Thursday, August 7, 2008

A Fandom Dies

Posted by Laura / 1 comment » / , geekery, life, memories, music

I remember discovering Josh Groban in 2003. I bought the CD (when I probably shouldn’t have) out of the meager funds in my bank account during my last year of high school. I listened to the CD, enraptured by the lovely sounds that the boom box circa probably 1994 was playing out to me on the windowseat. I remember the day was very sunny and that I was supposed to be doing homework but was reading an L.M. Montgomery book on the windowseat that my dad had built for me, listening to this new CD which was at best contraband in my house. (Any new purchases were scrutinized for appropriateness, and while I had no doubt this would have been approved – after all, I had been given Cecelia Bartoli just a few months earlier with not a single qualm – my bank account would then have been scrutinized and found wanting.) I remember very little about the book I was reading, but I remember clearly my awe at this young man’s voice. In 2003, he would have been twenty-two years old, and at seventeen, I was still aware that meant he wasn’t very old. The album was released in 2001 when he was just nineteen years old. (Don’t you just love birthdays?) I remember that day so clearly, and I remember how my affection for the music, less than half of which was actually in English, grew and grew through the coming months.

It was the start of a fandom for me that I thought would last forever. My mom was a fan of George Michael and Billy Joel even still. She had liked them for upwards of twenty years at that point, and I thought that would be me. My mom became a fan of Josh Groban as well and we anxiously awaited the release of his next album, Closer, which we ordered so that it would arrive on release day. We joined his fan club and were lucky enough to receive a signed calendar (one of only 250!) for being quick to register for it. We got excellent seats for the third concert in his very first tour and loved every second of it. I remembered being enraptured for two hours while his lovely voice floated through the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, that January in 2004. It was heaven, to be honest, at that point.

Then things started going downhill. It is inevitable on the internet that when there is a large group of people, even if they are united by a similar interest, there will be conflict. My mom and I became the brunt of some of this conflict for daring to have a separate website for planning get-togethers for the Portland-area fans. How dare we subvert all that the fanclub and official sites are for! We were supposed to dig through hundreds (sometimes thousands) of threads to find the one that we had started for the purpose of our planning rather than having an easy place to locate the ones we wanted. That was where it started to go downhill when it came to participating with other fans.

My own enjoyment of Josh Groban’s music started to fail around the time that he came to Portland again. Instead of performing in a beatuiful, semi-intimate concert hall, he was in an amphitheater. It was large and noisy, which was uncomfortable to start with. Then it was compounded for me when he began singing. The lovely, beautiful tones that I’d fallen in love with were replaced by a strained, sick sounding voice which was coming straight through his slightly-stuffed nose. It wasn’t an enjoyable aural experience for me, and as subsequent albums came out, particularly the live ones, I found that it simply didn’t get any better. Josh Groban’s lovely technique and sound are gone. I couldn’t say why, but it makes me incredibly sad to behold.

I haven’t pursued any of his newer music. After hearing some of the music on his followup to Closer in 2006 (called Awake), I was unimpressed. It sounded like the same thing that he had done on his first album, but with less quality and soul involved. Having recently picked up Pandora’s radio for enjoyment, I decided to put him on my list of preferred artists, just to see if perhaps hearing the newer music would renew an interest in his singing once again. Sadly, I’ve found that isn’t the case. His voice sounds worse, and his technique is flawed at best. I don’t profess to be the be-all-end-all of classical singing, but as far as I am concerned, if one is going to sing classical (or even classical sounding) music, one should at least attempt to employ a technique that sounds vaguely like the real thing.

What was once beautiful to me is now forced and dishonest. Josh Groban continues to be a cash cow for David Foster, racking up money for charity after charity from “Grobanites” who are willing to go deep into debt to follow him around the country and see him as closely as possible. For me, I think this fandom is officially dead, without any hope of renewal, and it’s time to say farewell to something that I once enjoyed so intensely. It’s sad to see a fandom officially die, but it seems like it’s just that time.

Goodbye, fandom. It was nice while it lasted.

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