I've noticed this a lot, but I recently had a conversation that made me realise that the word mainstream has become an insult of sorts. But I really don'ta think it is.
I recently had a conversation with a friend about how popular indie bands are these days, and said friend said something about how indie bands are never mainstream. The conversation was entirely pointless with respect to gaining perspective on indie bands. But I did realise a universal and fundamentally constricting problem existed here. The Voldemort of entertainment and popular culture. Elitism. Elitism is as omnipotent as Voldemort, and as much a racist bastard. And much like Voldemort, it intensely dislikes being named.
To a degree we are all elitists. I can't help but laugh at people who say things like Batman is the greatest superhero, or Christopher Nolan movies are the best movies. I'm so elite that Christopher Nolan elitists receive my contempt for placing him on a pedestal above everything else. This probably has something to do with everyone wanting to be special, or with wanting to seem intellectually superior (eg. See Kulltheconqueror.blogspot.in), or to be part of a seemingly exclusive club of followers of something. I don't think I need to spell out that all of the above is actually bullshit and we are all the same, nobody's better than anyone else, yadayadabingbong, I spelt it out anyway. Just in case. Now that I've started spelling it out, I'm going to go one step further and microspell it out. Microspell is a word I just created that you use when you're explaining something you've already explained, or doesn't require explanation to begin with, further.
Batman is mainstream.
Interstellar is mainstream. And also not very difficult to understand. If you didn't understand Interstellar it's because you didn't want to. It's a concept Nolan uses as a plot device in the Prestige (the audience doesn't want to know), smartly making himself the first filmmaker to direct a motion picture magic trick.
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"Here's a magic trick. How many dream levels have I got up my ass? Wrong. The answer is Limbo!" -Christopher Nolan
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Alt-J is mainstream, I don't think anyone's still confused about this.
Metallica, Slayer, Slipknot and Tool are mainstream. Yes, even Tool. Maynard isn't mainstream, but that's a different story altogether.
Going one step further, comicbooks like Preacher and Y: The Last Man are mainstream among comicbook readers.
Lamb Of God is mainstream as fuck among people who listen to "real" metal. The moment you find yourself saying Real [insert genre/form of media here], you can know you've got a very real problem.
I'm sure indie people have bands like that too. Modest Mouse maybe? Or was it Modest House. I don't remember. Funny thing about indie is the word was coined to replace bands and artists under the alternative tag who did not break into the mainstream. Same do it yourself approach to music. Fewer fans. Pretty sweet huh. So by definition it ought to not be mainstream, but careful observation (from the moon with an upside down telescope) shows that the tag indie seems to automatically propel bands into popularity these days, kind of invalidating the tag altogether. And I think the indie tag oughta go. The tag was literally created to mean that if you listen to something that falls under it, you are elite. Here's a badge.
Heck, in the movies all the so-called not-mainstream guys like Darren Arronofsky and Stanley Kubrick are most definitely popular mainstream.
All it takes is a band like Babymetal to come along and confuse the fuck out of everyone. It split the world into a couple of categories:
1. People who like them cuz they're kawaii!
2. People who like them for their music.
3. People who like them cuz they're weird.
4. People who don't like them because they don't like the music/vocals.
5. People who don't like them cuz they're weird.
6. People who don't like them cuz they're not "real" metal.
7. People who can "appreciate" what they're doing, but dislike them all the same.
8. People who like or dislike them because the people around them like or dislike them (closely linked to category 6).
9. People who don't like it because the music and shows are producer driven and that's what's killing the industry these days. Harumph.
Or a combination of any of the above. If you replace words like music, vocals, kawaii! and metal with relevant parameters, I think that the above nine categories could be applied to any form of media. It's just that most artists don't polarise as much, and people tend to bulk into two or three of the above categories. It can be seen that the categories are either based on taste, what's fashionable, and in one case the person's attitude towards the industry.
Now things get complicated. Insofar I've only spoken of mainstream popularity. Not of the ideas themselves.
Entertainment industries have certain ideas that help boost sales. A formula, more like. A superhero dying and then coming back months later, Micheal Bay, Justin Beaver. Metallica etc. are examples of this.
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Maybe the explosion implies popularity thing works for blogs too.
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It's not always the industry's fault though, some "creative" people tend to stick to the formula to make a quick buck. Or they just don't want to try hard enough and come up with a truly original idea. And sometimes artists do really well with this stencil and come up with classics either way (see ACDC).
We get easy entertainment, that isn't necessarily bad. And then there are those who come up with unconventional ideas. Tool, Darren Arronofsky and so on are examples of this.
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Pictured above: Unconventional idea.
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But all of this can be popular, so anything can become mainstream. The people who like the former pretend they're hipper, and the people who like the latter pretend they're smarter. There are intersections here too, and while the mechanisms are by this point complex enough to run a spaceship, the solution for all of this is ridiculously simple.
Like the things you actually like and not the things that other people say they like. For all you know some dick started this ridiculous cycle by pretending to like something in the first place, and then laughed when the thing he liked became famous because of a cascade of people pretending to like things in order to look cool with the people above him/her in the cascade.
But really. It doesn't matter if you genuinely like Justin Believer. You want to look cool? Stand tall and shout to the world. "Fuck you world! I am a truly individual being! I love Hudson and I don't care what you think! Take that!". You'll feel great. I promise. It'll open your world to the exciting possibility of appreciating things you actually like. People may ask why? How could you like Beamer? But you can tell them that haters gonna hate but you're a Bereaber all the way through.
Just to set the record straight. I do not like Bereaver. Not one bit.