Zan wrote:ManOfMiracles wrote: And why won't your own chromosomes allow you to differentiate between quaility and your own opinion? Because you didn't care for these songs... are they indeed poor quality because you deem them to be so, or are they just songs you personally didn't care for? "I don't care for this" does not necessarily mean "badly done..." it just means "not to my preferences."
But...Stabbim LIKES Roboto. lol...(dooesn't mean he's foolish enough to believe it's of high, intellectual and musical quality, however) I think the problem here is that some fans can justify songs like "First Time" and "Roboto" ONLY because they were "hits" and excusing the notion that songs like these were the beginning of the end for this particular rock band, who, up until that point, had a ROCK following, or at least a prog rock following. "Hits" are *always* used as a rationalization for whyy "JY and Tommy had no right to mistreat Dennis's dreams and throw him out on his ear because of everything he'd done for them" e.i.: fame & fortune, even at the expense of their artistic integrity, even though it was against their wishes at the time, and even though he was, by all accounts of people who worked with him, an overbearing pain in the tit to deal with.
There isn't necessarily anything wrong with ham & cheese. But to call it anything BUT ham & cheese is just putting pearls on swine.
Stabbim's point in all this is: Why is it so important for some Styx fans that Styx be recognized as something great by all?? Why do we care how many people come to their shows? We aren't profiting from these tours. What difference does it make to US how the Styx name is being used? Or how many top ten hits they have? It's like, if Styx isn't recognized, then THE FANS aren't recognized or something. Some fans get PISSED when Styx is dis'ed, they take it PERSONALLY. They've taken this split PERSONALLY. They take the hits PERSONALLY. NO other band has fans like this, not to this extreme. Why is that, ya think?
It's one thing to say "hey, Dennis couldnt have been so bad, he wrote all those hits." It's another to KEEP SAYING IT for EIGHT YEARS when you know full-well that "hits" don't necessisarily mean "good songs." At least not to everybody because music is subjective, all the time. But for some reason, they NEVER, EVER seem to grasp this concept. Ever. Why is that?
I agree with this to a certain extent, that Styx fans are, if not exactly MORE passionate than other fans, then passionate in a very different way about the band, its music and members. I also think I know why, or at least partly. I think it has a lot to do with the image of the band as "the rock stars next door" . . . you know, most bands of that era wrote lyrics about sex, drugs and rock and roll, while Styx wrote songs that were about the common things of people's everyday lives. Hard work, family, love, what are we going to do to keep the country moving forward . . . those were pretty unusual themes back then, and the band members came across as such down to earth people, as well. That allows people to see themselves in the band members in a way that they can't if it's a band like Kiss or Aerosmith or Van Halen or Led Zep.
You know, most of us know right off the bat that we'll never be as cool as Steven Tyler, or Gene Simmons, or Robert Plant or whomever, but almost EVERYONE on God's green earth is as cool as the guys in Styx, and that lets the fans project themselves into the guys in a very different way, and to project themselves into the lyrics in a very different way. And when that turned ugly, they took it so personally because that had been emotionally invested in the situation to a much larger degree than normal. At least that's what it seems like to me. They took it so peronally because they so strongly identified with the members of Styx, primarily Dennis and Tommy, and when they argued, the fans kind of fell into formation behind whichever one they identified with the most. It's as if the band's greatest strength - its populist appeal - turned against it and became its greatest weakness.
The other thing is, there are two completely different fan bases at play, and each one wants to see Styx in terms of its own tastes. So the fans who liked the earlier work think the later work sucks, and the fans who came on board BECAUSE of the later work don't understand that at all. That part, at least, is totally normal and I think almost every band experiences that to some degree. I mean, Queen went from making pseudo-prog records like 'A Night at the Opera' to making pseudo-dance records like 'Hot Space' (a record that makes KILROY look like a staggering work of genius, I might add, in my opinion). Most bands of that era wound up in a very different place from where they started, and that's just a function of radio changing so dramatically during that time, and bands trying to figure out how to continue to have a career. KILROY may not have been the band's best move, but the other side of that is, if they had released an album in the vein of 'The Grand Illusion' in 1983, it would have been hopelessly out of step with the times and would have likely been a resounding failure. At some point bands come to their natural end. But it's hard for fans or band members to see it that way; it's just normal to wish to assign blame. This band had a very, very long run at the top compared to most others, and it would be great if both the band members and the fans could focus on celebrating that instead of tearing everything else down. But that's not human nature, is it?
I hope all is well.
Sterling
