Scum Also Rises

One of the most prevalent misconceptions about music and the music business is that truly talented musicians don't need to, or shouldn't have to, promote or publicize themselves. Publicity is naively thought of as the natural and direct byproduct of a musician's quality: the better the music is, the more publicity it should generate. Most people don't want to think of themselves as force-fed their culture, they want to think that they like good things and that the things they like are good. If Miley Cyrus is the most popular teen pop sensation, then Miley Cyrus must make the most sensational teen pop. Likewise, if Young Jeezy's cousin has the most downloaded ringtone of the week, it must be the most bangingest ringtone available, at least from one of Young Jeezy's cousins. Stands to reason. Capitalism, social Darwinism, and American Norman Rockwellism all lead us to believe that the cream rises to the top without any outside help.

Unfortunately, we know this is not true. As good as Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5 surely is, I find it hard to accept that it is finer than any Leonard Cohen song, although it certainly charted higher. Leave aside the obvious truth that just because the majority of people like something doesn't mean it's any good; the music business is not a pure system. An army of publicists and agents uses kickbacks, graft, handjobs, cell-phone radiation, blackmail, and lethal doses of boring e-mails to ensure that their anointed artists are virtually ubiquitous. A circular logic ensues: people assume that prevalence equals popularity, and that popularity equals quality, so they embrace whatever's prevalent, ultimately making it popular. This reasoning also explains mock-Craftsman townhouses, pre-stained blue jeans, and the continued casting of Julia Roberts in movies.

Indie rock culture was born out of a desire to circumvent this mainstream music juggernaut. The cultural elite of bored suburban snobs took it as an obvious truth that popular culture was a bloated corpse and that it had perversely inverted its founding logic: The cream no longer rose to the top, it was buried and neglected under mountains of spoiled curds like the Vinnie Vincent Invasion. Mainstream culture was too lost and corrupt to recognize the greatness of small rock bands, but that was OK. The college-educated fans of alternative rock didn't need to have their tastes dictated to them by publicists; they could discern quality music with their own senses and from the suggestions of their trusted friends. Thus the indie-rock community adopted a sleeker and more elitist version of the mainstream capitalist logic: Great music by definition cannot rise to the top of the culture, because most people are too stupid or brainwashed to appreciate it, but it will be obvious to those "in the know." Buffalo Tom or the Minutemen don't need standard publicists because everyone capable of enjoying them already knows about them, and those who don't are excluded, not by design, but by their own pathetic tin ears.

This idea had massive traction here in the Northwest. The whole grunge era was a product of this founding principle: that straightforward publicity, promotion, and press are either unnecessary, unhip gibberish or the unholy refuge of the untalented. Megan Jasper's famous coinage of "swinging on the flippity-flop" to The New York Times encapsulated it perfectly: Publicity was for lamestains. Greatness was all around us—all you had to do was check under enough barstools at the Comet Tavern and the next genius would be sitting there in a puddle of beer and slobber. Of course, five years later everyone was crying in their Hefeweizens over how the mainstream culture had perverted the scene and ruined everything by publicizing it.

A new, even more draconian regime was instituted in indie-rock culture: Publicity was Shiva the Destroyer. If you willingly publicized your band, you were a traitor and a sellout. Bands flaunted their contempt for promotion and intentionally chose unlikely and unlovely band names as a middle finger to those who would try to co-opt them. (Ever hear of the band Fuck?) Sunny Day Real Estate refused to do interviews or play in California(?). My own band called itself the Bun Family Players in a conscious attempt to choose the unhippest rock-band name in history. (We were trumped, many years later, by the Barenaked Ladies.) Indie rock became obsessed with popularity. If you were too popular, or popular with the wrong people, or in the wrong way, or if you appeared to want it or enjoy it, or to be making music for any reason other than that you were a total idiot savant who never brushed his teeth and sang in a distorted howl hoping that someone would barf in your food bowl, then you were a sellout and you sucked.

Well, here we are 10 or 15 years later, and indie rock and mainstream culture have met somewhere in the middle. Major-label bands carry around barfy food bowls and have stylists tape leaves in their beards, indie bands get endorsement deals with Honda and appear to put lip gloss on their ears, and the writers at Pitchfork and People all agree that Vampire Weekend are the next Geggy Tah. The whole thing is a massive jumble of corporate and small-time operators all vying to create the next big smash using all the hype techniques of the worst Hollywood slimebags, while masquerading as publicity-adverse paragons of integrity. The potential for hypocrisy has never been higher. Professional publicists feel obligated to introduce themselves with a conspiratorial wink: "I hate publicists myself, they're the worst, and I'm only doing this because I'm working on a novel about how lame being a publicist is, but since I'm here let's talk about how we're going to publicize your record without appearing to be publicizing it." The music business is rife with this kind of cynical gaming, and the musicians are the worst at it. They want every effort made to make their band a household name, as long as they are portrayed as humble back-porch songsmiths who just learned to use a telephone so they could call their mothers in prison.