Durandatory Duran: Becoming a Fan

by Chris McGinty

As sort of an interesting point, at least to me, Nathan brought up that he was a fan of Duran Duran’s Facebook page. It’s partially interesting because I’m not, but I’ll fix that probably before I even post this up. I think it’s mostly because I try not to be too cluttered on my social networking sites.

I have two My Space accounts, one which is people that I actually know, and one which is an “add everyone.” I have some passable to great blog reading at both accounts, and I’ll add you on the Video Hack account if you send a friend request… probably. The “add everyone” is so hard to keep up with at times, and that’s why I try to keep things uncluttered. Because of the nature of Facebook, my current account is not an “add everyone,” and I doubt I’ll ever make one.

The point here though is that Duran Duran is simply a group I should have on my fan list, and Nathan said they were pretty active with their stuff; blogging and such. I’ll often just go check in with the official site, where they post up blogs and news as well. This got me thinking about the likely differences between being famous like Duran Duran and having a blog, and being famous like us and having a blog.

The first point is clearly the general differences between their level of fame and ours. Their “Liberty” album failed to sell 500,000 copies, and it was considered a failure. We can’t even fathom selling one percent of that (5,000) with our DVDs. Part of that is because we don’t really have a DVD for sell, but even if we did, we don’t have that many friends and relatives.

I sometimes think that there has to be a certain charm to our writings here that comes from us literally being the amateur and unknown. We’re the guys who don’t know how to market ourselves, even though we do a lot of work (some of it is even good) and even though we have hours upon hours worth of content available. The irony of course being that we can’t always be those guys if our work is to reach the masses as a testament to being unknown. If we stay unknown no one gets to read about us being unknowns.

What are the differences with Duran Duran and others of that caliber? Do they have editors while I edit our writing? Do they have people who manage their websites and social networking sites while Nathan manages our website and we manage our own social networking sites? Not that I have anything against delegation, or even the fact that they’re big enough to need that kind of support for their internet presence. I simply wonder what it’s like to have to need it. Even Henry Rollins has a staff for as much as he does on his own.

I don’t want to be an overnight success. I’d love to be able to write my perspective on every step up the fame ladder, and stop somewhere around the Henry Rollins level. Then again, while I don’t want it overnight, soon would be nice. It feels like for as long as we’ve been at this that we should be bigger somehow. Miguel and I were doing the first show in the late 90’s on public access TV, and we had a little bit of a web presence. We’ve been doing the audio show for over a decade now. Nathan and I have been on You Tube and public access TV for years now. We have a definite web presence except that nobody knows we’re here. I’ve even been in a couple of local bands. It’s sort of funny and sort of sad. And we’re still unknowns.