@beginners_ear said:

...it's that above point that really rings true with me, and has since...well, since before I even started listening to Phish and saw the same behavior in Deadheads. There's a contradiction in the fandom that's always stuck in my craw, and that's the dichotomy between the exploratory, "in the moment", nature of improvisational music (and the Phish experience) on the one hand, and the need to measure, rate, and analyze on the other. Like you say, I definitely understand it, but I also think it can go way overboard. There's a type of fan that is all about the stats, and listening to someone like that is about as enjoyable as listening to a Creationist. They're just looking for a comfortable structure to latch onto.

Amen to your comment in general. I do want to bounce off this paragraph a little...

The rankings, ratings, collections, comparisons, commentaries, and above all the bloody damned bitter arguing over identity...I've long been as enamored of that stuff as so many other phish.netters, and I think it's good to recognize that it's all a way of making sense of something that really can seem senseless. I don't even mean the music, either -- sure, song selection can be weird and OK that key change seemed to come out of nowhere and yikes Fishman's doing this just like thing right now HOW DOES HE, etc., but the even more unfathomable thing is our own relationship to the music. The investment, the incredible uplift, and yeah the disappointment and despondency and (most complex of all) the ambivalence that we all at times feel toward this music that is, after all, one of our favourite things in the whole world.

I mean, teenagers have to think their favourite band is the very best band because if they don't then the world is, after all, a contingent thing which exists independently of them and other people really are exactly as real and complexly human as we are, and their choice of favourite band is arbitrary and they will after all die just like everyone else. Yoiks!

That stuff carries on into adulthood in attenuated form. (If I hear another goddamn Red Sox fan babble piously about 'faith'...) I was very dependent on that kind of thinking for a long, long time, and still am to a much greater degree than I'd like.

The mythology of Phish -- America's biggest touring rock band, the hidden gem of 1990s music, the guys who can play anything, the smartest jammiest craziest blah blah blah -- really feeds into this identity-formation stuff. It's easy to incorporate Phish fandom into your ego. Hell, when I got into them they were still a reasonably well-kept secret in terms of mainstream culture, and I loved that.

Not a lot of stuff made sense to me then, but my Phish fandom could. Or it could make other things about me make sense to me, by contrast if nothing else.

Anyhow, I guess I'm trying to roll back the negativity in some of my earlier posts here, and say that these retreats into abstraction do get in the way of bliss (i.e. nostalgic comparisons don't explain why the new stuff isn't as satisfying, they cause the dissatisfaction), but they're sources of pleasure and sense in their own right, and I don't wanna throw the timers and setlist-bickerers out of the fandom or anything. I've been and continue to be that dude. I guess I just want the forebrain-heavy stuff to become optional; I wanna work with the music to enter into bliss. It's weird to ask Phish to respond in any way to my prejudices.

(Not that I don't.)

Sorry this is muddled. It's like a hundred degrees all week here! I am a dried out shell of a man right now.