Tuesday November 17, 2009

Track #3: “Nose” Music and Letting Go of Getting Discovered

To hear a VU-tinged spoken-word breakdown of “Nose”—track #3 from my new e-book Cassingle—head to Workbench Recordings. Listen, and also learn why I think short fiction is maybe getting a little too short.

The track you hear there and here—in this case, without my voice—and the illustration above were created by my friend James Beaudreau—a musician, designer, and critic with whom I’ve been having lots of inspiring talks about art and creativity and commerce. At about the same time—right now, more or less—James and I found ourselves in similar positions. He had toured with a well-known band and released two painstakingly-crafted CDs of solo guitar tracks to nice notices but few sales, while I had published fiction in small, well-respected places but failed to produce a book that could keep large, well-respected places interested. We weren’t quite poets or radio repairmen, but we were courting the same obsolescence.

As James was preparing his third album earlier this year, we started talking about a new way to release it. Forget CDs. Make it a track-a-week blog. Spread it out. Talk about process. Put it all out there and let the people, whoever they are, in. James’ writing about music is very good and his observations about what it’s like to make things are sharp. I relate to them, even though I can’t play a note. He put a lot of time into his site, just as I have—over the years—into mine, which is why (I think) we came to the same conclusion.

And that conclusion is this (forgive me if you had it yourself long ago): far from being a form of inexpensive marketing or a gambit on the way to some better deal, these tracks James was putting on the web and these stories I was giving away—and all the packaging and coding and planning that went into them—these weren’t devices for promoting our work. These were the work. We’d been so thoroughly raised on the idea of being “discovered” that we’d completely missed that we didn’t need to be discovered to do what we were doing. Getting discovered, we suddenly realized, would add nothing—particularly at this stage in top-down media’s decline. In my mind, the scales have tipped such that the benefits collected by the average holder of a book or record deal are so low, it’s not worth expending the effort to pursue either, at least not when this same effort could be spent building something. But James said it better at dinner a few weeks ago. He said if a record label offered him a deal tomorrow, but it would mean he’d have to take his website down, he wouldn’t do it. I don’t know if we’ve changed, or if it’s the media, but things are not the same.

I really like what James has done with the instrumental version of this track, by the way. It reminds me of the guitar scribbles on Bongwater’s cover of the Moody Blues’ “Ride My See-Saw.” I fucking love that song.

Tomorrow: Bad Badger revealed! And don’t forget to download Cassingle, which includes “Nose” and four other stories.