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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nScreenshot taken from the Psycho Sloan Site<\/em> homepage, circa 1999, containing proof of the existence of a now broken link to Sloan Teletubbies fan art. Accessed through the Wayback Machine<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is, though, at least one impressive quality developed from all of this: my unrivaled persistence in sleuthing the internet for increasingly obscure pictures of bands I like. With each new image discovered comes a catharsis: the appeasement of my desire to ensure that no picture taken of my favorite groups is forever forgotten. Because each photograph, no matter how amateur, is its own unique historical document. And when fixated on groups pre-dating the present social media age, finding these images is challenging, especially as search engines modernize their yield to only the most up-to-date results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But, for once, I was grateful that my 200-dollar laptop had Microsoft Edge as its default browser, because Bing Images offered a look into an earlier era of the internet that Google wouldn\u2019t yield 5 pages in. This was revealed to me when I uncovered an image of rock star Patrick Pentland I had never gleaned before. A simple Bing Images search of the man\u2019s name had led me to a Tripod<\/em> site, circa 1998, dedicated to Sloan, my favorite power pop band from the 90s; just one of the many HTML home-coded sources of y2k fan culture laying dormant on forgotten URLs not easily accessible from casual searches. These URLs exhibit the type of fan behavior I relate to, a degree of obsession I lost to an existential depression brought on by growing up. But that night, I was in my youth again, lost in a convoluted set of links that, for a brief internet age, were the newest platform for teenage obsession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fascination-fueled, I spent hours screenshotting the most eccentric parts of this corner of the web, envy growing within me. I yearned to spend these hours how the creators spent theirs, pouring their soul into their site\u2019s designs; what I viewed as ultimate examples of self-expression un-replicable in the modern digital age. The bright-colored backgrounds and mismatched font selections recalled a more innocent internet, where individuality won over marketability. Each site had a certain set of pages: a band biography, marked by the quirky personality of the site\u2019s owner; a band gallery, often including images the site owner had personally taken; and even site games, where one could play Sloan mad libs or test their knowledge on band trivia. Though repetitive in their information, the individuality of these sites meant they each offered something unique among their contemporaries. Unlike modern fansites (or, really, fan pages) that exist as only one small profile on an expansive social media website, these blogs existed under their own URL, limiting the site\u2019s intricacy only by the skill level of who coded it. My favorite Sloan fansite (aptly titled Psycho Sloan Site<\/em>) at one point in time provided entire pages dedicated to the band member\u2019s zodiac signs, the definitions of their names, and even physiognomic analyses of their faces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a certain level of unabashed derangement today\u2019s equivalent of this obsessive behavior cannot replicate. The nature of the modern social media site to recommend content and encourage virality means fan communities are not nearly as insular as they once were. To access a URL like Psycho Sloan Site<\/em>, however, required that you had already established yourself as having some similar degree of obsession, whether from being linked by a similarly obsessed friend, or going out of your way to subscribe to a similarly obsessed webring. There is inherent privacy that comes with the insular nature of such a site, making this version of fandom more organic than today\u2019s internet fan culture will ever be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But as the internet progresses, and once popular software like Adobe\u2019s Flash <\/em>become obsolete, the features that make up these relics of time have lost their functionality. Only so much had been preserved by efforts such as the Wayback Machine<\/em>, a community-led attempt to prevent such examples of fan culture from being lost forever. But why does it matter? Why is it important that Sarah’s photoshopped image of Sloan as the Teletubbies be preserved with the rest of music history? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Because journalism like this provides something that an archived music magazine cannot; its amateur expressions of adoration share the perspective of those arguably most pertinent to a band\u2019s success. The often young, obsessed fans running these sites paid greater attention to their subjects than a professional music critic could ever be expected to. Through their obsession, they documented their bands with extreme accuracy. Sites like these are not just one perspective on a group, they are an amalgamation of every fan interview, every sneaky photograph, and every live performance a band has ever produced. Through the bonding these insular communities had in their shared mission to create the most thorough amalgamation of information possible, true legacies were formed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This teenage obsession has created the most factual representation of the band to ever exist, before or after it. Because it doesn\u2019t rely on any status, that of a professional interviewer or an advertiser-friendly social media page. And by archiving these sites, we are preserving journalism not only interesting to the band’s fans, but to anyone who wants to understand how legends are shaped. It\u2019s a folklore, perhaps less solidified than the ancient tales the term initially conjures, but still a fan mythos reflective of how storytelling captures a time period. Because now whenever I think of Sloan, I don\u2019t think of the critical response to their music. I think of them at their fan meetups in the 90s, I think of the stories they\u2019ve long forgotten since last shared in fan-conducted interviews decades prior, and I think of the physiognomic analyses of their faces. Ironically enough, perhaps Impact<\/em> magazine put it best in their July\/August 1996 issue: \u201cThey\u2019re stalked like superstars by rabid fans\u2013who feverishly analyze lyrics, sightings and the most mind-numbingly mundane details of their lives on Sloan Net\u2013but they don\u2019t sell enough to go gold\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Emily Burnheimer I recall my past only through my timeline of musical obsessions. It\u2019s hard to remember anything else\u2013 or at least, it\u2019s hard to separate the music when it frames every memory. It\u2019s easy to find the music in everything, and in the isolation of adolescence I did just that, spending every free […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/arouseosu.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/arouseosu.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/arouseosu.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arouseosu.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arouseosu.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/arouseosu.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":800,"href":"http:\/\/arouseosu.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions\/800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/arouseosu.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arouseosu.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arouseosu.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}