The definition of a sports fan

No one has an obligation to be a sports fan. It's that simple. No secret handshakes, no over-the-top requirements to show your commitment to a cause. You show up to a game, put on a jersey, or merely check the paper the next day for the final score and you're in the club. The diehards might not accept you into their little self-indulgent treehouse, but who needs them? Who says their word is final? There's no rhyme or reason to it, no logic, and no requirements. I'm a Cubs fan, Bears fan, Bulls fan, and Blackhawks fan. I can remember Carlos Marmol knocking out Brewers hitters like it was yesterday: slider, fastball, fastball, fastball, slider, strike out. I can imitate Derrick Lee's swing to perfection: right-handed, open stance, bat between a 90 and 180 degree angle, and a major leg sweep to get the timing right. Derrick Lee hasn't worn a Cubs uniform in years. Craig Krenzel to Bernard Berrian for 49 yards and a TD? In my mind it happened yesterday, not eight years ago. $100 for a Toews jersey? Absolutely worth it. Without question.

That's the power of fandom. Plain and simple.

There isn't a test you pass to become a diehard for your cause, and there's no badge that you can betray. No one has questioned my credentials as a Cubs fan, nor have I questioned theirs.  You claim to be a Cubs fan? Then you're a Cubs fan until you say otherwise. The satisfaction the each of us receives from victories may not be the same, nor the stinging pain of defeat, but we've invested in both of those things. When I first discovered baseball, I was a White Sox fan. Why? No reason. None whatsoever, aside from them being from Chicago. Then I went to a Cubs game and changed my mind. I was 12, and haven't changed my mind since. No one makes rational decisions when they're 12. You're in middle school, just started to hit puberty, and have barely begun to grasp the idea that competition is the perfect outlet for everything, even if you don't know why you're so damn competitive. Even losing to relatives at a board game sucks.

But fans, diehard, casual, in middle school, what have you, are just that: fans. With jobs and lives outside of the ticker on the bottom of the screen during SportsCenter. On top of the never-ending daily grind of working 40 or more hours a week, dealing with the barrage of school work, coming home to personal problems, or putting up with shit I can't even begin to fathom, people still tune into sports. I've spent so much time watching games that I've likely wasted years fully grasping zone defenses or what to throw in a 2-2 count when the only pitches in your repertoire are breaking balls and fastballs. I could have spent that time studying AP U.S. History or Microeconomics. And yet I planted myself in front of the television, day after day, game after game, for reasons I can't articulate.

For some reason geography is the basis of almost all sports fandom, and no one questions that. I am a Cubs fan who originally rooted for the White Sox because they were from Chicago. I changed allegiances to the Cubs because they too were from Chicago. Just physically (in terms of ballparks) closer. (Also maybe because their uniforms had actual colors. But I honestly don't remember why I fell in love with baseball, or with the White Sox, or with the Cubs. I grew attached to the Red Sox because I had family in Boston. Likewise, I have family who don't like in the Midwest yet call the Cubs their #2 because of us in the Midwest who do call the Cubs our team.

I've suffered through painful defeats, depressing eras that have lasted years, championships, and everything in between, but I've never abandoned any team that becomes a part of my life's blood. I've been so angry at these teams that I've thrown things, broken things, and thrown gear away. Screams, tears, jubilation, sobs, exhilaration, you name it and I've done it in the name of fandom. Hell, a god damn video game commercial that simulated Cubs fans celebrating a World Series victory made me tear up. Nothing makes me tear up. That's not hyperbole. I just don't break into tears. And yet slipping into a dream where I'm in Wrigleyville, surrounded by lifelong Cubs fans, as that team wins it all has me fucking bawling my eyes out. IT WAS A GOD DAMN VIDEO GAME COMMERCIAL.

And so we boo them sometimes. We put them on these immeasurable pedestals that project this superhuman image of athleticism that's so out of our league it becomes a form of escapism so strong we don't even recognize it as escapism. It's beyond escapism, above the silliness of getting lost in a book, TV show, or band. It's so engrained in society that diehards are completely accepted, unlike Trekkies and Tolkien lovers. Pouring your heart and soul out into a team is expected. And winning a championship is considered so far beyond anything, it eclipses every other single emotion combined. More than love, more than hate, more than anything. Absolutely anything. When our team loses, that escapism is broken and ruined, an ugly punch to the gut that throws so many negative emotions in our faces we can't think straight, because we give them so much weight relative to everything else in our lives. And so we boo them sometimes.

It's a double-edged sword, fans and athletes. Fans owe players nothing. Players owe fans nothing. I choose to be a fan of a particular team because of geography and the stupid idea that the emotional roller coaster is worth the ride. Players play because they get paid to. Ideally they play to win a championship, because that's how sports is framed: play like a champion and win it all. But simply playing the game is their job. Don't confuse the job with this false idolatry. Winning it all is what the archetypal sports myth is all about, but we don't live in a world of myths and ideals. We live in a world with men and women, both on and off the field.

What is a genre?

In 1984, Bathory came out with its self-titled debut album. In 1992, Darkthrone came out with its second album, A Blaze in the Northern Sky. Venom's album Black Metal came out in 1982 while Burzum's self-titled debut came out 10 years afterward. All are, most metalhead would argue, staples of the black metal genre. 

But how true is this? What does it take for something to qualify as a genre, and how are these genres determined, labeled, and legitimized? These are big, broad, pretentious questions.

I will try to answer them anyway.

Here's the thing about black metal: the concept of it as a whole genre didn't come about until the 1990s. The first wave of black metal, which occurred in the 1980s, includes bands such as Venom, Bathory, and Celtic Frost. But Venom and Celtic Frost were essentially thrash bands with low production quality singing about Satan. Black metal? No. Not quite, if we're going to compare them stylistically. It wasn't until the influx of bands from the 1990s (the second wave of black metal) that black metal reached ears outside of those dedicated to the music and the scene. It wasn't until bands such as Darkthrone, Emperor, Immortal, and Mayhem started putting out albums during and after 1992 that enough black metal was out there being made to justify inventing a genre for it (besides the awful label of 'extreme metal').

Music genres can be very annoying things. They have an obvious positive benefit: they tell us generally what the music is going to sound like, sort of like a quick preview in case we're not sure what music some artist we've never heard of makes. Maybe an album cover pops out at you, and it happens to be in the 'metal' section. Helpful. But then you pop in the CD or switch to your computer's music library and discover that what you got is far from what you thought you were getting. Or maybe you have that friend who raves about the latest blackened post-metal shoegaze band or some new atmospheric sludge/doom album.

(Spoiler alert: I'm that friend)

I care too much about proper genre labeling, at least within metal. This is because A) I'm bizarrely neurotic about that, and B) there are enough diverse styles of metal to justify added descriptors to clarify what kind of metal the music is. I have 29 different metal (sometimes self-assigned) subgenres in my library: black, blackened shoegaze, death, doom, drone, folk, groove, heavy, industrial, melodic death, metalcore, nu, pirate, post, power, progressive black, progressive death, death, progressive post black, sludge, speed, stoner, symphonic black, symphonic death, symphonic, technical death, technical melodic death, thrash, and viking.

Progressive post black metal. I am literally Hitler for making that a thing.

Back to Bathory. After their debut album, Bathory continued to put out albums in the 1980s that continued to influence (along with artists like King Crimson) the soon-to-be second wave Norwegian scene. And they were really the only ones well known for making that sound and style of music, effectively making black metal in the 1980s even though the concept and definition of black metal didn't exist quite yet. Under the banner of real-time genrefying, Bathory would be an 'extreme metal' band. Under a more retroactive banner, Bathory is black metal. But is it black metal in sound only, or also in spirit? I can't tell because honestly second wave black metal (which ended up defying the genre) was just a giant circlejerk: Bathory copied Venom, Norwegian bands copied Bathory and then copied bands that copied Bathory to give us the iconic black metal sound.

So genres have souls now. Apparently.

A simple solution would to just label Bathory as 'proto black metal,' along the lines how the Stooges and MC5 would be considered 'proto-punk' because they were punk rock before punk rock existed. But the Stooges and the Sex Pistols were still of the same notion: fuck society, I'm a rebel. Bathory and Burzum aren't of the same notion. Bathory is 'Hail Satan' but not in a serious way. Burzum is 'Hail Satan' in a literal, church-burning way. Bathory came from Sweden. Second wave black metal came from early '90s Norway, a very different scene from early '80s Sweden. Norwegian black metal was very reactionary, very counterculture, and sometimes anti-Christian. Bathory was a man alone, without a scene. The spirit of what black metal is comes from the bands and music that came out of that second wave. I think spirit matters in this case. Bathory is of black metal sound, but not of spirit.

Problem solved! We're halfway home!

There's a new trend emerging in metal as bands continue to push the boundaries of traditions: the forging and evolution of fusion subgenres. If you look back on that list of subgenres sitting in my music library, you'll see stuff like melodic death and blackened shoegaze along with all the progressive subgenres (though progressive is another pet peeve of mine: it's a lazy way of describing how multiple subgenres are fused). There are some bands who only combine two styles of metal (any melodic death metal band) and then there are those that throw in so many it makes labeling using a traditional scheme impossible.

Agalloch and Cormorant are the banes of my existence. (You can blame Cormorant for progressive post black metal).

Hit play on any Agalloch song and you'll stumble across these different styles: atmospheric black, acoustic, black, folk, doom, and post metal. Listen to Cormorant and you'll be jumping from black to shoegaze to melodic death to folk to NWOBHM-inspired metal. But let's ignore Cormorant from now on because I like Agalloch more. First off, I should mention that Agalloch has a subgenre, sort of. The band refers to their music as 'dark metal.' I'm not sure how I feel about this because A) Is a band allowed to define its own subgenre? B) If not, who gets to put the label on a subgenre? Meshuggah is prog band that incorporates polyrhythms in the form of chugging, and calls their sound 'djent' as an onamonapia. The term has begun to catch on somewhat, but there's also a lot of backlash. This didive wasn't present when 'black metal' was taken from the Venom album and coined as the descriptor for the Norwegian sound.

Unlike Meshuggah, black metal had an entire scene devoted to the style, a scene very active that closely tied everyone together. Norwegian black metal artists were like-minded in their approach to the music: perform as if the color black were a type of music. Listeners have reacted negatively towards 'djent,' showing that sometimes classifying power can reside with them. There also isn't very much present with Agalloch and 'dark metal' (unless you want to get into the whole Cascadian black metal thing, which is very dumb and widely regarded as a bad decision). There are a few bands that are getting around to copying Agalloch, but not at the amount or growth of second wave black metal. And while no one's rejecting 'dark metal,' no one is really claiming it and legitimizing it.

I've just given up and labeled Agalloch as 'post metal.' It took me months to do. I'm really neurotic about this.

Back to Cormorant now, and my new favorite band of the moment An Autumn For Crippled Children. The problems that persist with these bands is that they are wave front, they are making the experimental stuff that'll never get near the mainstream and will either inspire the future conventions of metal, or be ignored completely for being too out there for its own good. AAFCC combines third wave black metal (a U.S.-driven subgenre that's growing and branching off in a very exciting fashion) with shoegaze, ambient, and post metal. I gush about the album Only the Ocean Knows, and it's a truly unique blend of styles that's both Explosions in the Sky and Alcest (an influential shoegaze black metal band).

This third wave of black metal is really a fascinating thing, especially given what it means for the core concept of 'black metal.' You have American bands taking this music and splitting it off in several directions: atmospheric, shoegaze, depressive/suicidal, and post black. Not to mention stuff like blackened thrash. But the point is that a lot of these American bands don't hold the same convictions and inspirations that music from Norway had. American black metal isn't really reactionary,  counterculture, or anti-Christian. Many bands don't implement poor sound quality when recording. Introspection and sadness are key qualities of the spirit of the music. Perhaps 'dark metal' is a better term, because third wave black metal seems to me more like 'blue metal,' blue as in the dark blue sky of dusk. Not black as midnight, just enough to tell the day is dying.

But that'll never catch on because A) I just made it up, and B) it sounds ridiculous. Pretty soon we'll have 'red metal' and 'green metal.' And you can all thank me.

I guess besides stroking my ego, this post is about some of the cracks in the current scheme.  I don't think that we need to limit classifications if the most accurate way of labeling it involved four different descriptors (Agalloch) rather than a band that obviously only needs one. If that means 'progressive post black metal' and 'blackened shoegaze post metal' have to exist, so be it. And if we have to call Bathory 'extreme metal' because subgenres aren't retroactive or are about sound rather than soul, then so be it. But I only sort of know what I'm talking about.