A simple diagnostic to work out whether you’re famous: has your home scene disowned you yet?

The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. Yet I’m told that nobody in art circles pays it any attention. It’s not a case that the painting is oversaturated and nobody wants to talk about it. The Mona Lisa genuinely doesn’t seem to be of interest to people who study art for a living.

It was involved in a famous art theft, and maybe it hung in Napoleon’s bedroom for a while. These things ignited a self-sustaining fire of parody and cultural reference that keeps laypeople interested to this day. On its own merits, its a well-executed portrait from an era of well executed portraits. Okay, but not greatest-painting-ever material. Or such is my reading of the art community’s attitude.

In the same way, a top 10 list of thrash metal might conceivably never mention Metallica, and a 10 top list of house music would probably never talk about Daft Punk, and UK skiffle fans probably aren’t wild about the Beatles. They’ve gotten too big for their respective scenes. They’re not a big fish in a small pond, they’re like a whale in an eyedropper. Their subgenre is famous for them, not the other way around. I remember thrash metal discussions where you’d get the stinkeye if you spoke about Metallica. Like you’d brought out a can of Chef Boyardee at a fine cordon bleu culinary school.

I was reading about how Green Day lost their early punk rock fanbase after they signed a major label deal, and it struck me that fame is the flash point that separates healthy fans from unhealthy fans. They might wear the same band shirt, but they’re not the same person. Casual fans, perversely, seem to like things more on their own merits. Hardcore believers, on the other hand, often seem to be malignant narcissists who don’t realise that their obsession is really all about them. They liked it first, they liked it harder, they own the fucking t-shirt, and don’t you forget it, peasant. They wear their “liking thing x” status like a Boy Scout’s merit badge, without the badge and without the merit.

Why else would a record label deal make them suddenly decide they don’t like Green Day any more? Their fannishness was about their own egos. Liking Green Day was just a status-signalling prop, like a woman’s handbag.

Few people are able to make products that appeal to the hardcore coterie and the mass markets. In fact, I think it might be impossible. There’s possibly a “Texas Sharpshooter” element to this stuff, where hardcore fans disavow things for the simple reason that it’s gotten too popular with hoi polloi.

This seems an inextricable and intractable aspect to how cultural circles work. Scott Alexander talks about an example of how fashions change (using the example of cellular automata, a’la Conway’s Game of Life), and how poor people try to imitate the styles of the rich – only to have the rich react in horror at the grubby unwashed copping their style, and moving on to something else. Is it any kind of stretch to posit that there’s a cultural rich, and a cultural poor? Cultural cordon bleu and cultural Chef Boyardee’s? When it comes to entertainment, apparently there is no fate worse than liking the band equivalent of Ikea furniture.

It all seems…unpleasant. If you’re shallow for liking something that’s popular, what does that make someone who stops liking something for the exact same reason?

George Orwell’s dystopian novel Eat Pray Love contains a plot device called a Memory Hole, where politically inconvenient documents are not just destroyed, but are removed from memory. In practice, we probably don’t need to destroy documents, we just need to make sure they’re on page 134 of a tumblr blog.

In 2005, symphonic metal band Nightwish went into a strange tailspin that ended with singer Tarja Turunen being ejected from the band. Why? We’re still not sure. The more you read about it, the less you understand. Reading about it unlearns things from your brain. Everyone says something different. It’s like the six or seven people involved live in eight or nine parallel universes.

In a valiant attempt to clear up the issue, Tarja’s husband Marcelo Cabuli gathered over 150 questions from the fans and wrote answers to them. He says many things that are…orthogonal to the recollections of various band members, but the fact that he typed nearly thirty thousand words defending his wife’s honour is impressive.

When I saw him post his answers, I thought “this is interesting” and “this will be gone from the internet someday”, so I saved it. And yes, it seems it is currently gone from the internet. So here it is reposted. The most fascinating part is where he implies Tuomas Holopainen was motivated by romantic rejection:

“36) Many people say that everything this happened because he Tuomas felt something for the Tarja and this feeling was not corresponded. It was the impression that passed. This can be answered? Or not?
Heluza Mercaus Viegas Brazil

Nightwish lyrics are Tuomas’ life diary, as it has been said. With this new information that I am sharing with you, please check once again some of them. We all can find amazing songs with beautiful lyrics full of poetry. Their meaning won’t remain that uncertain any longer.”

Imagine something. Is that too much to ask? It won’t take much effort, and when it really starts happening you won’t have to imagine any more.

Around 2020, a disease expresses itself in the human population. A very embarrassing and serious disease. It has some clinical name, but everyone on the street calls it “well, you know…that.”

It only affects men. The symptoms are a pretty quick death.

Maybe we can identify the pathogen responsible. Maybe it’s something too synergistic and vague to nail down – a complex multi-stage infection caused by the interaction of multiple benign bacteria.

But one thing’s clear: it’s universal, and it’s incubating in anyone. There’s nowhere to quarantine so it won’t get out, and nowhere to quarantine to stop it from getting in.

But one group is spared: gay men.

To be more exact, men who have been sodomised.

This disturbing fact provokes the kind of consternation-fuelled investigation where you can almost imagine sweat dripping off the researchers’ fingers. Yes, it’s true. If you’ve taken it up the ass, you will not get the disease.

Ipso facto, if you do not wish to get the disease, you must take it up the ass.

We try to find a more…dignified way of conferring protection, but no dice. Artificially douching your colon with a man’s semen doesn’t work. Likewise, anal penetration is not the trigger. Those who practice “pegging” are dying at the same rate as everyone else. You have to actually have a gay man ejaculate into your asshole if you want to stay alive. Why? How does this work?

Good question, but until we figure it out…how badly do you want to live?

Society now looks quite a bit different.

The gay bathhouses of the 1960s are reopened, and become filled with men with shivering hands, thousand-yard stares, and evasive speech.

Fashion designers, architects, and artists have an excellent survival rate. The theme of the age for doctoral theses becomes something like “Anal Lube Hermeneutics – Towards an Understanding of Post-Plague Survivor’s Guilt Through the Work of Foucault.”

Members of the clergy and mullahs survive at far higher rates than average. They credit spiritual benediction and prayer for their survival.

The incumbent President of the United States – a family-values Baptist from Alabama – makes the controversial decision to have gay sex and save his own life. Everything’s handled with the utmost discretion, but unfortunately the gay “donor” had a tiny spycam in his pubic hair. The video is sold to the Daily Mail for a record-setting eighty million dollars.

Mostly, things become very, very awkward.

You’ll be meet a well-dressed businessman in Fleet Street or New York, shake his hand, and then break off eye contact as soon as possible. You’ll both be thinking the same thing. Very recently, perhaps only yesterday, you had another man on your back. And his balls were touching yours. Anyway, what’s the Stockholm Securities Exchange doing?

And there’s always troubling warnings from the CDC and NIH labs. The plague is mutating, evolving. Who knows if gay sex will still be enough to confer protection tomorrow. Sometime soon, dog semen might be the cure. Or dolphin semen. Whatever. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it – perhaps literally.