The Last Leg

Meta
Title:	The Last Leg
Creator:	Laura Motta
Date(s):	February 28, 2002
Medium:	online
Fandom:	Hanson
Topic:	fandom and fansites
External Links:	brightandbeautiful.org/hanson/thelastleg.htm
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The Last Leg is a 2002 meta essay written by Laura Motta on her website Bright and Beautiful.

Topics Discussed

• the long drought between Hanson albums and what it meant
• online communities and fansites
• the effect of Hanson.net on the fandom

Excerpts

At one point, we were an army. We owned the internet. We started the phenomenon that is the Band Tribute Page. We invented TRL. Hanson fans. Not Nsync fans or Backstreet Boys fans. We did. We were a big deal, but we self-destructed. Hanson too, probably unknowingly, did their part in helping us get there.

Hanson.net did its part to kill us and kill us dead, oh yes it did. It divided Hanson’s otherwise united online army into two camps, the haves and the have-nots. Hanson.net flew in the face of one of the primary ideological, yet unspoken rules of the internet: You can’t charge me for stuff I can get elsewhere for free. And knowledge is free, baby. Knowledge is free and loving this band, with the exception of albums and concert tickets, is free. You try to put a price tag on that, and you will fail. And if you don’t fail, you’ll at least succeed in pissing off a lot of people. They did. They continue to do so. Fan clubs don’t, and shouldn’t cost a hundred bucks a year. What did Hanson ask of us when they launched Hanson.net? Too much. Who will pay the price? You will if you join, but Hanson will too. They’ll pay the price in that they got in people’s craws when they asked so much in exchange for so little. It was the single thing that turned the online Hanson community into You and Me, and even though we’re loving the same band, we’re sure not loving each other.

Then, as if the total fission of our community weren’t enough, Hanson disappeared. Rest assured, this is not a drought. This is not a normal lag between albums. Bands make albums in months, not years. The time between Middle of Nowhere and This Time Around was a drought, sure. But we had a Christmas album, a collection of rarities, and a live album in between. Last time around, whether we remember it or not, it rained every few weeks. This time, something is wrong. Something is deeply, deeply wrong in Hansonland, and no music journalist has cared enough or been curious enough to find out what it is, so we can only speculate: It’s their record company or it’s their management or it’s them, but something is wrong. Don’t think that’s taken a toll on us? Look around you. Websites, popular ones, are dropping like flies.

Support the websites you like. E-mail webmasters. Sign guestbooks And if you’ve got a website that you think you’ve done significant amounts of work on, keep it online. Let the record show that, once upon a time, you cared about something enough to spill thousands of your words over it. Your work is worth investing in, and it will last long after this album has come out.

It will never be the same. It will never be like the early days of this community when there were millions of websites and where the words in everyone’s mouth were positive. That’s a reality. What we can do now is hope that when this new album finally comes out, there will be new sets of ears willing to listen. We can also hope that the old ones will to.