You dream of being a rock star, don't you? You see the glamorous lifestyle. Money for nothing and your chicks for free. Yep, that's the way you do it. Well, set your way-back machine for fricking 1978 -- those times are dead.
Here is what it means to be a cutting-edge, underground rock star: Amanda Palmer. She released a wonderful record a while back, "Who Killed Amanda Palmer?"
She (with her own money) shot videos for every song on the CD. Wonderful works of art that when snapped together like a jigsaw puzzle form a whole picture. She posted them on YouTube. They were taken down. Why? Her record company, Roadrunner Records, wanted YouTube to pay them every time someone watch the videos. Seeing it is free to watch the them (as a promotional tool to sell THEIR record) that just wasn't going to happen. So down they came. A fine job promoting the CD, Roadrunner.
No worries. Amanda set off on a global odyssey to work her ass off and promote the CD herself. She toured all over the US...and then she went to Europe and got her foot run over in Ireland. It was very flat -- like Willie Coyote after a six ton bolder. Despite broken bones, a cast and amazing pain she kept touring, first Europe and then on to Australia.
She e-mailed fans and asked them to put her up. She had no money. Strangers, who loved her music, fed her and gave her broken jet-lagged body a place to sleep. She couldn't even pay the band. At the concerts, she asked people to give them something. They did. She was too broke; promoting the CD, making the videos, and airfare to get to the gigs all over the world (in a tour apparent laid out by a drunken monkey tossing darts randomly at a map).
Well in the end it would all pay off from the sales of her critically acclaimed CD, right? How much money has she made off the album sales? $0.00. Roadrunner records explained that she still owed her for their "promoting" the Dresden Dolls. In fact she owes them one more CD -- they will keep all the sales of that too. Pick cotton -- or record a CD... is there much difference?
Morally, mentally and physically Amanda was spent. After four long months of jet-lag, hobbling around on a broken foot, pleading for food and lodging it was good to be back in her own bed. What a long strange trip that must have been.
Did I say her bed? Well, not for long. Today she found out that she owes her landlord $3,600 in back rent! He has been very kind to let it all slide this long, but really. If he doesn't have it by the first of the month (five days away) she will be homeless.
The glamorous life of a rock star! Cool, huh?
Amanda has a book coming out soon that should make her some money. It is a coffee table book of nothing but pictures of herself dead in various odd ways. Considering her life, need you ask why she would do that?
If you saw Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath on the street tomorrow -- would you walk by? I know, you are broke. I'm broke myself. I don't have any money to give, so I paint promotional buttons and posters, I set up websites, I write passionate blogs, I get my friends excited in artists with unique voices that must be heard. My life would be so empty without my favorite music. Perhaps I am the most selfish person on the planet. I can't go on without the joy it brings me...so I didn't walk by. I wrote this.
And if you are in Boston and see a woman without any eyebrows lugging a huge box of "my Little Ponies" around, give that bitch a hug. That, my friends, is Amanda Fucking Palmer. She deserves your attention.
Yes, Virginia, music matters.
"Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside... a therapist for the human soul... help[ing] us with our internal, invisible lives."
--Dr. Karl Paulnack’s
From Amanda Palmer's May 28, 2009 blog: Why Music Matters.
No comments:
Post a Comment