Who is Bon Iver?

Who am I?

Many of my friends are very aware of two things about me: I am a devoted Bon Iver fan, and I spend a lot of time online. Thanks to these obsessions, I caught wind of the minor explosion of small subsection of the internet population in the last week or so.

On November 30^th, the nominations for the 54^th Grammy awards were announced. Every year, regardless of who is nominated, the general vocal population disagrees with choices and gets upset. This is understandable since everyone has their own tastes in music and is entitled to opinions about said music. Apparently, however, the four nominations from Bon Iver’s remarkable self-titled album caused some sort of disturbance in the cosmos.

This is (unfortunately) a real tweet sent not long after the Grammy nominations were announced:

@trialdogbert who da fuk is bon iver? and y is he on my grammys? lol srsly wat the fuk is this ive nvr even herd of him lol #bonivercansuckmycock

Atrocious spelling aside, this person is incredibly mad at a band for being nominated on the grounds that he hasn’t heard of them. This would just be mildly funny and fairly obnoxious if he was the only person reacting like this. Unfortunately he was not alone and a tumblr was started to track the idiocy. The confusion only picked up steam as people continued to talk about it. Most of the tweets and statuses didn’t talk about Bon Iver’s merits as a band or how deserving they are (or are not) of their nominations. They simply got mad because they hadn’t heard of them.

This isn’t exactly a new trend. Last year there was an almost identical reaction to Arcade Fire’s three Grammy nominations. People responded violently and screamed from the proverbial rooftops that, among other things, Eminem had been robbed. It was the first to gain a tumblr showcasing the anger of the internet and actually became a minor meme.

These pissed off tweets are not an isolated incident, people. There are angry fans of pop music and they know how to use the internet.

I’ll be honest; this whole mess confuses me. I can understand frustrations with award nominations — I’m looking at you, Bruno Mars. I know how awkward and embarrassing it can be when everyone else seems to know a band you’ve never heard of. I understand that sites like twitter are places to freely voice opinions. I can even excuse the multiple people who claimed that Demi Lovato was particularly robbed by Bon Iver. I just don’t understand why people are this mad.

According to the tweets, these people are rip-your-hair-out, punch-a-puppy-in-the-face, sweep-everything-off-of-a-desk mad about a band they’ve never heard of. Rather than typing “Bon Iver” into Google or YouTube, they took to the twitterverse and caps locked their fingers off. In an age where a world of information is literally at our fingertips, to complain about not knowing something that is accessible enough to be nominated for four Grammys seems absurd. Their complaints are empty purely because they’re easily fixed. If you want to take to the streets and scream about how much you hate Bon Iver, how much their music makes you fall asleep and how jealous of Justin Vernon’s beard you are, that’s perfectly fine. More power to you. But this much anger towards something that you could legitimately fix in less than a minute is a sad waste of bandwidth.

And perhaps these people were mad that they hadn’t heard of a band that is considered important enough for multiple award nominations. I’d be sympathetic if a brilliant but truly obscure band had crawled out of the woodwork and onto the ballot, but let’s look at the facts. Bon Iver’s “Bon Iver” debuted at no. 2 on the Billboard albums chart, selling 104,000 copies in its first week. This marked its peak spot on the overall Billboard chart, and the album made it to no. 1 on the Alterative, Indie, and Rock charts. Frontman Justin Vernon’s face has recently been on the cover of Spin and Billboard magazine to promote the album. The album is featured on Rolling Stone’s current best of 2011 year-end list, among others, and is projected to sit on many others as the year comes to a close. Vernon both sang and was sampled on Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” under the Bon Iver moniker.

It’s not as if Bon Iver has been hiding under a rock.

Unfortunately, because this is the Internet we’re talking about here, there’s little to nothing I can do. I’ll have to be content with sitting back, following the tumblr, and trying to avoid migraines from my head shaking. People, if you’re mad about something legitimate, then get informed and get passionate. If you’re mad about something that Google can fix, you’re wasting energy and that means global warming is your fault.