Don’t Push the River; It Flows by Itself

Today was lovely—brilliant sun on yesterday’s snowfall, still fresh and untrodden. Knitting a sweater for Afghans for Afghans, while drinking eggnog and listening to Christmas carols—my son-in-law is from Hawaii and we traded Yuletide cd’s this year. He got Susan and I got slack-key guitar. Such positive feelings that I did not want to come back and deal with the negative past. It won’t go away, but you can leave it a little wiser.


I’ll be wandering all over the map here, but there are a number of themes that keep popping up like detours on the road. Undue influence. Branding. Crowd control. Spin. From the first meeting with some of the staff of the susan-boyle forum regarding the purchase of the site, these were evident. “DJG’ers” were branded as evil. Members were an unruly mob that could not be trusted to vote for board members. “I don’t want that sword hanging over my head”, said one admin. Only the existing staff, and later, maybe a few hand-picked followers, were capable of running the site. (In point of fact, for at least a month after the site was purchased, the only person capable of keeping the site running was lchris. The previous owner had not trained even the admins in the technical aspects. lchris trained them.) And the admin on the official Sony site should be an admin on the forum, to make sure the corporate message was adhered to.


Lchris and I were a bit out of place in that milieu. We came in with the naive idealism that the site could be run by fans for fans as a democratic, non-profit enterprise. We were met with one admin’s idea of a private corporation with shares owned by the staff, and total control invested in them. This was, and still is, the basis for the “power struggle” within that site—those who wanted a site run by and for fans, with all the mess that might entail, & those who wanted tight control over that site, in accordance with the interests of Sony & Susan’s management. In return for adherence to those standards, the staff would have limited direct access to Susan, to be doled out to members.


Under normal circumstances this might have been workable, if occasionally uncomfortable for those most interested in free speech. However, this shaky collaboration between these 2 opposing points of view came under attack by our vicious cyber-stalker/cyber-bully whom I call the dementor. He is an expert at locating the weak points of his victims, and striking there. He apparently convinced the staff that lchris and I did not represent the members as a whole, but were only interested in power for ourselves, which we planned to wrest from the existing staff. Since it seems that at least some of the existing staff were so invested in retaining power & control for themselves, it was easy to convince them that we (and the “DJG’ers”) wanted the same thing. Therefore we needed to be stopped at all costs, and the uproar on July 18 ensued.


Back to the title. The music industry has been accused of “manufacturing” so-called talent, and of manipulating the buying public into supporting these instant stars. The outrage among musicians not in the corporate limelight reached a peak last year with the movement to make Rage Against the Machine the #1 Christmas single in the UK rather than the usual winner from the X-Factor. Joe McElderry (sp?) a nice young man with a pleasant voice, didn’t get #1, and I guess they proved a point, but so what? The corporate music factory keeps on running.


My point is that Susan doesn’t need branding, undue influence, crowd control (well, maybe when fans get too demanding in asking for hugs) or spin, to be wildly successful. She is a force of nature, like a river. What you see is what you get. She isn’t manufactured and neither is her fans’ love for her. Trying to make a website into a mouthpiece for corporate control isn’t necessary. We might comment on or even criticize her musical choices, her hair style, her clothes, her weight, or even her preferences in men, but it’s like doing the same to one of our beloved family members. We want her to be the best singer and the happiest person that she can be, and we don’t need any P.R. person telling us how to behave. We’re responsible for her success, not any marketing scheme. And when someone attacks our members, as the dementor has, the corporate entities either need to cooperate or get out of our way while we protect one another.


Susan and her fans are unique. We are changing the music industry organically, spontaneously. The industry powers and pundits have a choice: go with the flow or be left high and dry. And that includes websites.