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.