The 5%.

• Reflections on whether sometimes it can be more than mere pretentiousness to state "that band has become too popular to listen to now", with examples including Bon Iver, Anais Mitchell, and the xx.

It took me a long time to engage properly with Bon Iver's second album. It wasn't because the music isn't great, but because I wasn't the first of my friends to hear it. I admit to being guilty, more so in the past, of turning away from an artist the moment they receive widespread public recognition. (I say of course public recognition and not critical acclaim. Critical acclaim from the right sources can infinitely boost a band's appeal, whereas general popularity can immediately diminish it).

For me, growing to love the second Bon Iver record was about realising the ridiculousness of my own prejudices. Part of this process involved acknowledging the fact that I only came to Justin Vernon's music after his first album For Emma, For Ever Ago was Re-Released on Jagjaguwar, when I was introduced to this brutally moving performance by a friend.  Remembering that, and considering my own slightly embarrassing reaction to the eponymous album, I realised that it was quite conceivable that there were those who scoffed at the band wagon jumpers such as myself back in 2008. I imagine that somewhere a hardcore of fans unnecessarily rejected Bon Iver after the band became "well known" and upgraded from the original self release of For Emma and released the album on Jagjaguwar. It became obvious that it was important to distance myself from such a farce.

That sort of cancerous pretentiousness is deeply harmful to an individual's appreciation of the beautiful thing we call music. Pretentiousness in the other extreme , i.e. claiming to like a band for the sake of image, is dumb but ultimately harmless. It might actually be a good thing if it encourages musical discussion and sharing, where it may even lead to others discovering bands that they genuinely enjoy.

Harm occurs however when we let our fear of the opinions of others, or worse, our own need to feel superior to others, prevent us from enjoying something. People will all too often scorn bands on the basis that they have "lost their way" since the release of their first album when this has absolutely no correlation with reality. I once heard it stated that Biffy Clyro are "no longer making the music they want to make", as if men in their 30s are longing for the days when screamo was cool.

The situation is made worse when we consider that the people we are trying to impress or out-do don't even know what we listen to the majority of the time, let alone care.  It's crazy that we act as if that one friend who always knows "the best" bands were reading our thoughts and shaking his or her head. We act as if the song we're listening to on an iPod at any given moment were emblazoned on our clothing for all to see. Musical taste ought not to be something to be ashamed of, but I won't deny that it can be. However, in the iPod age so much of music consumption is private and if we're unhappy with how others might perceive our tastes we have a simple solution: don't share it with them. Even when musical taste is shared with another and even if they do care momentarily, the opinions which you hold in such high regard are probably forgotten 10 minutes later when the conversation moves on to traffic, the weather, and the blonde girl who works in Starbucks. 

So sure, choose to wear a shirt of a band with 5 fans and an E.P only available in Albania if it makes you happy, but t's simply mad to deny yourself something in an attempt to make yourself look better in the eyes of others  who aren't even looking.

Self righteous stage set, I would actually like to discuss an important exception to my own dogma. As I grow older I try as much as possible to ridicule myself whenever I'm guilty of the sins described above. Nonetheless, having stated that 95% of "that band is too popular now" is a ridiculous and mostly internal struggle, I write here to defend the 5% of times when it is not. I won't try and wade belligerently into the "who lost their way where and when" battle, opinions flailing wildly, but I will defend the notion that sometimes listening to a band's record can simply be less enjoyable when more and more people are also consuming it.

Now, bear with me on this one.

Let's imagine that I told you that I love you. That we spent long nights together trying to sort out all the little things in the world that make us sad, and woke up to sunrises and coffee and everything else that goes along with it. This would be beautiful, until the point that you discovered that I had shared a similar experience with a friend of yours. Worse still, let's say that you discovered that I had shared these experiences with that person you sort of like but secretly really fucking hate. It would make all of my intimate words feel meaningless, and would make you feel a fool for ever being moved by them.

Songs can have similar effects on us that intimate partners do. I have my own "3am records" that I would discuss only with a few select people. I have songs that are for me on quiet mornings and songs that are for me when I'm feeling lonely. My love for them is increased by the fact that it feels like only I know them: it makes them feel special, personal, and unique. Great mass-appeal pop songs and club tunes can often in fact feed off of the same principle, only in reverse. Some songs, especially the likes of summer hits, actually benefit from being known by everyone. The difference here is that the catalyst is a sort of mass hysteria rather than a subtle sense of intimacy.

So, to continue my analogy, try to imagine the feeling of discovering that someone you care infinitely for is hooking up with strangers in terrible bars down town? That all those little commitments you made were all for nothing because they mean nothing to the person you allowed yourself to be exposed to? In the same way, how do you feel when a favourite song or artist, one that perhaps dragged you through a particularly difficult period in life, is heard over the speaker system of an equally terrible down town bar? You stand there, struck, gaping in horror as the words that changed your life pass the sweaty lips of a thousand drunken animals in terrible clothes that couldn't possibly appreciate them like you do... Or used to.

I'll return to Bon Iver from a different angle to illustrate my point. The band recently covered Anais Mitchell's Coming Down. I fell in love with that song from the moment I first heard it used as part of a promotional video for her latest album, Young Man in America. Bon Iver's cover is competent but it has nothing on the original. The moment Mitchell's word "free" sung in the bridge dissolves simply into breath is one of the most devastatingly beautiful noises ever recorded. I have no problem with the cover itself. However, now when I listen to the original I am only reminded of the screeds of Facebook posts from Bon Iver's newly amassed army of fans declaring their loooooooooooooooooooove for the song. The feelings of "this song relates to this thing that happened in my life" are lost and the illusion of intimacy is shattered.

A perfect up to date example? The new xx album and more specifically it's opening track, Angels. It's a great track. Lyrically and musically it's extremely intimate. "You moved through the room like breathing was easy" is a great line. However, some of this intimacy is unavoidably lost if the listener remembers that Coexist currently sits at the top of the UK album charts and thus Angels is musically consumed by hundreds of thousands of people alongside tracks by artists such as Joe McElderry and Ed Sheeran. Thankfully, however, those looking for an equivalent might turn to Maps. The two songs have broadly similar themes, Maps isn't heard every day, and - another example of what I'm talking about -  Maps comes from a time before Yeah Yeah Yeahs songs had been appropriated for use as Topman background music.

I won't begrudge any band their success, especially those that deserve it: generally music becomes popular for a reason. We must always try to enjoy great music without prejudice, even if we sometimes can't enjoy it in the way we used to or could have done were the band less well known. I suppose all I hope that can be taken from all this is that it's important to laugh when we catch ourselves engaging in "the 95%" of self centred image obsession. As I learned with Bon Iver, I was only hurting myself by not enjoying something because it wasn't as cool as it once was to do so.

Having said that, Bon Iver's popularity means that it simply cannot hold the place in my heart that it perhaps could of 3 or 4 years ago, but I don't feel bad if I genuinely fall into "the 5%". People and music, like people and people, sometimes are simply not meant to be. Both are sad facts of life.

Modern Idolatry.

• Reflections on Shut Up and Play the Hits.

LCD Soundsystem's Farewell concert at Madison Square Garden has become an event regarded with near religious reverence in musical circles. I would have killed for a ticket to that show. Naturally, when it was announced that documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, detailing the lead up to and immediate aftermath of the concert, would be screened at cinemas across the UK followed by a satellite Q&A with James Murphy in London, I instantly bought tickets.

I was desperate to attend, and the documentary was truly fascinating... but I'm not really much of an LCD fan.

For me, the band's songs have always divided into three categories. First, the "single-friendly" category: the upbeat indie and dance-punk songs that see the band at their most accessible: The Daft Punk Is Playing at my House or Drunk Girls type songs.

Second comes the surprisingly introspective, emotional, and touching songs. All My Friends is undoubtedly one of the songs of the current musical generation. Tracks such as All I Want and New York I Love You also find home here.

Finally, however, comes the unfortunate category of the glitchy, inane, often barely on the right side of discordency tracks. The Disco Infiltrators or the Pow Pows. While writing this I happened to be listening to On Repeat. I was intrigued by the low buzzing noise Murphy had incorporated into the track, until it stopped and I realised I'd missed a phone call from my father.

Skipping tracks is almost taboo amongst those who "truly appreciate albums" and generally pressing the double-forward does indeed leave me feeling wretched and soulless, but an LCD record finds me hammering the skip button in a way that I usually reserve for output by Ryan so prolific that I release three albums in a year when one would suffice Adams.  I came to LCD as a fan of indie music, not dance music, and this might explain my lack of understanding, but it is just that - a lack of understanding. The songs in category three simply make no sense to my ears. They come across as filler; muzak for hipsters.

Having said all that, the neat little construction above was in fact composed before watching Shut Up... Now that I've seen it, I still feel largely the same, but will concede two things. One: I perhaps didn't give my third category enough credit. Sitting down and actually focusing on a track like Someone Great does make you realise that there is a lot of lyrical content there worth paying attention to. Two: Despite saying that I'm not a fan of dance music, having now watched a film of the band's live show, with Murphy strolling around the stage like some sort of dishevelled party ring-leader, I can see how the category three songs might make sense in context. A lot of sense. I suppose I can conclude that three, I'm going to give all LCD records in their entirety a lot more time to see if I come round.

But back to my point: why my rush to check out the film? Why the obsession with a band that I will happily dismiss half the catalogue of? The half of the tunes that I do enjoy I enjoy a great deal, but there's definitely something more to it than that: I think that I am enthralled with the cultural phenomenon that is James Murphy. The man appears to be the embodiment of modern cool. From LCD itself, through his myriad of other trendy-sounding projects, his involvement with Outkast, Gorillaz, and Converse (oh, all the cool mis-spellings), his fanatical coffee consumption and his perma-quiff, his involvement in indie film, and his generally doing cool shit and being a cool guy, Murphy has become somewhat of a modern idol. Whether he intended to or not, he has become more than a mere performer and has begun to take on a cultural significance in his own right.

Before going to the show I knew what I wanted to say about Murphy. The bones of a mostly average blog post were very much in place. It was a brilliant surprise then to discover that the exact thing I'm talking about is discussed by Murphy and Chuck Klosterman on screen. Murphy explains that any truly enthralling show that he has attended has been 50% about the music and 50% about the overall mythology of the individual or band performing it. The pair discuss Lou Reed and David Bowie  ("David Bowie's from fucking Mars" is probably my favourite standalone line from the film) and Murphy explains that he feels that Nick Cave is, for him at least, the last of the great musician-cum-mythological heroes.

When asked how a fan might emulate LCD in the same way someone might emulate Lou Reed by wearing sunglasses and a leather jacket, Murphy seems genuinely stumped. He doesn't recognise himself as an idol, and this humility perhaps adds to his appeal. Indeed, he admits that at least a small part of the reason for bringing the band to a close is that he likes being an everyman who can ride the subway without being recognised. While I personally can certainly admit to attempting to rip off the beaten up tennis shoes and blazer style that Murphy seems to have co-opted, his attitude to his art and his scene represent something far more significant for fans to aspire to. Perhaps LCD's most iconic song, Losing My Edge, at length highlights the futility of desperately trying to be cool.  Elsewhere in Shut Up... Murphy recognises that he is a lover of pretentiousness purely for the sake of pretentiousness - he recalls reading Gravity's Rainbow at 16 in an attempt to appear cool, although it is unclear for whom. The man's self awareness is admirable in a time when the cult of hipster-ism can regard itself in a viciously serious manner. Taken in sum, Murphy seems to embody an effortless cool, but at the same time an obtainable, realistic and down to earth one.

So are idols dead? In today's internet-based DIY musical age they don't exist in the same overt manner as the Bowies or the Reeds, not in credible music anyway. Murphy is therefore right to an extent, but idols are still there if we look for them. Kerouac disciple, story teller, and Hold Steady front man Craig Finn instantly comes to mind. Despite claims by some that the man is losing his edge, Finn remains for me, at least, a scribe or prophet for the generation inspired by Murphy. His tales of parties, shows, and music festivals so accurately describe the events and the characters contained within, but more importantly, all the emotional highs and lows that go along with them. His style and outlook have certainly informed my literary choices and the way in which I view the musical scenes around me.

I'm not intimately familiar with the world of Jack White, but I'm sure that he too holds great significance somewhere in the musical map that I'm beginning to draw. He has expertly branded himself as unconventional and a bit of a badass, and the various PR stunts that Third Man Records are pulling off are going a long way to prove that he just don't give a fuck. Elsewhere a band such as the Gaslight Anthem manage to maintain a very committed, distinctive, and focused everyman retro aesthetic in all aspects of their musical product.

It's reassuring to make such a list. It's easy to lament the past and fear for the future when we hear a statement such "Nick Cave is the last great iconic artist remaining" but it certainly should not inspire panic. Icons can be found everywhere if we want to find them and to fret about the fact that modern music doesn't have an equivalent of Lou Reed is to do modern music an injustice. The list above were merely a few of my personal favourites and came very quickly to mind. I could name others - Brendan Canning and Kevin Drew (responsible for the often awe-inspiring musical behemoth that is Broken Social Scene) would be obvious candidates for me. The bespectacled bookishness of Colin Meloy and the ever popular Decemberists is certainly worthy of note.The fact that I had already placed James Murphy himself in this category before watching the film speaks volumes.

Therefore, don't worry about Murphy lamenting the fact that idols are dead. Maybe he's just lost his edge.