I’ve been thinking lately about the dodgy plight of contemporary recording artists and producers.
I only have been thinking this because I have a record that I want to sell—in some way, shape or form. It’s my cow that I’ve spent years raising and am walking to market hoping to score, and trade for enough magic beans to be able to pay the rent long enough to raise and sell another cow.
That is the dodgy part—the need to sell. The need to create is subjugated by the need to survive in a climate where 30 seconds of your song on enough people’s phone may pay the bills for a year. This hardly encourages genre bending, pioneering of new sonic frontiers.
Instead of lamenting this fact, I’m wondering if instead this need to create, and then sell, can be an artistic impetus for me to raise the bar. I’m trying to see it as a kind of structure to work within in such a way as to allow the original content to remain fresh and interesting...and the form to be something that resembles roughly what people have already proven to want in their music, and therefore willing to spend money on.
In college I hated having to write sonnets or sestinas or villanelles because of the strict rules of form that govern those particular types of poetry. No matter what, if it is going to be called a sonnet, the rules must be obeyed. It’s not that I can’t write what I want. I just can’t write what I want and call it a sonnet. That is not a popular message now or ever to the rock and roll rebel.
So I’m working on my song structure and lyrical content as something to be honed and refined within the understanding that I would like to make a living taking the finished product into a larger marketplace. This is where the art of creativity transitions into the art of commerce. Finding creative ways to represent the music, band, and “Ready Fire Aim experience” that are consistent with who we are as artists/producers is a whole other challenge that I have been enjoying to no end.
The days of having a major label take care of everything for you and support you, and coddle you and develop you, and then break you to the world are over. Good fucking riddance. It’s time that we as artists and producers did for ourselves what no amount of major label money or power could ever do--sell our shit in the marketplace with the same voice and soul with which we created it.
The term “sell-out” is a luxury throw back to a time when artists had options other than strategic brand alignment with household name goods and services and band t-shirt sales. People USED to buy records. Now they capriciously sort through and buy into artists that they hear about through other media conduits—TV, Movies, Games, ad infinitum. Now we as artists are another type of good or service—another consumable on the shelf . . . for better or worse. You can fight this fact or say “fuck it” and become the most original and interesting consumable on the shelf you can be. My mentor in the entertainment industry once pulled me aside and sat me down after a particularly good run of auditions in Hollywood. He said “Sage, never forget that you are here to sell soap. They’ll put soap before your act, they’ll put soap after your act and if they can, they will put soap IN your act.”
He was right. With Synch licensing and merchandising being the last great bastions of income generation for artists, we are literally selling soap . . . or tampons . . . or if we are really, really edgy and fortunate, a politically incorrect socially deviant video game.
For me it’s not about the Benjamins or the Bentley . . . okay—maybe the Bentley . . . but it is about not waiting tables anymore, and having the time and resources to do what I love most and do best in relative security and serenity with the landlord. Till then I will continue busting my ass to make interesting art that sells. I’m not selling out. I’m buying in.
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Ready Fire Aim's This Changes Nothing is available now through Expansion Team Records.
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