La La La! I Can't Hear You!

In honour of the ever-present love of a conspiracy, I present an observation I had recently.

For those who weren't paying attention (or just don't care), Nintendo's upcoming console, which had been known by its code name of Revolution, had its official name unveiled yesterday.  The name that was chosen?  Wii (pronounced the same as 'we').  (Note: Unlike the Gamecube — whose official name was the Nintendo Gamecube — it's apparently just Wii, not Nintendo Wii.)

Now, as you can likely imagine, the name was met with a less than warm welcome among the vocal population of Internet gamers-cum-loudmouths everywhere.  (For the curious: I don't like the name.  I think Revolution sounded better.  However, I feel that eventually people will get used to it, and most of the bitching will die down.  Microsoft's decision to name their current console the Xbox 360 was also met with derision upon announcement, but now no one thinks twice about the name.)  There were the obvious c=jokes made, the usual slew of online petitions angrily demanding that Nintendo change the name back, and those who loudly proclaimed that they had it from reliable (but unnamed) sources this wasn't the real name — it was a joke, or an attempt to build hype for the announcement of the real name at E3 in May.

Now, the reason this last one stood out at me (seeing as it, obviously, wasn't <em>ed when I saw it), was that it was very similar to statements I had seen about something else.  As more people likely know, Tool has a new album coming out.  As possibly slightly fewer of these people know, it was leaked to the Internet sometime last week.  (No, I haven't heard it; I'm not really a Tool fan.)  Now, as with anything so greatly hyped, there are going to be people disappointed by the reality, and as with anything that has such a loyal fanbase, there are going to be those who'd love the album even if it was Metal Machine Music.  Even though I'm not a Tool fan, I still had to read the threads on various music sites about the album because — to put it quite simply — I find hardcore Tool fans funny.

It's not meant as an insult to anyone who is a Tool fan, but sometimes I think you need to forget all critical thinking skills in order to become one of the hardcore fans.  Anyways, there were wonderful comments in among these threads going on about the strangest theories: the standard one that people who didn't like the album weren't true fans; that the album was designed to separate the 'real' fans from those who just liked Tool because it's cool to do so; that people who didn't like the album just hadn't listened to it enough times (I believe the numbers normally given were almost always at least several dozen times).  However, most common among the posts — and differing from the previous ones in that this came from people who claimed not to like the album — was that the album was a fake, made by Tool to fool those people who try to leak albums before their official release dates.  There'd be all kinds of evidence to back this up: supposed news releases that mentioned it (why would they even mention it ahead of time if it was meant to be a decoy?), as well as evidence culled from indepth analysis of the album art, song titles, song lyrics, and (of course) numerology.  (Let's just forget that you can prove almost anything you want with numerology.)

If you've lost track (since I do seem to wander), this entry was to talk about the love of conspiracy theories.  So that's not entirely true, but it does have to do with one conspiracy theory: the belief that something you don't like can't be real.  Nintendo's new console is called Wii?  Not real, but a joke.  (That one makes no sense.  A joke?  Is Nintendo known for making joke press releases or something?)  Don't think the new Tool album lives up to the hype?  Obviously it's a decoy album, which the band spent time writing and recording songs for when they could have been working on their real album.  Or, in other words, it's like putting your hands over your ears and screaming what's in the title.

There was more of a point to this entire entry, but I seem to have lost it now.