of the word “Kanye” causes various instant ocular diseases. So nevermind.

I suppose amongst all current things overblown, I have the strongest opinion about one relating to the new Guitar Hero game, “Guitar Hero 5”.

After hearing that Kurt Cobain would be a “playable character” in GH5 (and later hearing that Courtney Love was upset about it. Surprise surprise!) I went over to Wikipedia to check out the song list for the game. Lo and behold, one of my favorite artists, Elliott Smith was amongst the artists on the new roster. (If you haven’t heard of Elliott Smith, you’re probably in the majority. He was, more or less, an under-the-radar singer-songwriter on the indie “Killrockstars” label. He is probably most well known for his song “Miss Misery” on the Good Will Hunting soundtrack and for “Needle In the Hay” on the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack.)

My first reaction to something like this is almost always a positive one. I love Elliott Smith and I’ve enjoyed Guitar Hero to a fair degree, so this is a good thing to me.

The song in question is called “L.A.”. Since Elliott Smith has about one billionth of the exposure that the Beatles have, I don’t know every song name and melody like the back of my hand. So to refresh me on exactly which song “L.A.” was, I went over to Youtube to check it out. Ah, that one. Okay, awesome… but then I scroll down to the comments.

Every other post seems to be about how all the little snot-nosed 15 year olds are going to start liking Elliott Smith now, talking about how they can “5-star” his song, thus “ruining” him for all of us old fans. Us old proud fans that found Mr. Smith when so many others didn’t and it was so special that he was ours and he was sacred and beautiful and blah blah blah. This is such a common overreaction of people in a billion other similar circumstances. “Their” underground or unknown band, movie, hangout, book, or whatever has become endangered by exposure, and more other people are going to start liking it and talking about it. If I can quote Dr. Evil: “Boo frickety-hoo!”.

Are those things any less entertaining after other people have gained knowledge of them? Really? It just seems to me that if you really like something enough to complain about its exposure on a website, the subsequent media and peer blatherings shouldn’t affect your love of that something (unless of course, you’re being inundated with it).

P.S. I can sympathize with the fear of a band going mainstream and becoming mundane pop, because it’s happened with some bands that were the ideal for an underground love. But Elliott Smith is dead. It’s not going to happen this time. (Some might argue that it did happen before he died. These people are musical elitists. Don’t tell them who your favorite band is.)