Just spent 15 minutes writing my post and it got deleted, so I don't know how this one will turn out but I will try...Ok, so first of all I think a couple of the bands are slightly popular/ trendy, but not the genre. Most of the people I know either do not like it or don't know who the bands are. When I think about why it is that a couple/handful of the bands have managed to cross over into the mainstream my two favorite examples to use are White Stripes and Black Lips, both of whom have been discussed elsewhere on this board. If you think about each of these bands and how/why they got popular (and also take into consideration that we are talking about two different time periods here- WS in 2000/ early 2000's and BL in the later part of the decade) one thing that becomes obvious to me is that they both became successful because of some kind of branding or selling of a concept, none of which, if you really think about it, has anything to do with the music they are playing. (Some of you on here may be able to think of things such as the equipment they use or build, etc., that connects the image to the sound, but remember that you already have a background knowledge about this that the general public does not, thus they probably won't consider it.) So with BL, think about how back before they were on Vice the garage community seemed a little stand-offish against them (even when they were on ITR). Well partly I think the reason for this may have been because they were so young and looked a little hipster-ish. (And also the fact that they have admitted in their interviews that in the old days they didn't even really know how to play and just relied on shock value at their shows.)So once they landed on Vice the kids went, oh, they look edgy or whatever, let's listen to this. With WS, ten years ago: WS was a buzz band, people thought it was cute. They thought all those bands from Sweden were cute. THEY WERE NOT. (Sorry Swedish GRH members.) Someone brought up the example of Oblivians and I think it is a great one, so I will use it again: These kids that like BL are not going to look at old Oblivians LPs and go, they look cool, I think I will listen to this- because they don't know the TIME PERIOD or the GENRE. And they don't care about it. Two more quick things then I will shut up- 1. The Mummies: for whatever reason for quite a long time it has seemed to me that if someone only knew one garage band, it was the Mummies. Usually these people were hipsters. If I think about another band a lot of people know, you have Man or Astroman. They are so big that people who like this band and do not like primarily garage refuse to acknowledge that they are a garage rock band. My suspicion is that it is because they don't know enough about the genre to know that MoA plays a sub-genre of garage. 2. Blaine: No we are not cool, for me what liking garage means is that people think you are weird and that your music sucks/ all sounds the same :)
