the nature of authenticity

I became a Deftones fan in high school... I want to say around 10th or 11th grade. I really liked the single "Change (In the House of Flies)and bought the CD it was featured on, "White Pony." The CD was hit-and-miss, but I liked it overall on the strength of it's better songs.

So, I considered myself a fan based off of these songs and began my considerable Deftones knowledge-gathering expedition. Where I now rely upon Wikipedia to quickly gather information on things that interest me, at that time I simply scoured the internet for whatever "Deftones" links popped up on Yahoo!

During my travels, I landed upon the Deftones OFFICIAL message board (not to be confused with all of those inferior unofficial ones). Reading through threads, I ran into the rant of a pissed off fan who said (near exact quote but, remember, this is 10 years ago):

I can't fucking stand all of these White Pony fans now that they're big on the radio. They don't know anything about the old shit, they're all just jumping on the bandwagon.

"FUCK THAT," I thought in my mind, with the caps lock clearly on. Whenever I'm a fan of something, I'm a REAL fan. I liked the Penguins when they sucked. I hate mainstream things... I'm totally independent in my likes and dislikes.

So, to prove how I didn't need to like what other people like and scour for other people's approvals, I went to the store and bought the two previous Deftones CDs that I hadn't heard. NOW I had their entire catalog and I was a REAL fan, just like that guy was talking about on the message board.

For the approval of some guy I don't know on a message board... in some digital pissing contest where I could prove that my stream was strong enough to stay on the boat.

I never talked to him again... as a matter of fact, I never talked to him, I merely read his post... but I'm glad that I was able to prove him wrong.

Ten years later, I still remember this event. Isn't it funny how fickle and proud we all are?