It's Popular, Now It Sucks/Quotes

"She used to be good. Now she's becoming popular!"

—Will Shakespeare, Irregular Webcomic

"Oh no. Sci-fi is getting mainstream recognition? This could be problematic. Now how will I feel superior by reading and watching material from a previously marginalized and ignored genre if it suddenly becomes mainstream and thus cool to like it? I know, I'll insist that anything that is recognized by the mainstream is junk and only watch and read obscure sci-fi, while insisting the genre was better when it wasn't distilled for the lowest common denominator. Whoo, glad I solved THAT problem."

—Comment on io9.com, in response to a post titled "Science Fiction Is About To Take The Giant Leap To Oscar Recognition"

Delving deep into my letterbox when I discovered
Fan-mail for MC Front (noo!)
It kind of hovered
Before my vision
I made a decision
To open it up;
It said "Yo Frontalot, you suck!"
Whew, I was worried for a second that I'd started to earn love
Seeking all my indie points burned up...

—MC Frontalot, Indier Than Thou

In Real Life, money makes the world go around. It's all well and good talking about how something should be about 'The Art Of It', and not about the money, but in the real world You. Need. Money. That nice little guitar of his that Mr. Crowe uses to strum out his art and all that? Yeah, you need to keep that thing in good shape, you need to clean it, you need to replace broken strings, you need food so the muscles in your arms don't atrophy and you're incapable of lifting a guitar... that being said, of course I'm not saying one should only be about the money, but what exactly is preventing Crowe from making money and revolutionizing music? ... take artists like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci; they tended to get paid for their work. You need money to survive in the real world. But in this comic, they're not living in the real world; they're living in a fool's paradise where they feel the need to rebel against their privileged environments because of 'The Man' or some other bullcrap.

—Linkara, on a musician who spends a lot of time whining about this trope in Batman: Fortunate Son.

The first song I heard didn't sound so bad, and I said to myself: "Hey! Perhaps I am still fairly hip after all!" And then the deejay came on and said, apologetically: "I realize that song was mainstream." He said "mainstream" the way you would say "composed by Phoenicians." Then he played a song entitled--I am not making this up--"Detachable Penis."

—Dave Barry, "The Old-Timers Game"

Thou shalt not stop liking a band simply because they've become popular.

—Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, Thou Shalt Always Kill

Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded.

—Yogi Berra

I was uncool before uncool was cool.

—Anonymous

Nine Inch Nails were the best and most popular industrial band of all time; as a consequence, industrial purists usually assert that Nine Inch Nails aren't an industrial band at all (this is a counterintuitive phenomenon that tends to occur with purists from all subcultures, musical or otherwise).

—Chuck Klosterman

One should always support the independents. At least until they start making money, the soulless sellout fucks!

—Zero Punctuation, Amnesia the Dark Descent review

Do you think that they're too cool now,
That being popular is lame?
You're the ones who made them popular,
All the songs are still the same!

—Five Iron Frenzy, "Handbook for the Sellout"

"The truly coolest people like what they like, simply because they like it, without any regard for how popular it may (or may not) be."

—A poster on one of the forums at Subeta.net

"Never doubt the power of fangirls and their power to make people hate entire franchises and genres merely because they like them."

—a Sad but true quote on Deviant ART.

"It's hard to like something a lot of other people do."

—Another Sad truth from Deviant ART.

"If you work in entertainment and you make money, then you're a sellout."

—South Park.

I'm off to listen to bands you kids have never heard of, and when they go major I'll be there to complain about how much they've sold out!

—Uzuki Yashiro, The World Ends With You

H.A.T.E.R.S. = Having Anger Towards Everyone Reaching Success

—A Tweet

"For the first twelve weeks of Jaws, people were thrilled by it. Six months later, they were saying that no film that made that amount of money could be any good."

—Steven Spielberg

You just KNOW that if Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga were unknown artists, you'd be flamed for NOT liking them, not flamed FOR liking them,

—Anonymous

[Y]ou can see the trouble that certain authors have had through selling huge amounts. I mean Stephen King, I know, gets very cross about not being thought of as a literary author. He's a very good writer, but no one will take him seriously because of the amount he sells and the amount that he writes or he feels that nobody takes him seriously.
And J.K. Rowling, people were very rude about her here and all she did was saved literature. So I don't know what she'd done to deserve the rudeness. You can see it happening that the more ubiquitous somebody becomes, the less literary they are.

—Nick Hornby, IDEAS, "Think reading means you're smart? Think again"

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