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ivan@stellysee.de
| From | matty karas <mkaras@mindspring.com> |
| Subject | Re: colter's rant - not an attack |
| Date | Sun, 13 Jul 2003 21:04:59 -0500 |
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> It's very hard for anybody to make a living these days, famous or no, because
> the mechanisms by which bands toured and sold in the 5,000-to-100,000 range
> have largely been removed. This both makes it hard for skilled musicians and
> writers to keep going (leaving the field largely to short-timers and amateurs)
> and lowers diversity and excitement in the general music scene. This in turn
> lowers people's interest in going out to see bands, buying new CDs...bla bla
> bla...you get the idea.
actually, the music scene today is overflowing with acts who tour and sell in the
5,000-to-100,000 range, from bands like the gossip and the kills and les savy fav and
the detroit cobras on the low end of the scale, to bands like the get up kids, the
dropkick murphys, glassjaw and cat power on the high end. not to mention bright eyes,
le tigre, pretty girls make graves, the new pornographers, fourtet, mum, mars volta,
the dismemberment plan, the international noise conspiracy, tsunami bomb, the detroit
cobras, poison the well, postal service, superchunk, guided by voices, moe., del
mccoury, and blah and blah and blah and blah and blah.
a few are on majors; most are on indies. a few, like superchunk, guided by voices and
moe, have been doing this for years, having started at a time when the industry was
arguably different than it is today. but most of the ones i listed have amassed their
audience in the past few years, while napster and kazaa were in full effect, while
radio and record companies were super-consolidated, while the national economy was
going to pot.
not one of them is a record executive's creation; they're all real bands making real
music that real kids want to hear.
and i'm not that well versed in the what's out there. someone who's paying more
attention than me could easily come up with a list 20 or 30 times as long.
is the music business corrupt and does it suck? well, yes, of course, it always has
and probably always will. is it incredibly hard for skilled musicians to keep going?
yes, of course it is, and it always has been, and it should be.
my band, the trouble dolls, had the great fortune of playing in albany last night with
a band from oklahoma city called the stellas. (this was at the big pop barbecue
mini-fest, organized by the tireless, fanatic and fantastic john brodeur of the
suggestions, and featuring bleu, the damnwells, ike, and eight or nine other bands,
not to mention free hot dogs and burgers.) the stellas are a catchy and raucous
punk-pop two-piece, a drummer and a guitarist who play along with programmed beats and
keyboards, and they play their punk-rock hearts out onstage. they've been away from
home for the past two months, playing clubs from tennessee and arkansas to nevada and
california to nebraska and minnesota, and on and on. they're not gonna be home for
another month and a half. they're in the prototypical shitty van, and raechel, the
singer, wants nothing more right now than to sleep in her own bed. they booked every
show themselves, without any help. they keep a tip jar at the merch table wherever
they're playing, hoping for donations to help them get from city to city.
they are an old story, a rock music cliche, yadda yadda yadda, i know. but the point
is they don't care that it's an old story; they just care that this is what they want
to do. and this is the way it has always worked, napster or no napster, clear channel
or no clear channel, avril or no avril. and they're good at it. i bought their
album, "music for umbrellas," at the show, and it's a really good (fab hooks, crashing
tempos, nice sweet-and-sour harmonies, new-wave touches here and there; file next to
the muffs). i have no idea if they will "make it," but i do know that there isn't a
chance they'd make it if they weren't doing exactly what they're doing. they're
invested their lives in this. and that's exactly what it takes to make it. i don't
know of any artistic pursuit that works any other way. and i'm not aware of any time
in the history of rock and roll when it was any harder or any easier.
matty
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