Jun 02, 2007
Popularity Sucks

Ah, again, it's been a while, but at least I'm not the only one: All of Somers' other columnists haven't bothered to write anything in years, and even Somers himself has been lax lately. Of course he's a big-time author now, writing for money and all, so I guess giving it all away on this crappy web site doesn't make sense any longer. Asshole. Trust me, when Somers is on Oprah one day soaking up the accolades, you'll all get to know what a prick he can actually be.

The easiest way to know something is complete shit is to observe that it's incredibly popular with the proles who inhabit this planet. This might sound like your typical smug I am smarter than you as clearly demonstrated by my choices of mainstream, corporate entertainment but it isn't, really. It's just the realization that good stuff almost by definition appeals to a fairly narrow band of any population.

Still, what always happens has happened again: I've been enraged, and I need to vent. This is a good, anonymous place to vent. No one knows who I am—hell, few people (if any) actually even read this. I couldn't be safer from mine enemies. So I keep returning here, like a bad habit. And it's perfect, because this little column—like the web site that hosts it—is not popular. At all.

The reason this pleases me is because I've realized recently that popularity just sucks. The easiest way to know something is complete shit is to observe that it's incredibly popular with the proles who inhabit this planet. This might sound like your typical smug I am smarter than you as clearly demonstrated by my choices of mainstream, corporate entertainment but it isn't, really. It's just the realization that good stuff almost by definition appeals to a fairly narrow band of any population.

Think about it: You and I are less of a delicate snowflake, unique in the universe, than we'd like to imagine, but we are after all individuals, formed from unique experiences and traumas. The chances that we have exactly the same taste in anything is pretty slim. We might both like one band, or movie, or book, but the chances that all our choices will match up are virtually nil—at some point, there will be a tiny detail about one book or song or movie or lifestyle choice that we disagree on, and from there our lists will diverge. This is natural. This is a good thing. This means that whenever someone writes a book or makes a dinner or composes a piece of music, you and I are going to apply our own individual taste to it and decide if it's for us or not. And chances are we will disagree.

As a result, most complex, rich creations have trouble to find a very broad audience. Even things that are considered to be wildly successful—Spider Man movies, for example—really aren't. Consider: The average movie ticket price in 2004 was $6.21. Spider Man 2 grossed roughly $373 million in the USA. There are roughly 300 million people in this country. This is really, really bad math, of course, but if everyone who went to see it paid the average ticket price, that means about 60,064,412 people went to see this movie. That's about 20% of the population. Now, that's a lot of people, sure, but that also means that 80% of the population didn't bother. This was a film that was designed to have as broad an appeal as possible, and it still failed to bring in even a quarter of the population. Even if you adjust for really young kids and really old people who maybe can't go to the movies any more, and even if you add in all the pay-per-view money, I doubt they beat 50% of the movie-going population.

Ah, but 50% is a big number, and there's the rub—getting there. In order to convince anywhere from 50 to 100 million people that something is good, you have to strip away things that will divide them. You have to strip out religious themes. You have to calibrate the sex and violence very carefully. You have to dispense with complex concepts because you can't predict who in your audience will get them. This is not necessarily about making the movie dumb—although that is pretty often the end result—because the story and characters can still be complex and nuanced. It's about making the movie palatable to a huge number of people, all of whom have their own prejudices and weird rules about what they like or don't like. In order to get Spider Man 2 up to 20%, they had to remove a lot of complexity and roughage.

And guess what? Spider Man 2 sucked. You may disagree, but you're wrong. Trust me, friends, in 100 years no one will be voting to preserve that vanilla piece of shit for future generations.

You can do the math: The less a work of art appeals to a broad audience, the more interesting it probably is. Not necessarily better—complexity can suck too, oh boy can it—but at least it'll have all sorts of dark crannies and mysterious stylistic choices, weird psychological artifacts of its creator(s), and lovingly rendered details. It will piss off, offend, and/or bore a large swath of people because it will only connect with certain neurons out there. But you know what? For the people who it does connect with, it will be fucking interesting. It may even be great. Instead of a mildly pleasing couple of hours you won't even remember later on in the day—inoffensive and easy to swallow, like lite beer—it'll be something that digs in on the way down, makes you ponder, and possibly burrows into your brain and never leaves.

In the meantime, you can safely avoid anything, like Britney Spears albums, that attracts millions of people, because it probably will suck. And if it doesn't, if it is that rare but real creation that is both interesting and broadly appealing, well, don't sweat it son, you can always hear/see/read/experience it at a later date. There's no fucking reason you have to experience it immediately, is there? If you answered yes to that question, stop reading, because I've changed my mind: You suck.