THOUGHTS ON QUEEN AND ADAM LAMBERT

GratefulFan wrote:
Shoot me!

While I'm sure many of the sentiments are genuine, it can't be forgotten how organized and determined Lambert's middle aged female fanbase is. They constantly bombard video views, polls, comment sections, etc. en masse and in coordinated and deliberate campaigns. Through multiple purchases of multiple copies of Tresspassing and massive gifting campaigns they got the album to number one. Of course that can't be sustained so it fell down the charts like a stone beginning week two and is currently at 137 I think in it's 7th week on the Billboard 200. Here's them trying to manipulate the UK Charts:
http://www.adamofficial.com/ca/node/2184694
And that is just one fan board. These efforts are echoed all over the internet at other boards and at a dedicated chart and sales manipulation site called adamlambertstorm.com. Fanaticism meets middle aged buying power as I've said. Nobody seems to stop and ask themselves if it's even ethical to take it to this degree. Anyway, all this to say that a coordinated Brian May email bomb can't be ruled out, along with the independent and spontaneous praise of the collaboration.[/QUOTE]


Thank you, GF. I think that is a compliment to the fanbase. I personally do not participate in the buying of multiple CDs to boost sales. I will confess to voting more than once in contests just for the hell of it. You have to admit, though, there is a pretty small group of hardcore fans that contribute to the mass buying efforts, not enough to greatly skew the numbers. Adam has over 1.5 million followers on twitter alone. He has an enormous fanbase. So his music does well on its own merits.

GratefulFan wrote:
In two and a half years here I've seen one person try to organize a campaign to get BoRhap to number one, for Christmas I think. The response was pretty much "no, that's stupid". When people post polls and such to vote Freddie number one for this or that they are largely ignored. As far as I know Queen fans don't dedicate entire evenings to voting in polls, clicking on videos over and over and over just to fudge the numbers, leaving scores and scores of comments everywhere, and then come back to QZ to breathlessly report on their tour of duty. When 'The Unblinking Eye' was released people either downloaded it or they didn't. Encouraging fellow fellow fans to buy something or other and being enthusiastic about the success as a group is one thing, and what the Glamberts do is entirely another. Buying 20, 30, 50 copies of something or other, trying to manipulate the charts in another country, etc. - and doing so on a relentless, constant basis - is not behaviour that I consider typical of any music fan I've ever seen in decades of being a music nut myself.

I'm pretty sure someone was organising a campaign for You And I just recently. And there was one for Don't Stop Me Now because it's apparently the best seller on iTunes or something. (We shouldn't even get started on buying multiple copies of the same album when there are "stamp collectors" with dozens of virtually identical Queen releases from different countries etc.)

The fact is that there are such campaigns in the Queen world, but there aren't enough fans interested in them to make any noticeable difference.

Should we take that as a positive sign of integrity, or a negative sign of waning interest?

"the majority aren't forgiving his fuckups because they don't view them as such"

Well I won't be party to wilful musical ignorance. I've acknowledged that he's done better than a lot of people thought he would, but he's also made more than what I'd say is an acceptable number of clunkers for what is supposed to be a world-class band.

I don't see anyone going easy on the Led Zeppelin set at Live Aid, and I love those guys. It was a mess, big deal! Sorry, but I can't see why different standards should apply to this schmuck. I don't believe in the musical handicap you people have put in place.

I just can't beleive the Glambert zombies they bombard the videos with rediculous comments comparing him to Robert Plant and other established singers. Its like they are still trying to win American Idol, or still pissed that he didn't win. He is good at what he does, but people earn their way in the music, you can't do it by a brute force fan base.

Zebonka12 wrote:
"the majority aren't forgiving his fuckups because they don't view them as such"
Well I won't be party to wilful musical ignorance. I've acknowledged that he's done better than a lot of people thought he would, but he's also made more than what I'd say is an acceptable number of clunkers for what is supposed to be a world-class band.
I don't see anyone going easy on the Led Zeppelin set at Live Aid, and I love those guys. It was a mess, big deal! Sorry, but I can't see why different standards should apply to this schmuck. I don't believe in the musical handicap you people have put in place.

Chocolate and vanilla, Zebonka. You like vanilla and I like chocolate.

Personally I find it disgusting that a load of Adam Lambert fans now think they "own" Queen's artistic license and know what's best for Queen despite the fact most of em probably didnt have a clue who Queen were before they showed up on that Idol show.

Ive been lectured on Youtube by a bunch of Adam Lambert fans telling me what Queen and Freddie would want and what is best.

tero! 48531 wrote:
I'm pretty sure someone was organising a campaign for You And I just recently. And there was one for Don't Stop Me Now because it's apparently the best seller on iTunes or something. (We shouldn't even get started on buying multiple copies of the same album when there are "stamp collectors" with dozens of virtually identical Queen releases from different countries etc.)
The fact is that there are such campaigns in the Queen world, but there aren't enough fans interested in them to make any noticeable difference.
Should we take that as a positive sign of integrity, or a negative sign of waning interest?

You're talking about anecdotes and I'm talking about a culture. Stamp collectors are completist hobbyists who amass their albums over years for a personal purpose. Nutty Lambert fans buy 20 or 50 or whatever of the identical thing and get mad when Wal-Mart doesn't have enough of them on the shelf to Hoover up all at once, prompting scathing complaints to corporate. If you believe you're comparing apples with apples, knock yourself out. I tried. :) I've lurked on and off in the Lambert fan community for years and I assure you there is nothing easily comparable to the fandoms souffled in the Idol kitchen.

someonewholikesadam wrote:
Thank you, GF. I think that is a compliment to the fanbase. I personally do not participate in the buying of multiple CDs to boost sales. I will confess to voting more than once in contests just for the hell of it. You have to admit, though, there is a pretty small group of hardcore fans that contribute to the mass buying efforts, not enough to greatly skew the numbers. Adam has over 1.5 million followers on twitter alone. He has an enormous fanbase. So his music does well on its own merits.

The hardcore group is absolutely not incidental. A couple of years ago Open House Party - a hugely popular and massively syndicated top 40 program played in the biggest markets and smallest cities alike in the US and Canada - disqualified Adam Lambert for a week because of coordinated vote fraud and request harassment by his fans. A "pretty small group" would be a mere blip, hardly noticeable or at least indistinguishable from the enthusiastic fans of other contemporaries. How many times is it that Adam has had to tell his fans to back off a little now? I remember at least one other when radio stations contacted his management and told them to get the fans to lay off and stop harassing them for airplay.

Also, the course of Trespassing on the Billboard 200 doesn't seem to me to tell the story of a natural number one album by a contemporary artist. He's been on the chart for 7 weeks now and is currently at 137. Any other contemporary artist who has had a number one record and is anywhere within 40 positions of him on either side have all been on the charts far, far longer. The closest is Blake Shelton who is just slightly higher than him and has been on for 21 weeks - three times longer. Others have been on for periods exceeding a year and more. Conversely, those who have had a number one album and have also been on the charts in the neighbourhood of 7-12 weeks are still way, way higher in position. In short, the rise and fall down the charts is virtually always more gradual when it's fueled by normal buying patterns. There was more than a 71% drop between week one (the debut at number one) and week two sales for Trespassing. It completely smacks of a frenzied buying spree that rapidly burnt itself out. And the mass buying is not niche activity at the forums I see, it's mainstream behaviour. There is an entire website whose mission statement lays out the intention to push Lambert's albums and singles to their "full potential". I know that not all Lambert fans do this, but I would argue with you all day that it certainly is skewing numbers - and so would Open House Party.

Forgot to note that Twitter followers of course do not map directly to album sales, or even fans for that matter. In fact I recently read a lament on Adam official to the effect of "where oh where are all the Twitter followers!" as the new album slid precariously down the charts.

Maybe it's because it originates in the Idol TV fan culture (vs. the music fan culture).

I've encountered similar fanaticism in TV show fandoms. It's just a lot harder to game the TV system because it requires much larger numbers, e.g. it takes millions to bump up a TV rating any significant amount. And fans can't buy or bribe their way into being included in the Neilsen sample.

One group of fans got around that by targeting one of the advertisers on a show. Fans of Chuck had a campaign to buy from Subway on the nights Chuck aired and other special times, and boosted Subway sales enough that Subway sponsored the show and helped to keep it on the air for 5 years despite dismal ratings.

The whole thing completely fascinates me from a sociological and pop culture standpoint. That's why I've spent time lurking in Lambert fandom. It's not some kind of masochistic bent or Adam Lambert Schadenfreude. The fan dynamic is definitely rooted somehow in television, and specifically the Idol genre, because you see similar unusual norms develop in the fandoms of artists like David Cook, Clay Aiken etc. Part of it to me is a loss of perspective, or never having it in the first place. It's culturally contagious too, which is the slightly alarming part. I really do think Queen+Lambert lacks any true rational basis beyond the very superficial. So what were the dynamics exactly that led two wonderful and experienced musicians to think this was a fantastically snappy idea?

someonewholikesadam wrote:
Very interesting data GF. I don't study it like you do. I just know what I know from being in the fandom and a frequenter of a few fan sites. I disagree that the fan dynamic is "somehow rooted in television." I never even watched American Idol before Adam. My mom told me to tune in one night and happened to catch Adam's performance. I was instantly hooked and tuned in every week just to see him, started googling and was enthralled with all his pre-Idol work. Then I started watching every interview that he gave and fell even more in love. Many fans I know have similar stories. Many did not watch AI but upon discovering him, rewatched the AI performances. It has nothing to do with TV and all to do with Adam, the performer and the man. There is a book entitled, "The Meaning of Adam Lambert" that may shed some light. Also, I found this article soon after I thought I was the only middle-aged loony googling a 29 yr old gay guy.
 
 
Let's talk images. A snake. A butterfly. A young man with his shirt unbuttoned to his waist, pouting at the camera. Lots of chest stubble. Alone, each image is rather boring. Put them together, and what you have is a hotter-than-Johnny Depp new Rolling Stone cover of American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert. The 27-year-old dude who made guyliner fashionable again gave an interview to the magazine confirming—big surprise—that he's gay. What's really surprising: I can't stop thinking about him. And neither can any of my cougar-aged friends. We love Adam, truly, madly, deeply, in a kind of weirdly Mrs. Robinson sexual way. And the reason doesn't just have to do with our past lives as professional groupies. It also has something to do with biology.
Just a few short months ago, most of my female friends and I were clueless about Adam Lambert. We're busy, professional women, some of us with demanding families and children, all of us with demanding jobs. We never spent our Tuesday nights in front of the TV. Yet this year, for slightly more than two months, phone calls went unanswered and any type of social or familial interactions were put on hold on so we could plop ourselves in front of our sets at 8 p.m. to watch American Idol, the No. 1 rated show on TV, which none of us had ever bothered with before. It started innocently enough: A friend, waylaid by a flu bug, was channel-surfing from the comfort of her couch one Tuesday evening and saw a bejeweled young thing singing a scorching rendition of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." She left us phone messages and tweets, saying, and I quote, "ohmygawdyouhavetoseethisemoglambowielovechildonAmericanIdol." We went, "Huh," but we tuned in the following week. And then we were gone.
My seemingly well-adjusted posse, myself included, morphed into archetypal Adam Lambert fangirls. We became Glamberts, besotted with the leather and rhinestones, the perfectly smudgy guyliner, the emo coal-colored coif and, oh, yeah, the preternatural vocal range. When we got together, we no longer talked about good books, North Korea or the recession. We talked about all things Lambert. We became the thing that we normally despise: a cougar court that fell into a gentle loin lust with a man young enough to be our son. And a gay one, to boot.
In terms of biology, Adam Lambert's attractiveness is kind of bizarre. Some research shows that women like square jaws and deep brows—iconic masculine traits—when they're looking for a fling. But we like more feminine traits when we're looking for The One, the long-term mate. Lambert has a little bit of both going on for him, as anyone who saw his version of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" can attest.
When we aren't laughing at our patheticness (because, let's get real, even if Lambert were straight or gave in to some bi-curiosity, he would never be interested in us), we are actually ruminative enough to wonder what it is about this fellow that turned us into such loons. One thing we know for sure is that we are not alone. There are thousands of women of a certain age out there who are just one Adam Lambert Google search away from crashing their computers.
The good news is that people who know about these things think that our little Lambert love-fest is downright mentally healthy. "I think more women would be happier if they channeled their inner 14-year-old girls once in a while," says sex therapist Laura Berman, director of the Berman Center in Chicago. She's always been fascinated with the Clay Aiken phenomenon, that of girls going crazy for a seemingly sweet, innocent-looking boy-man (Aiken is now, like Lambert, out and proud).
While Aiken may be the ultimate "safe zone," Lambert, she believes, somehow managed to be "hardcore, crazy, humble, adorable, charismatic, sweet and mind-blowingly talented," all in one package. "He's a study in contrasts, and the gay thing doesn't matter," she says. "Anyone who can get women to talk, giggle and get their mojo back is fine by me. Enjoy the ride."
Indeed we will. But it still begs the question exactly why our mojo leaned more toward Lambert than toward cute-as-a-button Kris Allen, the eventual winner of the competition, a young man whom Lambert admitted to having a little crush on.
Part of the Lambert allure is that some women find his onstage lack of inhibition a powerful aphrodisiac. According to psychoanalyst Dr. Gail Saltz, we all have a little touch of the voyeur inside of us, but it's often repressed. Then along comes Lambert, and those voyeuristic floodgates open. "Here's a guy who is a maximum exhibitionist, molten hot, can sing anything and is screaming, 'Look at me,' and for some women, that's an incredible turn-on," says Saltz, author of The Ripple Effect: How Better Sex Can Lead to a Better Life.
It may also go back to our childhood, as all things psychoanalytic seem to do. According to Saltz, buried deep inside all of us is the childhood desire to be able to have everything and anything, whenever you want. So part of our fascination with Mr. Lambert is that we may want to be like him. "[Lambert] is the poster child for having it all," says Saltz, associate professor of psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill-Cornell School of Medicine. "Men want him, women want him, and that ambiguity is as hot as hell."
But my friends and I also think it may be something more. We were once slam-dancing to the beat of The Clash and The Sex Pistols. We weren't the girls who liked The Eagles, we liked The Buzzcocks. But today, our lives are dictated by the confines of appropriateness. So maybe we just want to be like Lambert; hey, even his wardrobe is better than mine.
For other women of a certain age out there who are having little Lambert crushes of their own, sex therapist Wendy Maltz, founder of healthysex.com, suggests that we think about what's going on with our relationships in our lives. For her book, Private Thoughts: Exploring the Power of Women's Sexual Fantasies, Maltz interviewed scores of women to determine where sexual fantasies come from and what you can do about them. Maltz says that our connection with Lambert may be the wake-up call we need to be more playful, to have more fun and yes, to try to become a little more brave and confident. "There's something very wonderful about someone who can say, 'Accept me or don't accept me,'" Maltz says. "We tend to lose that as we get older." 
So how's this for bravery? I'm actually thinking about going to the Idol tour this year. I might be one of the only fans over the age of … ummmm, 40-something, but I bet I can still shriek louder than any of Adam's tween groupies.

GF See additional post in Adam Lambert Fanbase thread.

Tarabostes
For GratefulFan
You keep rationalizing a pure dislike of Adam Lambert. Yes , fandoms' creation, rise and decline can be interesting for us to study, each has its own dynamic that lies in their origin, some are rooted in obscure clubs where the singers/players were heard first, others are manufactured by shrewd producers in "labs" for the only purpose of making profits. In our case the fandom has its origin in a TV show, does this make it worthier of our despise? Where does all this snobbery come from, it is an American product after all!
I won't be alarmed that other I. contestants will follow this path , I am alarmed by the increasing number of fabricated stars out there in the mainstream, with 0 musical qualities, but dependent on technology. I am alarmed that on a Queen forum , I can't say that I love Queen Adam Lambert collaboration without being invaded by musically illiterates who can hardly hide their homophobia. Let's be honest , all these discussions about how talented or not is Adam Lambert or how suited is he to front Queen are roars of homophobia(most of them).