On loving an obscure band in the age of an evolved Internet - posted at 15:22

Were any of you fans of anything obscure, not well-known, out of the mainstream public consciousness back in the late nineties or early two thousands? Do you remember what it was like to scour the internet for hours, hoping to find some nugget of anything about the object of your affection? It was exhausting, wasn't it? Take the band Shudder To Think, for example. I used to maintain a fan site dedicated to them (Shake Your Halo Down ring any bells, anyone?) and so I was pretty focused on finding any information on them, anything at all. Articles and photos were great, interviews were awesome, and videos? Unheard of, but they would have been cherished like a newly discovered gold mine. I remember what it felt like to try to hold on to the fuzzy images of music videos in my head, straining to remember every last detail, because god knows that finding anything other than a 30-second clip - if you were lucky - was impossible. You practically had to turn to eBay prepared to pay out the nose if you wanted to have a prayer of fulfilling the dream of seeing the music video in its entirety that started your whole rabid obsession in the first place.

As I've mentioned before, my music obsession kind of went into hibernation for five years after college up until just about three months ago. When I finally snapped out of it and dove head-first into my first all-out, all-consuming Shudder To Think binge in years, I discovered a whole new world of band-worship. Between blogs, YouTube, Craig Wedren on Twitter (!!!), and music/record-reviewing sites that have been given the benefit of a couple of years worth of perspective (the number of sites alone who herald Pony Express Record as one of the most underrated records of the nineties or who say Uh, we kinda screwed the pooch when we panned this record is pretty hefty), there is no longer a dearth of information about anything, even a band formerly as obscure as Shudder To Think (whose fan base has grown quite a bit in the eleven years since they broke up). Now you can find the entire video for X-French Tee Shirt, which until this summer I had seen less than four times whose fuzzy edges my memory struggled to keep a grasp on, on the Internet and watch it as many times as you want. Hardly sounds revolutionary now, but if I could go back in time and tell that to the struggling fansite maintainer from all those years ago, she'd probably pop an aneurysm out of sheer delight. When it comes to finding early, limited-release, out-of-print-like-you-read about recordings - recordings that are, in the words of the person performing on it, "hard to find, but worth your time & dimes" - that you paid an amount of money you'd not like to admit in a ferocious bidding war on eBay , it's an absolute wonder that you can find them available as downloads from places like Amazon.

A person like me is a kid in the proverbial candy store these days. Dedicated fansites have all but faded into obsolescence (though I'm seriously thinking about resurrecting my erstwhile Shudder-dedicated webspace), but the blogs that proclaim their virtues are abound. Live performances have been recorded and uploaded. In a niche that popular media has largely ignored, user-generated content is king. And as far as I'm concerned, music, fandom, and the Internet are all the better for it.