"Fake it until they make it"

Something that Erick posted at the Buzznite mailing list:

We Will One Day Become That Which We Despise
Date: Thursday, June 10 @ 16:24:16
Topic From the Magazine

By Chuck Klosterman

Illustration by Nathan Fox

"Never criticize anything in public," a semi-wise man told me as we drank absinthe in a Colorado ski lodge, "and never build the foundation of your career by attacking a specific idea. Because if you live long enough you will inevitably come to embody the very idea that you once criticized. And everyone will know."

This is a half-truth. I've never been in a ski lodge, I've never
consumed absinthe, and I'm not sure if some semi-wise man gave me
this advice or if I just now made it up. The truth lies in the
message. Over time, every dogmatic individual evolves into his or
her ideological opposite: Anti-authority figures slowly enter the
ruling class, socialists become capitalists, Fonzie grows a beard
and becomes a high school shop teacher. But what happens if someone
can exist only by embodying their opposite?

Nothing, I suppose. Or everything, possibly. Maybe these people are
like hammerhead sharks; maybe they don't need to evolve.

I bring this up because I've noticed a curious explosion of a
certain kind of rock band: groups like Franz Ferdinand, the Stills,
the Killers, the Rapture, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and roughly 900 other well-dressed collectives who generally have floppy hair and at least one excellent song (Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out," for example, is arguably the best rock song I've heard in two years, and the YYYs' "Maps" has become my all-time favorite track about cartography). These are generally small bands who perform to small crowds in small venues (Urge Overkill being the patient zero of this epidemic), and few of them move very many records.

Logically, these bands should represent the hyper-authentic underclass of popular music; logically, they should be cultural underdogs. But this is not the case. What these bands do best the main purpose of their existence, and the main thing people seem to like about them is embrace and embody all the signifiers of massive rock stardom. And nobody seems to realize how weird this is.

It was not long ago less than 10 years, really?that "rock star" was
a negative term; if you referred to somebody as a "total rock star, "you were generally calling him or her a self-absorbed prick. This is why people loved Kurt Cobain; they loved him because he didn't seem like a rock star. That attitude changed at the very end of the 20th century. Suddenly, it was universally assumed that being an archetypal, coke-addled egomaniac was the greatest thing any artist could aspire to, apparently because our society did not have enough of these people. Today, we've reached the bizarre cultural moment when bands are adopting the trappings of superstardom without the(seemingly essential) component of being successful. And this is not a case of groups trying to "fake it until they make it." These are not bands who think that if they act famous they'll eventually become famous. These are bands who appear comfortable being smallish, indie-ish club acts who will never sell a million records. I suppose there is no need to be tangibly successful if you've already imagined yourself a superstar.

Certainly, this movement is not exclusive to rock and/or roll. The
only television I watch is reality television, a genre whose success is measured by how accurately it reflects real life (read: good TV is anything that does not seem like TV). Nonfiction publishing has become increasingly dominated by memoirs, which are really just autobiographies by people who haven't done anything; interesting writers are people who are not necessarily interesting. The culture industry is reversing the nature of famousness.

Let's say everything about America changed overnight, and Interpol
suddenly became the biggest band in the world. None of their
original fans could possibly turn against them if they became
eccentric, narcissistic fashionistas; that was the whole idea to
begin with! If you start your career as an unsuccessful superstar in other words, if you start your career by contradicting your very
essence you cannot be changed by fame. The only way Interpol could
evolve would be to become multiplatinum boring dudes. And that will
happen; as stated in the first paragraph, everyone eventually
embodies the ideas they once criticized. And what does that mean?

It means that in the year 2008, Interpol will be the Dave Matthews
Band. Buy those skinny ties now, you future frat boys of America.