Serious Business/Music

• How about just the simple question---what is music? You hardly have to go far to see people denouncing 'experimental' music as not music at all. It doesn't even need to be as extreme as free jazz or contemporary classical music; people who frequently say this about music they just *don't enjoy* (hip hop being a frequent victim of this---though more pretentious music fans will toss this at radio pop).
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's version of "Trapped In The Closet," "Trapped In The Drive-Thru", is a ten-minute long song about a husband and wife going to a drive-thru, ordering their food, and paying for it. It includes moments where the wife asks for a chicken sandwich (instead of her usual cheeseburger) and the husband says, "I don't know who you are anymore!" Everything is an Epic moment. At the end, the husband freaks out because they forgot his onions.
• R. Kelly's original "Trapped in the Closet" itself, which treats its Soap Opera plot so seriously that it's almost certainly tongue-in-cheek. Whether or not it's intentional, people still appreciate its So Bad It's Good qualities.
• Music genres. People will argue to death trying to define a genre or deciding whether or not a piece of music falls under this razor-thin subgenre or that one. Notable examples include:
  • The war over what is punk and what is not punk, beautifully exemplified by this anecdote:

You ask me, "What is punk?" I kick over a trash can and say, "This is punk." So you kick over a trash can and ask, "This is punk?" and I say, "No, that's a trend."

• • Ironically, the above quote is by Billie Joe Armstrong, frontman of Green Day—the band that gets unfairly maligned more than any other in the punk war.
  • "What is REAL rap music?" Almost anything made after 1999 is seen as popcorn trash. On the opposite side, anything before 1999 is played-out and passe. The turning point was the time when "Gangsta rap", Alternative Rap, Political Rap, Hardcore Hip-Hop and associated genres lost popularity among casual rap listeners, causing a rift in those that followed new genres and those that preferred the old.
  • Heavy metal. Go to any heavy metal discussion board and there's a good chance that half of the posts are trying to decide whether a band is death metal, thrash, black metal, progressive metalcore or all of them at once. The other half will be denying that the band is metal at all.
• Rap feuds. Many people giggled about the "west coast/east coast" rivarly until they learned that people were actually getting killed over it. Rivalries have always been a part of the genre's culture for better or for worse. Even during the old school era things were dicey.
• The Norwegian band TNT's original vocalist Tony Harnell left in 2006 and was replaced by Tony Mills, leading to serious Fan Rivalry among fans. Witness this for yourself by looking at the comments for any TNT video.
• Black Metal. Let's just say that aside from all the supernatural shit that goes on & the size of the fanbase, Metalocalypse isn't that big of an exaggeration...
  • Especially if you were in Norway during the early 1990s. People were murdered.
• 'Tis a brave soul who ventures onto the Muse messageboards and asks the wrong question. If you're lucky, you'll be told to get lost. If not, you'll experience the online equivalent of a public flogging.
• The Beatles' fans provide numerous examples, but John being murdered and George attacked in his home by crazed fans are the ultimate ones.
  • This proves to the whole world what John Lennon was trying to point out with his "more popular than Jesus" quote. It wasn't meant to prop up the Beatles or be anti-religious or blasphemous, but to point out the Serrrrrrrious Importance the media and their fanbase were placing on the "four lads of Liverpool" and every move they made in the eyes of the public. Very likely as a delibrate distraction from discussing the issues of the day and the Unwinnable war of the day. It also gives entertainment journalism its own facade of profundity.
• Manowar serves up this trope with a massive helping of cheese.
• Guitar playing, or at least the equipment required. Dropping $20 for a single handmade guitar pick (mass-produced delrin/nylon ones go for about $3/dozen for comparison's sake) isn't unheard of in the pursuit of the perfect guitar tone.
• The reaction to Kanye West's interruption of Taylor Swift at the VMAs. This might be the only example of the trope that has prompted a sitting American president to weigh in.
  • Not only that but Kanye received death threats after the incident. Just to be clear: he interrupted someone at an award show and didn't even lay a hand on her.
• Robert Johnson famously claimed to have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads to gain his skill with the guitar.
• Korean boy group leader Yunho once drank a poisoned drink made of super glue, not knowing it was sent by an anti-fan, needing to be hospitalized. The letter that came with the drink told him to "watch his mouth". What made it more frightening was that the letter and drinks targeted the rest of the members as well.
• Even the simple act of listening to music can be taken too far. While having some good audio gear is a nice luxury, meeting hardcore audiophile standards of spending throwing money at handcrafted DAC's, amps designed by Nikola Tesla, headphones blessed by the Pope, and encoding all music at 24bit/192kHz can bring listenng to those old Kinks albums to new heights of paranoia. Oh, and don't forget the $1000 cables. (The link is apparently a joke, but you get the idea.) Apparently they can save your life from dimensional rifts. These examples, of course, only apply to digital audio. Analogue audio enthusiasts (yes, the British spelling is required) can be even more unmeasurably discriminating. Just remember, man, it's all about the warmer sound. Parodied by Xkcd here.
• Michael Jackson. Since many casual fans (at least in the U.S.) gave up on him from the child abuse allegations of 1993 onwards, those that remained were/are often frighteningly fanatical. After he died on the cusp of a return to the concert stage, and perhaps in part because fans publicly went berserk over it, he became serious Serious Business. Though he was better known as a tabloid freak show than a musician in his final fifteen years, all media treated his death like a big deal — bigger than protests in Iran. Tributes kept pouring in, people rushed to get tickets to his memorial service, MTV played music videos during prime hours for the first time in years, his albums completely sold out, and even the United States Senate had a moment of silence to commemorate his death...never in a lifetime has a person's death triggered such huge attention worldwide. Bigger than Princess Diana Pope John Paul II EVERYONE. And now we have websites like Inner Michael which continue to stump for Jackson being one of the greatest human beings of our time.
  • Jon Stewart lampshaded this by showing CNN report Jackson's death, while a series of far more serious reportings (Natural disasters, murder, foreign politics) scrolled as small texts along the bottom of the screen.
• The idea is played for laughs in this piece, the chief conceit of which is that by the year 2110, there is an entire academic discipline devoted to the study of Ke$ha's music.
• Many music reviews like to draw a line in the sand over whether or not a popular music artist, piece of music and/or style is (or was) relevant in the "age of punk", "age of grunge" or "age of gangsta rap", regardless of the quality of music, or whether the artist/genre in question even needs to acknowledge those musical movements. This is even in spite of whether the general public themselves take an active interest in whatever the next big musical revolution happens to be.
• Justin Bieber among his fans and haters. His fans see him as the greatest thing ever, his haters see him as a baby eating puppy killer who is ruining music as we know it.
  • Really, anyone who is the face of pop music (especially pop music aimed for teenage girls) at any time will have that effect on people, depending on their tastes in music. It might be a combination of Hype Backlash, Periphery Demographic and It's Popular, Now It Sucks. Before Justin, it was Miley Cyrus and The Jonas Brothers, and before that, Britney Spears and The Backstreet Boys, and then before that was New Kids on the Block...
• Release of the "Public Enemy No. 1" video by Megadeth (starring three chimps in a western setting) in November 2011 was followed by a flood of Facebook comments in the vibe of "Screw this! Chimps in a video? Metal is SERIOUS BUSINESS!"
• Brickwalling is achieving this status as more and more people become aware of the issue. Once you learn what brickwalling is, you immediately hear it in any piece of music that was engineered in studio to be artificially loud.