I'm only 30 years old and I feel like people have been talking about this forever. 'Member this wonderful article Steve Albini wrote in the 90s about how major labels were totally ravaging most of the bands they signed?
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| Ben "Ziggy" Franklin by Sergio Rodriguez, via MakeYourFranklin.com |
Here's the thing: 99 times out of 100, if you are becoming an artist--more specifically a musician because that's what I can speak to--if you are doing this to make decent sums of money you are borderline insane. I am already skeptical of you. I can smell it in what you create and, 99 times of out 100, your stuff is either trite or it's manipulative in all the wrong ways. It's not you. My band-mates and I last night were talking about Jon Brion, and how somebody somewhere asked him what he looks for in an artist he's hoping to work with; his answer was something along the lines of: I look for folks who aren't trying to be artists. [UPDATE, here's the video with his thoughts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnhbHFgagIM; merci, MrJonBraun]
Speaking of Jon Brion, this is a really wonderful AV Club interview with him.
Is it frustrating that in 10 years of playing and recording music I haven't made a dime? Sure. But do I actually care and am I going to use that as a reason to stop doing it? I'm laughing at that. I'm not in this shit to be "noticed", to have people incessantly Googling my name, to be on the covers of magazines that won't exist in 10 years, to be blogged about by who-even-cares-who. Would that be neat? Hell yes, I am a human being after all. But if that's your main reason for doing this stuff, you are setting yourself up for utter failure and a lifetime of bullshit. Also, we can spot you from a million miles away. You may even get what you want, score that sweet hit Thing, and maybe even McDonald's will help promote your music! Maybe that's what you truly want (??)... even if you do, it's just not going to last very long and you still won't make much money off it.
Here's a big, cold spoon of truth from that Jon Brion interview up there:
"For every Radiohead, there's 10,000 supposedly modern rock bands who aren't a tenth that creative, or a tenth that emotional. For every Elliott Smith, there are 10,000 people who think they're sensitive poets. For every 10,000 people who have a drum machine and run things through a filter box, there's an Aphex Twin."
I'm already an incredibly lucky person in that I've never truly worried about money, not in the way that people quite literally scrapping by are. Thanks to my parents, and their parents before them, I have a great education, and the even more empowering knowledge that, whatever I think I know, I don't actually know shit.
One of the few things I'm fairly certain I know is how icky it makes me feel that phrases like "you have to market yourself" have leaked into modern vernacular, masked as sage wisdom for how any artist ought to go about presenting themselves. Don't just be you, be the You calculated to generate the most page-views! Awesome.
I make songs and write stories because it feels so good to do it. It gives me Life. It makes me think and feel ways about stuff.
All this talk about money & artists just bores the hell out of me. Feel free to have that discussion, but my eyes will glaze over and I'll eventually melt into a wall. If you need me, I'll be in your basement writing a song or a story about that dusty old 1970s Fisher-Price toy castle you've got down there, or something.
