Phish Phans

Last week, I followed a link on Reddit to a blog post on Vice.  It was one of those, “your favorite band sucks,” type of posts.  While not an original idea, it is the kind of journalism I’d expect from Vice: the self-appointed arbiters of all things cultural.  You’d better not be caught wearing the wrong hoodie else there will be a picture of you on their site accompanied by a sneering criticism of your fashion choices replete with digs which openly question your intelligence or suitability to procreate.

My favorite “your favorite band sucks” column was published years ago on Something Awful and was cleverly entitled, “your band sucks.”  It was through reading this column that I learned that Tool fans were just as bumptious and humorless as hippies.  I should not have been surprised.

In this particular Vice column, the author decided to deride Phish.  Despite the fact that it was a rather poorly written missive, the troll worked.  Getting Phish fans to take umbrage with unfavorable opinions of their favorite band is like shooting phish in a barrel.  The comments section was long with the outraged manifestos of wounded hippies.

This is a pretty common tactic on the internet: write something mildly contentious and watch as people show up in droves to make indignant posts in the comments section of your website.  Page views are revenue.  This is trolling 101.  The combative nature of internet communication compared with the way people speak face-to-face is what makes this so effective. 

On the internet there is no, “let’s agree to disagree,” or any credence lent to the fact that there are a wide variety of valid opinions to consider when discussing something as objective as art.  No, on the internet anyone who holds an opinion in contrast to yours regarding your favorite band, move, book, author, or television show is so absolutely wrong that they shouldn’t even be allowed to exist.

I’ve seen this type of defensive behavior spill into the real world.  I was at the Highlander one night and some woman was going on and on about Elvis.  She tried to get me involved in her conversation, but I told her I really didn’t care for Elvis.  Her response was, “didn’t your mama raise you right?”  See that?  Because I didn’t share her love for some fat guy in sequins over-emoting gospel in Las Vegas there was obviously something fundamentally wrong with me. 

I think this kind of behavior shows a lack of confidence in one’s own taste.  Should you feel personally wounded when someone doesn’t like something that has touched you personally?  You can continue to enjoy the things you enjoy because you enjoy them even if no one else shares your opinion.  It is alright to like things others don’t.  Your level of self-worth should not be tied to the number of people with whom you share your passion.  People who disagree with your tastes do not diminish you.

There are coping mechanisms for dealing with the unreasonable on the internet.  The simplest way to handle a troll is to ignore him.  Alternatively, for an obvious troll, you can always respond with a mocking meme of some sort.  The current internet meme for handling a hater is, “stop liking what I don’t like!”  Google it if you haven’t seen it.  I wish more people would respond like this rather than engaging in fights.

I had my own run in with Phish fans about a dozen years ago.  At the time I wasn’t a traditional blogger.  It wasn’t until, maybe, 2003 that I started placing the things I wrote in a particular location.  Instead I would send out my musings in an email blast to an unwitting group of friends.  This method, unfortunately, leaves no archive of what I was writing at the time.  It’s all lost forever.

Back in 2000, Phish went on a hiatus.  At the time I was reading a lot of the Onion so I wrote an Onion-style satire piece about Phish breaking up.  In the piece I faked interviews with members of the band who were all lamenting the fact that after Jerry Garcia died, all the hippies chose their band to follow.  They dismissed the diminishing standards of their music as the result of the new crowd: it didn’t matter what the band was playing or not because the audience was too stoned to know the difference.  Knowing me, I probably made a dig at that arrhythmic hippie dance.  That’s the dance where guys carry themselves with what I like to call Tyrannosaurus Rex arms: elbows locked tight to the side of the body with limp wristed hands held forward.  This position enables them to rigidly rotate their shoulders to something other than the beat of the music while at irregular intervals kicking like Elaine’s crazy thumb dance from Seinfeld.   To truly complete this dance you must be wearing thick socks with either Birkenstocks or Tevas.  I was clearly mocking Phish’s fans and not Phish themselves.

Soon I was receiving insulting emails about my cracks from people I didn’t know.  Apparently friends of mine were forwarding along my email to Phish fans they knew, none of whom seemed to enjoy humor.  It was enlightening to see how personally people would take these jokes.  It was also pretty enlightening to see just how easy it is to troll on the internet. 

People, I implore you: the next time you read an article that was obviously written to try to get a rise out of you, don’t respond.  Ignore it.  Otherwise, websites will continue to publish these content-free articles just to drive up page counts and serve banner ads.  It’s easier than journalism.