I think about the responsibility I have to an audience.
One of the fun things about getting older is seeing the ways that things you have had in your head for a long time have endured. You get to see the thread reaching back all those years and how many things you’ve got that you do that you can connect to odd or interesting sources. Fox and I routinely reference Strong Bad Emails at one another, sometimes with the right level of levity (“look who thinks he’s clever dan“). Quotes from the Bible, inflections from 1990s sitcoms, the occasional idiom from a They Might Be Giants song. Sometimes, I’ll stop mid-sentence and we’ll have a little chat about oh, huh, I guess that’s where that’s from, huh.
These are literally memes; they’re transmisable ideas, things that cling to the memory and can be easily exchanged, which in turn promotes their existence. They are used for a meaning below their exact meaning. If I say someone’s Clever Dan it’s bringing with it a framing that speaks of children’s cartoons.
It takes a great person to get an idea
But don’t go public, it’ll ruin the plan
‘Cause no matter how intelligent or clever you are
You’re only as good as your fans
There’s this band I like, TISM. You’ve probably heard me mention them. If you’re on the internet of the right age range, you’ve probably heard their song Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me, a song bemoaning, christ, yeah, one’s access to sex. The realisation that the parents that warned you against sex had more sex than you, like people with plate fulls of cookies warning you that you’ll get fat if you have too many, kinda thing. It’s a fun song, and it had a fun video.
I didn’t discover TISM until I was out of the cult, and really, in the early 00s, so I was already by most accounts an adult. But the impact of TISM on my mind and life was pretty deeply stamped. When I found them I found earlier albums, and they had just the right kind of depth of lyrics and breadth of reference – and a fun conspiracy theory about their identities – to reward me for digging into what they were saying and why. I like them, I like what they were trying to do, even if I dont like their methods.
There’s this song, Aussimandias, which I’m not linking here, but which seems to be a bunch of early 90s guys wondering about the extremely Australian attitude towards racism which is sports teams that don’t have any actual motivation for their hatred but know they want to fight one another. It’s a good first step into the conversation, to consider how ridiculous the need for violence is, and to make fun of it. Wish it didn’t have an N-bomb in the chorus, though, even though it is specifically a reference to another song with the N-bomb in the title.
Peter Garrett chanting “Oils! Oils!”
Can you imagine it? I don’t think you can
As a Mistral employee once told me
You’re only as good as your fans
The stuff TISM talked about was very much Australian stuff. Consider in the song here, the one whose lyrics break up this article like images. It’s called Play Mistral For Me, which is a pun on Play Minstrel For Me, which is a mis-quote of a Shakespearean phrase — to ‘play Minstrel’ was to take on the role of the minstrel, to play a servant for entertainment. It was like saying you would make fun for an audience, or that you would take on the role of a performer. It’s also a reference to Play Misty For Me, which is a horror film about a Radio DJ being pursued by an obssessive fan. And the fact that these are both part of the conversation is a telling sign of the kind of people TISM were.
Mistral was Australian’s most widely recognised local brand of fans. You know, the big things with whirly bits that propel air around to cool a room. Turns out this is a country that had a big market for fans and wanted them everywhere, what with the heat. It’s a specific reference that I need to explain to you, because I know that even if you’re Australian, you’re probably young enough to not remember Mistral as a brand. Because I think of you as my fans, and I think of how what I share makes meaning to you.
There’s a confidence in TISM’s music, a willingness to present themselves as stupid while also presenting themselves as willing to think about challenging ideas in the language and demeanour of the unserious people. In this song, they sing about how musicians and their fandoms relate, and the strange painful coda of the refrain:
Each man kills the thing he loves
The fisherman caught in his own net
It’s frightening that you deserve
The audience that you get
This is one of those ideas that lasts in my head. One of those sticky memes. One of those ideas that I can pull apart and look at in many ways. Am I beholden to how I want to be perceived? Am I tangled in the net, because I don’t want to – say – include a link to Aussiemandias, as if you might click on it and go ‘hey, Talen, this song from the 90s is pretty racist,’ when I’m already saying it’s pretty racist?
The idea that you deserve the audience you get, in its worse moments, makes me think about how my readership on this blog works. Time to time I see people on Reddit talk to me about what a relief it is to see someone with a blog, someone who has put their stuff on a website and not on some other ephemeral bit rottable place like a discord post or a screenshot of a tweet.
But there’s also a grimness to it.
You deserve the audience you get.
Who am I entitled to reach? If I deserve the tiny audience I have, the audiences of those people with millions, do they deserve them? I tell people success is random so I have to think that’s true. I have to centre this not on what other people and other audiences are doing, but my audience. What can I say about them? What does it say when you can look at your audience and imagine them being upset at things you want to say? Is your audience shitty people?
Is your audience the kind of people who would say ‘I don’t see anything wrong with Aussiemandias, after all, it’s just a song?’ ‘Cos, you kinda are responsible for that then. You should do something about that. You should take responsibility, since you did something to deserve that.
I had an organic growth on Youtube (sounds bad like that) a few years ago. I commented on one person’s videos, and a viewer of that came and looked at my stuff and looked at what I said and decided that they wanted to see more. And then in one of my videos, they saw that I said ‘Cis’ about something, and complained about using the made-up word. And I thought for a moment about getting into a fight with them in Youtube comments, and if that was fruitful. After all, this is a person who was doing what I wanted, I wanted comments and I wanted growth and I wanted more subscribers just because a number going up is what I was promised if I made sincere content I found interesting.
I told them they were wrong, and got rid of the comment, knowing this would probably stop them paying attention to my work and tell whatever algorithm gods that suggesting my work to other people was a bad idea.
Because that’s my audience. I need to cultivate it. I need to be mindful of who I am making comfortable and who I want to be uncomfortable. I can’t make my space safe for everyone, and I don’t think I should, nor do I even want to. But I know who I want to make uncomfortable.
I know what I don’t want in the fans that I get, and I know who’s responsible for that.