Good morning. Hello. How are you? #626
More about art and artists and the KLF but also Sarah Polley and an old fake record label
Good morning! Hello, there, what’s shakin’? Please excuse the Ho/How typo in yesterday’s headline. I did not mean to call you all hos, as alert reader Jen in California asked. I love you guys. You are great.
I should clarify from yesterday’s post when I refer to a “writing sellout” that that is honestly pretty cool. I mean, I am obviously the real sellout in this situation, not a writer who struggles to earn a living with their writing. I don’t mean to imply otherwise, I was not really using the term perjoratively. I mean, in my own private, personal artistic creation ecosystem, what I have learned is that I am completely unable to “play the game” and indeed the act of “playing the game” ruins the art for me. That is, I hate hate hate doing all the business work of being an artist. I hate having a publisher my experience with them has not been particularly swell. I do not enjoy, at all, self promotion, and tweeting about my posts or asking people for reviews or sending copies for reviews or any of it. I can’t stand it, I can’t do it, and if I did it, I would probably be unable to write. So for me it is just easier to keep a day job and keep my writing (and music) as completely uncommercial as possible. This isn’t really a moral thing, really. I just find the idea of doing all of that work horrifying, embarrassing and, of course, probably pointless since, as I alluded to yesterday, I don’t want to make the kind of art that could be easily consumed or shared.
I do kind of wonder at the economy of art. It really is mind-boggling. It is stunning and horrible and endlessly shocking to me just how much of an economic apparatus exists in the world to take money from artists. I mean, I have my music on Spotify and iTunes, my books are on Amazon. I don’t like any of those organizations, and I hate that they take giant cuts of everything, but, lol, we’re talking barely any money here anyway. And the platforms are just the first tier. There are tiers beyond that that I mostly completely avoid. I don’t have an agent anymore. I have a publisher for Agency but that’s it and I’m trying to get out of that. It’s just stunning to me how many people make their money off of artists, when you think about it. But I it’s not like I have some brilliant alternate method of getting artists paid in my head.
Real artist Damon Krukowski of Damon & Naomi and Galaxie 500 has a swell newsletter and yesterday he wrote a very interesting piece on a related topic of what is an artist. He tells the story of Ekfat, aka Guðmundur Gunnarsson who is a popular (ish, compared to me, certainly) Icelandic musician on Spotify with millions of listens on Spotify. Turns out Ekfat is a fake person, the product of a group of three Swedish songwriters who, the article tells us, “ are behind songs for another 89 artist names on Spotify…. In total, they bring him 7.7 million listeners a month on Spotify, more than twice as many as the Swedish star Robyn.”
Damon’s piece then goes in a few directions at once and they’re all interesting. On the one hand, there’s a debate about whether these Swedes (part of a collective called Firefly Entertainment that doesn’t “just release music, we create artists.”) are “real” artists. Touching back on yesterday’s post and the influence of the Discordianists and the Church of the Subgenius and all of that, I am inclined to say of course they are! I must confess I have a dog in this fight, since in the oughts my friend and college Sean T. Drinkwater and I, while owning a real-world, legitimate record label called Archenemy Recordings, simultaneously managed a completely fake record label called Swiss Rivers that had a stable of bands, all completely fake, on Myspace. This was mostly Sean’s doing, he would start new fake bands — there were over ten of them — and record several songs from each one of them, then we’d make Myspace pages for each one of them back when Myspace was the place to be on the internet. There are remnants of this whole experiment still on the internet: here is the latest version of the Politburo Myspace page: Sean’s brilliant send-up of Interpol. Here’s the Swiss Rivers page. Oh god, I forgot about some of these names. So good. Seattle was the grunge band. I don’t remember what Gropius was. DJ BJ was Sean’s DJ alter Ego. SO FUN. Anway, obviously I count Sean as a real artist, and the whole thing was a great gag and prank and an all around good time and a good prank is art.
BUT Sean and I were not doing this to make any money. Or, at least, we didn’t make any money, so now we can claim we weren’t doing it for the money. If Gropius had gotten ten million listens and a major label deal, well, no promises, but at least now we get the moral high ground. Damon points out that “at least one Swedish Newspaper claims to have found the smoking gun” linking this fake band collective to Spotify, and an earlier scandal where it was alleged that Spotify itself is making fake music and putting it on its platform to collect the royalties and screw “real” artists. Now, suddenly this Discordianist prank is a totally different thing, innit? Suddenly it is shady and crappy and lame and not “real art.” Adding Discordianist prank art to the world is still adding art to the world and enlarging the art pie. Being a platform making fake art to pay real artists less is… well, probably not enlarging the art pie, though I guess maybe that could be argued, but you have to be a bit more morally flexible than I am do to so.
Kinda useful example case on how the context shifts everything. I used to think that maybe someday, after I finished with this whole day job thing I would get an agent again and try and write books for real world publishers again and I would write essays with a single digestible topic and a pithy headline and place then in actual publications that pay you. And I guess maybe that could still happen but.. I don’t know, man. It is a hugely unresolved dilemma. I could turn payments on on this very Substack and let you all subscribe with cash money, but then I have to, like, pay attention to the moral character of Substack the company and that does not seem promising at all. I can’t tell if my reticence is part of my artistic principles or self-sabotaging and something to get over. I can’t really resolve that dilemma. And since I’m too busy with work and child raising at present, I have the luxury of procrastination and will kick the can down the road. And who knows, maybe by the time I’m forced to make that decision, Web3 will have really worked and the indie dream of the 80’s will be alive once again.
As an aside, the KLF sold six million records — actual pieces of vinyl, with the commensurate profit margins — in one year. Without a record label. Without a manager. That is so crazy.
Also Jimmy Cauty made this Lord of the Rings poster. Best selling poster in England for eight years running.
I’ve been reading Sarah Polley’s book Run Toward the Danger and I read the chapter last night on her really very insane first pregnancy and man did it capture all the crazy of being a new mom, the crazy of maternity hospitals, all of it. It’s crazy (that word again) how I had to learn all of that information, master this whole field, and now I will never really use it again since we’re not having another kid. It really took me back to those first days of being a parent, the chaos, the confusion. Not knowing how to get the baby to latch. The general helplessness fathers feel watching the woman they love be riddled with anxiety and exhauastion. What a time. What a time.
Tangentially (which is a fancy way of saying “as an aside’ which I just used so I shouldn’t do that again nope because that is bad writing because humans cannot repeat themselves that’s just tacky, super cool and useful writing rule there), I have constant moral dilemmas about where to link when I mention a book. I could link to the publisher page, as I did there, which is the least helpful but most neutral. I could link to a good review of the book to help you, dear reader, decide if you want to read it, but I don’t go around reading book reviews too often so that’s just a ton of work, or I could be “helpful” and link directly to Amazon in case you want to buy it, but… Amazon. No winning there.
Okay I think that’ll do ‘er for today. That was more chipper than yesterday, right? I try, I try. Let’s do a mix. Covers mix! It’s got that !!! Magnetic Fields cover, of course, because it’s been in my head all week. And a pretty swell Kate Bush cover by Car Seat Headrest, though I wish people would cover other Kate Bush songs oh wait wasn’t it Futureheads that covered “Hounds of Love”? That was a good one. I just bought the Wolfgang Press “Mama Told Me Not To Come” 12” the other day because why not why wouldn’t you buy that in 2022. And really not enough good things can be said about First Aid Kit’s entire album of live Leonard Cohen covers it really is quite an impressive work and deserved more attention.
All right, tackle the hell out of this hump day and leave it in the dust. Talk tomorrow!
"I hate hate hate doing all the business work of being an artist"
The hardest part of being a full time artist for me is just this... after booking my own tours and trying to maintain some semblance of an online presence (and I am very bad at that end fo things... need to hire 'the kids' to do it for me)... after all that stuff, I am spent and so distracted that the actual process of making art is very difficult. Ugh.