COMMENTARY.

Reinventing Faith: A Fanson Can Be Tough
21 November 2001

The following is an email that I, caught in a furious splurge of words, wrote on March 21 to my friend Rachael. Her initial feelings regarding the intrusion of the "real world" into a webmaster's Hanson domain reminded me of my own past unhappiness in this matter. There is a shared sensation in being a Hanson fan that all of you have probably experienced to some degree: it's that first kick of disillusionment when the magic of the Albertane Tour seeped away; it's that strange sense of something amiss when you realized there would always stand an unbreakable glassy surface between your world and Tulsa, Oklahoma; and it's that twang in your throat when you finished Laura's unforgettable article "These Blue Yonder Dreams." So, in the hope of shedding my own patch of light on this emerging mystery of fanatic breakdown, I have reproduced the following for your perusal. And believe me, that magic - that special Hanson brand of magic - it's still there. You just have to dig a little harder in the hat for it.

Dear Rachael,

You wrote, "Maybe all those sleepless nights spent challenging my own beliefs, conjuring up comebacks, constructing one-liners, will finally pay off."

Who here has not undergone days, maybe weeks, of fanatic breakdown, cruel self-doubt, bristling anxiety over the validity of everything we act upon as Hanson fans? I think a great number of people - though far less actually express their experience - are familiar with this cold, sullen, bittersweet feeling that worms its insipid way into one's heart like icy little fingers. One day you're walking around in the bustling and colourful world of real, live, flesh-and-blood people - each person following her own agenda, her own ambitions, academic- or career-oriented - but all of a sudden, you stop mid-track and the gritty, overwhelming tangibility of it all hits you with an overdose of the twenty-first century American teenager's cynicism-saturated reality.

Consequently, the oft-thought answer, "In a nutshell, I love Hanson because they are bright and beautiful and their music speaks to me, brings order and clarity to the chaotic world, connects with me in a way no other art form can imitate," is not good enough for others to hear. In fact, it becomes a million times easier to write such a response down, to nail it in black letters on paper or on the computer screen, instead of actually pronouncing each truthful word to the person who provoked you in the first place with the question, "Why a website?"

Never more clearly has my own apparent duplicity as a fan come into the light, and only now am I beginning to understand and accept the role-playing that all social creatures, you and I included, have to perform in order to thrive in an environment that is often hostile to the things we cherish and cultivate. Sometimes it seems we lead double lives! One existence is lived with the people at school, at home, on the sidewalks, around the next street corner - visible people who represent common sense, usefulness, and an unfaltering individual purpose in this social hierarchy where everybody must serve some function to the world. Needless to say, as high school or college students in this very practical universe, the amateur vocation of "Hanson webmaster" raises highbrows.

Our other existence - the one that takes place in ungodly hours of the night during vacations - is lived with people far less accessible - the people who make our hit counters increase, the ones sitting in a chair behind a computer screen, poring over our words from some distant sphere of their own - the ones you cannot see, cannot touch, cannot even begin to fathom. So why do we attempt to live both lives? Why not immerse ourselves in the tangible and forget the invisible and enigmatic? Why straddle two discrete universes when all the pedestrian road signs point to a pedestrian alternative?

I think it is because for people like us, prosaic realism simply doesn't cut it anymore: it fails to meet our needs or satiate our curious hungers.  Whereas the physical world is crammed with visual clutter and touchable things that fence us in and draw boundaries, in the virtual world online, such traditional material icons of reality are trashed completely. Here we communicate with one another in a perpetually shifting, nebulous realm where words count - even written ones that are hard to say out loud. Especially the written ones. Because in writing, we have found a voice.

That these two alternate existences mutually enhance, even cross-germinate, so that one is all the richer because of the other, is something a person has to believe in sooner or later. When I think of virtual reality, I see walls broken down. I see freedom and headspace - corridor after corridor of clean, white rooms in which to move and think and breathe so as to recover and eventually to collect and put back together the spiritual pieces of us broken in the tangible world. Rachael's Hanson Oasis? Space for Breathing? Bright and beautiful? I swear this is cosmic unity at its finest.

But as females, as teenagers, as webmasters, and as Hanson fans ("advocates" is a much better word), we fall into four of the most pernicious and bloody wrong stereotypes in popular culture: 1) the squealing pubescent teenybopper with black sharpie tattoos on her forehead, 2) the troubled adolescent, 3) the antisocial computer geek, and 4) the, well, squealing pubescent teenybopper with black sharpie tattoos on her forehead, "old" version. At any given point, for all of us who are really serious about our Hanson boys and about our websites or our e-zines or simply our personal analysis of their music, a sort of confrontation has to take place.

I have come to believe that the said confrontation is posed as much against the external people - the mocking, invasive purveyors of "reality" - as the internal doubts - our internal doubts, which constantly startle us, poke at us and badger us in disquieting little voices: "Why lavish hours on a Hanson website? Why commit a portion of your time, energy, and youth to three boys who do not even know that you, you little speck of dust, exist?" Then helplessness sets in and it is petrifying. You become almost paralyzed by a spiraling sense of no control and no significance which is further exacerbated by This Time Around royally sliding off the Billboard charts despite all your angst-ridden efforts to grab the world by the ears and make it listen to that wholesome music-making. But - what made you feel better in the midst of all that disorder? Emailing your online friends, returning to your website and posting an editorial that grapples with such issues, thinking and re-assessing your purpose, searching ever and anon for your Song to Sing. Damn it, what a beautiful thing!

I for one am too self-conscious to attempt self-martyrdom, and so this message is far from some effort to glorify and deify Hanson webmasters. In fact, look all over the web at the crops of personal pages: almost every long-standing site that has seen the changes of the seasons contains some journal entry or "miscellaneous piece" in which the writer's voice becomes quaky, riddled with self-doubt, and she questions the validity of her cause, scrambling for some clearly-articulated rationalization of her presence in the virtual world. What I believe is, there need be no other justification for the things we create - websites included - than the act of creation itself.

After all, the only true reality for a human being is the one she creates for herself. One mission statement, one song to sing, one bridge at a time. So who's to stop us and tell us no?

As I try to wind this email down, I cannot help but smile over that singular moment in Almost Famous, when Penny Lane stalwartly asserts, "Groupies? We're not Groupies. We're Band-Aids." So, Rachael, in the face of adversity, laugh and be tough. And be sticky.

Really sticky.

Yours,
Lulu