21 October 2010
Music in the universe of 1984.
“I Sold My Soul Just to Make a Record, Dipshit, and Then You Bought One”
Today Thom Yorke said, with that glee he sometimes betrays, that it is “only a matter of time — months rather than years — before the music business establishment completely folds.” He has advised young musicians like myself to release records on their own, rather than through the major labels – lest they rope themselves to a “sinking ship.” [Come hear At Peace At Last at GrantValdes.com!] I don’t know about his timeline, but, morally speaking, Mr. Yorke is right.
I have almost never heard excellent music coming from an artist who was “trying to get signed.” That’s just my empirical report. In the age of the dense, stupid, major label monolith, there has grown a vast underclass of what American economists might call “discouraged composers.” I have heard reels of remarkable, gorgeous, insightful, intricate music by these various unknowns: friends of friends, friends of lovers, lovers. They are talented – more talented than any A&R rep – and precisely because they are not writing down to a market, they can freely offer up “to the eyes of God” (to quote Charles Murray admiring the anonymous cathedral masons of the Middle Ages.) I count myself as a discouraged composer, albeit one with the financial resources and self-regard needed to keep writing anyway.
Do you not believe me that these small and perfectly good composers exist? Seven examples from the last few years:
“Rose Garden” by Ghost Family
“Blurter” by Mouseheart Factor
“Faults of Family” by Alicia Amiri
“Welcome to Repeat” by Headless Body in a Topless Bar
“Very Well” by Discourse on Method
“Goodbye to That One” by Go Slowpoke
“Whitetown” by Kerry Kallberg
I believe that an artist needs to be spiritually and psychologically free in order to produce. If he leaves that headspace, the muse leaves him. If enough artists cannot live free, due to political repression, prescription medication, moral decadence, or whatever, a pallor falls over society as a whole. In the repressive fiefdom of the major labels, at least, artistry has all but shriveled into the shadows. It is difficult to overstate the contempt with which this squalid industry views its musicians. Witness the new comedy Get Him to the Greek, in which our hero, a jellyfish henchman of label honcho P. Diddy, escorts a broken and heroin-addled singer to a venue. That’s the whole depressing plot. Funny! I get it! Artists are lost without handlers to ship them from point A to point B! Creators can’t create after all! Don’t worry though, our protagonist is real, he’s one of the good ones, because he name-checks the Pixies, Radiohead, and the Mars Volta, and in the end leaves Los Angeles to move to “East Seattle” – where the “grunge” came from.
Was it acceptable for Michael Jackson to die with several hundred unreleased songs sitting in a vault controlled by a vengeful Sony?
Is it acceptable for Britney Spears, an idol to millions of girls, to glitch out on television like some kind of Project Monarch victim? Is she free?
Is it acceptable that some overeager-to-please young artists who “sold their souls just to make a record,” to paraphrase Maynard James Keenan, may drown with the major labels’ sinking ship? Yes, that’d be fine.
“A Vision of Ourselves”
[Originally sent to a group of Facebook friends in the early morning of 5/20/10. Now posted here for your consideration, particularly if you consider yourself an artist.]
Dear talented friend,
This is why I’m not interested in being an entertainer…
The culture industry can (via Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse):
1. Reduce human beings to the state of mass by hindering the development of emancipated individuals, who are capable of making rational decisions;
2. Replace the legitimate drive for autonomy and self-awareness by the safe laziness of conformism and passivity;
3. Validate the idea that men actually seek to escape the absurd and cruel world in which they live by losing themselves in a hypnotic state of self-satisfaction.
I intend to make art that is sublime/beautiful (via Edmund Burke) and honest. That’s it. I hope that’s where you’re at.
Do not disdain of Beyoncé Knowles; disdain of Sasha Fierce. Stefani Germanotta may be an ally, but the Fame Monster certainly isn’t. This mammoth-scale pop music, which lacks credible emotion, decency, and craft, is not some isolated quirk off somewhere: its stupid, unexamined nihilism floods out, at ~45,000 barrels daily, into small-time indie blogs and bedrooms everywhere.
I want you to know that the art you craft to divine proportion is objectively better than what is hyperrefined and dished out by AOL Time Warner, Viacom, The Walt Disney Company, Vivendi Universal, and Sony. You suspect it, but do you really know it? Do you?
-Gv
“The Opposite of Wiretapping”
or
Seven Drunk Americans Discuss the Government
One: “…You can only have an open dialogue when it’s economic and when you’re doing it in practice. If you’re just saying to the public, ‘Hey, we’re having an open dialogue ’cause we’re at a barbecue and we’re drinking beer.’ [Adopts Texan accent:] ‘Hello, ‘dem liberals! Bring ‘em on! Come on out to the barbecue!’ Blah, blah, blah. And then they go to their office and they sign away the liberal agenda. They just say, ‘Fuck you.’ And they just build corporations down the highway, as far as you can see. And then they make criminals out of regular people. And then they let illegal aliens come in and work. But they don’t, you know, they don’t pay taxes, they don’t get benefits, they’re treated like criminals. A lot of that stuff goes on, behind the scenes, but then it’s the Alamo, and it’s the barbecue, and this kind of culture that drives this underbelly that’s really nasty because they don’t protect the borders.
“If you get pulled over – You were talking about getting pulled over in North Texas? Never go… I don’t know who told you to go with a bag of weed in that area of Texas!”
Two: “But it was vacuum-sealed, so even if they had dogs, they probably wouldn’t have smelled that shit.”
One: “I got pulled over in Childress, which is North of Dallas, when I was coming back from Portland. And they just pulled me over because my hair was a little long and I was driving an older car. And they just pulled me over and had me take everything out of the car and put it back.”
Three: “They can’t legally do that.”
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