Monday, November 18, 2013

Are You The Eggman or the Walrus?…Choose Wisely

Many, many, many, many, many, many, many musicians detest the idea of ‘packaging’ their music in anyway. This is often because they don’t want to be pigeonholed into a particular sound and retain their creative freedom at any cost. Given the kind of work, passion and more that goes into a song, it’s hard to blame for not wanting to think of it as a product and their band as a business. However, there is a middle ground. You don’t have to demean yourself by trying desperately to sound like Maroon5, but the hard truth is that very few people, if anyone, reach what a reasonable person would consider success completely on their own terms. So if you want thrive in the fringes, think about which particular fringe is most appealing to you and package yourself to be accessible within that niche fan base.

John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) did this extremely well with his post-Sex Pistols project, Public Image Ltd. He ironically embraced the ‘music as a business/product’ mantra, relentlessly insisting that the band was a conglomerate and music once just one of their products. The product he was selling was ‘irony’, made especially meaningful by his history with the Sex Pistols – a band designed to self-destruct by sex shop owner and their manager, Malcom McLaren – but that’s another story. But with a broader concept as their product and a generously encompassing holistic approach, Public Image Ltd were able to genre-jump between, punk, experimental/avant-garde, dub, and pop/new wave. The moral of their story is that marketing yourself doesn’t necessarily limit your creative freedom. The punk and art scenes love(d) irony, especially in the 70s and 80s, and they just ate up what Lydon was serving. Whether he did this cynically (by the dictionary definition, e.g., ‘ulterior motives’) or as a cathartic statement about car-crash-career of the Sex Pistols, isn’t entirely clear. But the point is that it worked and you can make it work for you and have fun with it while still employing your creativity. By neglecting/resisting this strategy, you are denying an objective truth of the music industry and thus, will always be exiled from any meaningful success.  


There is no way to win a war on objective truth. You may triumphs in some (ultimately meaningless) battles and maybe even go on a winning streak, but you will always lose in the end. If you still insist on fighting the good fight and changing that truth, the best you can do is make some tiny, tiny dents towards your goal and although someone(s) may benefit from your efforts decades down the road, in the meantime you will be martyring your creativity and hard work unless you can find a middle-of-the-road strategy that satisfies you and your debt collectors. To read more, click on the link below:


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