We live in the Age of Awesome. A look at any social media feed will present endless examples of people getting over-excited about all kinds of everyday, mundane occurrences.
You’ve probably joined in yourself on occasion. It’s hard not to, as the prevailing social media mood is always positive and upbeat. Unless, of course, there’s a periodic outbreak of rage and fuming when everyone joins together to slam someone or something.
When it comes to music, and especially live shows and festivals, as the song goes, everything is awesome. Those who talk about a gig tend to amplify and exaggerate the positive stuff. You rarely come across a bunch of people saying that the show was so-so or that the songs were mundane or that there was a lot of faffing around between songs, all common gig sights.
Hard work, high praise
These thoughts came to mind after Dublin's latest Hard Working Class Heroes festival. Like everyone else who were out and about going from venue to venue, I saw a bunch of bands over the weekend. Some were excellent (Saint Sister and Anderson top that list), some were good (Pleasure Beach, Frankenstein Bolts) and some were promising (Pale Rivers, Bad Sea, We the Oceanographers, We Raise Bears, Basciville).
But the majority of acts on the HWCH trail were simply grand. They were okay, average, satisfactory, decent and all those other descriptive terms for the middle ground. Not good enough to warrant further investigation at this stage, but not bad enough to dismiss them. It’s what you’d expect, because not every act you run into are going to set the world alight.
Yet when you gauge what folks were saying online, you'd think every single act in Dublin last weekend should have been snapped up by passing labels, managers and agents. Some of the hyperbole made me wonder if I'd gone to the wrong venue by mistake. Bands playing their first or second show ever were lauded as the second coming; acts with zilch stagecraft were hailed as grandstanding show-stealers.
More realistic
None of this overblown praise is doing the bands in question any good. Acts have become more realistic about how the music business works and what they need to do to engage with the industry. Still, there is a natural psychological reaction to believe what you want to believe and ignore more realistic and less laudatory comments.
It’s nothing new for Irish bands. In the past, a toothless, uncritical domestic press treated homegrown acts with kid gloves, ill-preparing them for the world beyond Irish coasts. Many bands gathered rave notices at home but never progressed much further afield.
Social media and technology changes mean acts can bypass those gatekeepers of old, yet it’s worth remembering that simply downing the Kool-Aid is not going to sustain you in the long run. Sadly, as we all discover at some stage, everything is not awesome.
