Dear @amandapalmer,
There’s no easy way to say this, but I think we need a break. As a novice Twitterer, there was a certain excitement to seeing your name on my front page every three minutes; I mean, how else would I know how much wine you were drinking or how many emails you hadn’t answered. It was like we really were best friends [even though you probably wouldn’t answer my emails]. Even when you went on tour and somehow managed to find time to play music in between expressing your opinions on weather/airports/taxi drivers, I was right there with you. But enough is enough. I can no longer deal with going onto my homepage every morning and wading through your 140-character exchanges with your boyfriend to get to something vaguely interesting. So I guess this is goodbye.
But don’t worry, I’m sure your remaining 281,275 followers will find a way to comfort you.
Love, @__charmlessgirl.
And with that, I unfollowed her. As @RODDYBOTTUM said about unfollowing @nicomuhly, I feel 30 pounds lighter . And I can now listen to the Dresden Dolls’ Missed Me and picture its singer as a howling scorned teenager hell-bent on revenge, instead of a 33-year-old who does yoga on the beach [check her Twitter, there’s a picture of that somewhere].
Twitter, incidentally, was what led me to this site in the first place, and therefore indirectly responsible for my starting to write for it. In a fit of boredom last week I Googled do any indie bands use twitter [or something] and found NoiseAddicts’ list at musicians who use twitter . This followed an unsuccessful Twitter search for some of my favourite artists, which was only notable for turning up a somewhat baffling page claiming to belong to Jesse Lacey of Brand New [@BNJesseLacey], which contains such expressions such as cool asian hats, pimps out someone’s Stickam channel and well, that’s basically it. If that actually is the real Mr Lacey, I apologise, and I’m really looking forward to your concert in March. But somehow I don’t think so.
Looking over the list made me wonder how much, exactly, do we want to know about our favourite musicians? In what sort of intimate detail do we need to be told about their personal lives before their Twitter-personae start bleeding into their music? How soon am I going to start listening to Bad Religion and picturing Brett Gurewitz [pardon me, I meant @OblivionPact] changing his baby’s diaper and going for a bike ride? Because, after all, isn’t the mystique part of why we love them?
With that in mind, I took a look at some of the other celebrity Twitterers. Firstly, @nickcave. Yes, the name at the top of the profile is currently Fake Nick Cave . But even if it isn’t actually the Real Nick Cave, it’s one of the funniest things I’ve read in ages [if there’s not a restaurant called Murder Salads, there damn well should be] and I highly recommend looking at it.
Then there are those pages – for example, Bloc Party [@thisisblocparty], Jimmy Eat World [@jimmyeatworld], Soulwax [@soulwax] and indie legends Sonic Youth [@thesonicyouth] which serve solely as outlets to announce tour dates/recordings and other band news. Even Bjork [@bjork] uses her page for the same purpose. Her fellow Scandinavians Peter Bjorn & John [@PeterBjornJohn], however, do not: wrote a new song. It’s called alien v.s. Santa claus. It’s a ballad.’ Followed by, another new song ready! it is a fast song about love and it’s called: “predator v.s. a puppy ‘.
So far, so un-Amanda Palmer-like. Even her touring partner Imogen Heap [@imogenheap] doesn’t give too much away, aside from the fact that she seems very friendly and nice and likes putting x s at the end of each Tweet. Dave Matthews [@DaveJMatthews], on the other hand, may not Tweet the minutiae of his personal life but does appear to have started a Twitter campaign for people to upload a profile picture of themselves giving the finger.
So, how much would you want to know about your favourite musician? If, say, Brian Eno were to start Tweeting [as opposed to his fan page, @Brian_Eno], would you prefer an impersonal news page or a sharing-is-caring extravaganza a la @johncmayer [whose Tweets you’ve all seen quoted somewhere, but include such gems as I thought I had to fart but it turned out it was just a poop. False alarm.’]
Personally, I like my idols to keep a bit of mystery. I follow several musicians [including the aforementioned Messrs Bottum and Gurewitz] whose Tweets strike a balance between informative music-related stuff and interesting personal anecdotes and who never claimed to be eccentric geniuses in the first place. But I think my reverence for someone like Faith No More madman Mike Patton would be somewhat reduced if he were to sign up and start spamming my front page Palmer-style about his favourite bagel filling or what kind of oil he uses on his bike [@RODDYBOTTUM @MRGOULD: Just took dump in hairdryer. lol. Just like the old days]. What do you think?
There’s no mystique to any of it… it’s just people who play music. This whole blog and every comment to it is [removed].
Seriously, get a life. Your opinions on why you follow people on twitter are irrelevant for the rest of the world. What’s the point of complaining about the use of the twitter media that Amanda Palmer does if you are also using it for personal purposes only? And try not to forget, artists, famous or not, are still people.
*sigh*
good points…
but alternatively, I’m distanced from music and social outlets. I can’t get to a club to see a local, or even a big band play. Yeah, my age set is close to amanda’s so I can relate to that somewhat. But watching her mad kerouac dash around and her slippy-slap manipulation of this new medium while *still* maintaining good musical chops really gets me off.
To me, the mystique of the dolls, and palmer is part of drama, theatre. When you assume the stage you become something else completely. When you come off the stage… you’re human again. So rap that up in vamp and make-up and a girl who worries about her period and still needs to pay the rent. Yeah. It help me get through my day.
Part of my love for all of it is the two aspects. But that’s where I’m at. Now would I have wanted to watch Kurt Cobaine floss his teeth? Eh?
I’ve felt like @amandapalmer sometimes does tweet too much “irrelevant” stuff, but it gives me something to read. If I don’t want to read it I can elect not to, so for those that are into that type of stuff, it’s there, for everyone else just skim it and only read what looks like it might be interesting.
I remember a friend trying to get me to join her at a Dresdan Dolls show years ago, and me being like “Who? No, I have to do homework (aka drink and makeout with my boyfriend).” What a mistake.
I discovered Amanda and her music through Twitter. I had been following @neilhimself, and when I found out she was his girlfriend, I started to follow her too. My logic: “Who? Well, if she’s dating Neil Gaimain’s, she has to be cool.” Not a mistake at all.
What’s so great about Amanda is she works tooth and nail to tear down that fourth wall between herself and her audience. She is so accessible on stage—she interacts with her fans and she feeds off of the audience’s energy in a way that is more holistic and organic than any other musician I’ve seen. She works tirelessly after her shows to meet and greet fans. The internet enables her to do this on a much more wider scale. I’m not delusional and thinking we’re BFF, but I do feel more connected to her than I do to any other writer, musician, poet, or actor I admire, which is largely because of how she makes connects with her fans a part of her daily routine. Perhaps this connection is ‘artificial’, as it is enabled by computers and not face to face contact (this relates to a deeper philosophical question about the meaning of communication in the technological age), but it’s still a connection, nonetheless.
Charmless-
Luckily Twitter is easily configured for you to follow or not follow who you like; there is no obligation on your part to add to the digital noise on this Earth by describing in catty detail what you don’t like about too much information from Amanda Palmer.
I personally like her Tweetfeed; also Neil’s. Neil is, I think, the master of the medium. He uses his blog and his Twitter as matching components, and manages somehow to give us all exactly enough information to feel as if we are a part of his life, and yet always leaves us wanting just a bit more. Not all of us can strike his exquisite balance.
I clearly prefer Amanda Palmer over-sharing over a certain actor who needs a team of five people sending out his weekly PR tweet because he is sooooooooo busy, and twitter is soooooooo hard to use….
Olovia – I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Also, if you don’t like how the wonderful @amandapalmer uses Twitter hen I suggest you unfollow her, rather than whining about it. Personally I love it and admire someone who uses the tool to her full advantage.
So true, sometimes my feed gets flooded with tweets from musos that are giving me no insight to their music, just ramblings on what they eating.. lol. Check out http://twitter.com/BandsToFollow for daily updates of new Bands on Twitter
I really enjoy following celebrities who tweet the minutiae of their days, because I like seeing that they are just real people, and the mystique that surrounds them is merely a media distance. Twitter closes that gap depending on how much each person wants to disclose, and while I really enjoy Amanda Palmer’s tweets, I also really enjoy Warren Ellis’ smart ass comments rather than, “I am now scratching my balls,” and Neil Gaiman’s “these are my beautiful children, also here is a blog to read” style tweets. I love feeling that much closer to the people I admire, and it makes it feel even better when they reply to my tweets 🙂
Hm… I’ve had this dilemma myself, about Amanda.. It turns out that my thinking wasn’t quite right, in a way.. Imagine your own tweets (I don’t know what you tweet about, but taking that most of the people tweet their usual day routines and/or funny things which happened and/or photos from their usual day), then imagine that you had to change them because of a fan-base.. Isn’t that a bit cruel? Amanda Palmer is a normal person, as I see it, and has that right to do normal tweets.. As far as it goes, it would just be very very wrong for her to limit herself just because we aren’t interested.. Someone out there (besides Neil Gaiman) is interested in her yoga on the beach.. I didn’t unfollow her from this reason alone.. You can always expect your stars to be humans once you reach far enough, and if you don’t – well, then don’t.. 🙂
Ah, the eternal struggle of fandom: torn between wanting to know and knowing too much.
Everyone, artists and fans alike, needs to figure out where their own limits are. How much do you want to share with people? How much do you want shared with you? Go, find all your wrong answers, and somewhere underneath them you’ll stumble on the right one, too. If @amandapalmer ‘s willingness to share is more than you’re willing to listen to, well, that’ll happen. She’s not wrong for sharing what she wants to, and you’re not wrong for opting out.
(My solution was just not to follow *anyone* on twitter, but to bookmark the twitter pages of people I’m interested in, so that when I’m in the mood to see what they’re up to, I can go look for myself rather than having it put in front of me automatically. Keeping twitter tethered to MY schedule goes a long way towards making sure that I’m not going to feel bombarded by things I didn’t want to know right now. And just for the record, @amandapalmer makes for great reading that way.)
And I get tired of people who seem to think that others want to know why they stopped following someone on Twitter. And people who complain that Twitter gives too much detail about peoples’ lives. Just stop following and stick to someone who doesn’t telll you more than you want to know.
Depends on the person and their goals as a person and an artist. Really interesting article.
Thanks! 🙂
Personally, I love following Amanda’s tweets. It puts her on such a more personal level than bigger ‘stars’. It’s nice to know that she can be so amazing and at the same time act a hell of a lot like the rest of us. I can understand that all the constant information can be overwhelming or annoying for some, but it makes me love her all the more.