Haters

"I would not sit in the scorner's seat, Or hurl the cynic's ban" or would I

It’s both a failing & a blessing that I’m not popular enough to have many haters. But that means the hate I get stands out more starkly. The hurled insults stick like dashboard bugs to my mind & come into focus any time I’m feeling remotely down, despondent & doubting. The most recent one was the first comment on my video for “Let Me Live By the Side of the Road” :

“utter twaddle. being hot only gets you so far”

The backhanded compliment only made the dagger of the “twaddle” jab that much deeper. And touched a tender, female-specific, wound in me. That I’m only worth something if I look good enough. So that not even being enough, in my twisted perception, felt like a lower lowdown blow.

To respond or not to respond to the hate. I don’t really know. It changes day to day. Mostly I believe it’s best to ignore, but, honestly, this time I wanted to bite his head off. I took a few breaths and without thinking much attached the poem that the “twaddling” song was based on :

“Let me live in my house by the side of the road,
Where the race of men go by-
They are good, they are bad, they are weak, they are strong,
Wise, foolish - so am I.
Then why should I sit in the scorner's seat,
Or hurl the cynic's ban?
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.”

In my sparring state of mind, it felt like a walloping literary “touche”, but as I reflected (obsessed) later, it simply sounded lame & only served to reinforce the truth of his dig - twaddle: silly, tedious, pretentious talk.

Better to have let it be & not given him the satisfaction of my attention & the awareness that he succeeded in ruffling my feathers.

But he did get my attention & ruffled my feathers to an embarrassing degree.

And this made me think about the comment section.

While I have many strong opinions about music & art, I have never once commented on someone’s work with negativity. I feel most artists have this in common. We may be the most discerning, judgmental & elitist regarding other people’s work, but we know not to share our opinions publicly - or at least not directed straight toward each other. Sure, I’ll share with friends, I like/don’t like this or that, but it stays within the field of real life conversation & never gets heard by the artist themselves.

The major point being: my opinion is not meant to be heard by the artist and that’s because what I think does not matter. What I think has no bearing on whether the music is good or bad. What I think is a complex of related & unrelated things: my specific taste, envy, the mood I happen to be in at the moment, whether I’m trying to impress the person I’m speaking to with my snobbery, whether I was spurned or desired by said artist, etc…

And maybe this looks like an elaborate effort to convince you of the untrueness of aforementioned “hate”, but, in fact, it isn’t. It’s the trueness of the comment that rankles. If I didn’t feel that somewhere in me it was true, it wouldn’t sting.

Or maybe it looks like I’m arguing for a Barney-like censorship of everyone’s posts. Like, everyone has to play nice, fake smile and get along.

That’s not it either. I am just grappling aloud with yet another bizarre arm of the human societal experiment that is our technological evolution. Today the public square is online & accessible the world over. While at a live show, it’s true, you could get heckled, but now the heckling is available to hecklers everywhere 24/7/365.

When I read someone’s harsh, rude & sometimes outright cruel - ie. ‘Taylor Swift, I hope you die” - comment I can see that’s more a problem with them than Taylor Swift.

And we can all dish it out, but it’s a rare someone who can take it. I certainly can’t take it. At one point it took boldness and bravery to jeer at someone to their face, now any coward in his mother’s basement can enact a full scale assault on thousands of comment sections in the course of one red bull-fueled night.

I generally believe it’s always better to take the high road. To ignore. To shake it off. To wish them the best anyway.

But sometimes a bully needs standing up to. So maybe next time I’ll say how I really feel.

Like:

“it’s true, being hot only gets me so far……far away from pathetic losers like you.”