What's the future of the music industry?

https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/dummy-tour-diary-part-one

the spicy stuff is in part 2

This is really long... what's the upshot?

That indie rock is full of posers and careerist hacks, both musicians and journalists.

He is talking about the band’s motto of sorts, which appears in their Bandcamp bio and is, much like this story, kind of a joke, but not really.

Mysteries within mysteries: no-one can figure out what's being said about a Bandcamp article about a Stereogum article about responses to someone's tweet.

All this about a Portishead record?

I read Part 1 over lunch... it just kind of felt like a lightweight tour diary / promotional piece for this band (which didn't get me interested in hearing them). Maybe I'll tackle Part 2 (and the "spicy stuff") later.

I skimmed it--seemed like some shit talking about Wet Leg and industry plant indie acts

I like how this band is all serious about not posting pics of themselves on Insta, keeping it "all about the music," etc. - and yet they participated in this puff piece (is that part of what ppl are making fun of?)

Curious if the author is related to Mary Timony? I kinda liked it, it reminded me of tour diaries and blogging from a more innocent time of the internet.

It’s not a puff piece though…

I mean there are many paragraphs about how great she thinks the band is, and why

(she says upfront she's a fan, so it fits - but it's clearly not in the trad rock-mag band profile, either)

(*I missed "style of the," or something)

they're a good band tbh

I don’t think the piece is excessively complimentary which is what a puff piece is, of course she likes the band also who cares if she likes the band

Honestly if you think that’s a puff piece I can’t help you

It is totally a trad rock band profile

I'm not gonna argue about it (cuz who cares), but trad rock band profiles do not have sections like this (about another band they encounter):

“Maybe they’re just excited,” I think, feeling uncharacteristically generous towards a group I’ve always found to be the band equivalent of every dweeb who ever tried to talk to me about this really obscure label called Flying Nun Records. Yet as I start scrolling through their posts, my annoyance level starts to rise.

To me, the band’s DIY-as-promotional-shtick brims with unearned condescension toward the underground music community whose hard work and willingness to take risks has made it possible for them to have a show tonight in the first place. It’s doubly insulting coming from a group on their first full U.S. tour ever and already playing big rooms as the support act for a much larger band, as if the “DIY show” is a cute novelty that’s useful only when the “real show” falls through.

Dummy sounds like if Stereolab had more drone, less hooks, and less fun. Tbh I think ILX people would be into it.

xpost that band deserves to be taken down though

Seriously dumb shit

Also I’m sure there are plenty of Lester bangs articles with stuff like that

Don’t even like dummy that much and that’s one of the most refreshing articles I’ve read in a long time

I’m sure there are plenty of Lester bangs articles with stuff like that

Exactly. And it was well done. The whole piece is good, both parts, even though it didn't make me want to listen to Dummy at all (or hang out with the writer, for that matter).

Ftr - Lester Bangs didn't write trad rock profiles!

He fucking toured with the clash and wrote about it just like this writer did with dummy

My point is that his style is not what I meant by trad, if this writer is emulating him that's cool, but Bangs probably would've named that other band (i.e., done an actual takedown) and not just used them as an unnamed counterexample of a less cool band

(and for something so minor, I mean yeah their social posts sound annoying, but this is small-bore inside scene stuff)

(and for something so minor, I mean yeah their social posts sound annoying, but this is small-bore inside scene stuff)

I hate to break it to you, but there are no "big" bands anymore except for Metallica and Coldplay and maybe U2.

The bands are big. It's the pictures that got small!

morrisp in "not getting it" shocka

good piece overall, also the Powers/Rolin duo rule

Do I normally "not get it"(?) Guess I'll have to work on that...

Btw, I skipped ahead to the Wet Leg takedown – very trenchant!

(I guess the author was not afraid to name names there, for whatever reason)

i remember a time when the mere mention of the name "wet leg" made all who might raise their ire quiver in fear. truly, what degradation has befallen music?

Making music shouldn’t be fun.

I also enjoyed the cameo from Caldwell and Tester, who made the best ambient album of 2020 (which is really saying something).

So bitter about Wet Leg. Maybe Dummy should consider writing music more people want to hear instead of looking for conspiracies about why they aren’t as popular as other bands.

maybe if they hadn't chosen such a terrible name

good tour diary, good band. love internecine scene policing. i like wet leg too but a band's first single having a lavish video and huge promo push is not un-candleboxish, i think it's ok to be grouchy/leery/sneery when it comes to the modern alternative rock corporate apparatus.

found this unreadable lol but good on y’all

idk didn’t feel like the writer interrogated the brilliant musings of the band enough or potentially at all. good wet leg and stereogum hit jobs i guess but i find the “making art should be miserable” mentality like capitalist stockholm syndrome. i don’t know i didn’t read it all

self-importance of ppl doin it diy is why i never talk to diy ppl end of post

The thing (to me) about the writer's Wet Leg takedown isn't so much that she hates the band or thinks that ppl only like them because they're told to (tho that does carry an amusing "narcissism of small differences" angle) - it's that she's so angry about the review (and, I guess, the band's success) that she doesn't seem to even really read or engage with it, she just (mis)reads a single line about them being "carpetbaggers" and sees red.

Btw, I downloaded a "sample" (first chapter) of a book she mentions, b/c it sounded interesting – Your Band Sucks, by a guy named Jon Fine who was in Bitch Magnet. It starts off with a well-written meditation on his childhood in a quiet, leafy NJ suburb; early attempts at music / h.s. "battles of the bands"; etc. But the sample ends right when he starts going off on how "awful" mainstream music was in the '80s – as he attempts to illustrate by listing a bunch of (IMO) actually awesome/fun (if sometimes cheesy) artists, with lines like:

Things were so bad we tried to get excited about John Fogerty's first album in like ten years, even though my chemistry textbook was more exciting and contained no writing as horrendous as the lyrics to "Centerfield."

and

During one surpassingly strange fifteen or eighteen months, the ghastly and bouncy Men at Work was the biggest band in the world.

And it's like - c'mon, man. Everyone has their lane, and you've already said this book is gonna be about how your favorite bands are Swans, Scratch Acid, Sonic Youth (etc.), so I get you're no "poptimist"... but even looking back as a middle-aged guy whose tastes have presumably broadened since adolescence, you still have these opinions(?)

otm

When I skimmed this I thought it (Dummy) was all a reference to Geoff Barrow of Portishead's recent tweet:

I’ve so had it with immensely over privileged artist and bands
Do labels not sign working class people anymore ?

Same as theatre and film It’s so fucked.

Their lack of awareness and Their assumption that we’ve all grown up the same way is astonishing

— 🏴‍☠️ Geoff Barrow 🏴‍☠️ (@jetfury) July 23, 2022

Which in turn reminded me of Clairo. I don't know Clairo, but I was reading something about the new Marcus Mumford solo album, which features Clairo, so looked up their wiki. The wiki includes this:

Following the success of "Pretty Girl", a number of social media users (specifically on discussion website Reddit) began claiming that Clairo was an "industry plant" who gained success through her father's nepotism. She denied the claims, calling them sexist. Writers for The Guardian and The Ringer also stated that her father's connections facilitated her record contract signing.

I had no idea who her father could be, but indeed, he has his own wiki entry:

Geoff Cottrill is an American marketer who formerly held top positions at Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Converse. He is the father of the musical artist Clairo.

And then later on:

Cottrill is the father of the musical artist Clairo. According to The New York Times, her record label signing was made possible by her father's connection to Jon Cohen, co-founder of The Fader and an executive at the publication's marketing agency, Cornerstone. His role in the launching of his daughter's professional career attracted scrutiny from some online communities with regard to the singer's authenticity.

So, well ... yeah. I think I've seen a few things lately making fun of indie acts with blue hyperlink parents. But upper middle class indie kids are nothing new.

Yeah - one of the Dummy guys (in the profile) refers to "punk and DIY music" as "working class genres"; which feels a bit... ahistorical (at least w/r/t indie rock, I dunno about punk). Whatever accounts for the phenomenon he's complaining about - rich indie-rock kids apparently thinking they "deserve to get paid" – I don't think it's solely b/c of their privileged backgrounds, b/c artists like that used to be willing to work their butts off too (if anything, it may have given some of them a "fallback" which made enduring the grinding-it-out life more palatable?)

Like - the DIY scene here in L.A., where Dummy is from, is absolutely populated by at least a very healthy % of upper-middle class kids (or at least was, not long ago, and I assume still is)

(and artists in that scene, whatever their background, weren't really focused on getting Sub Pop singles or touring nationally; it was all very centered around the local community... so Dummy seem to represent a very particular kind of "DIY" artist with Big Ambitions)

The Wet Leg takedown is funny - yeah, they were discovered and got a push. It's a thing that's happened faster and more often with the UK music world vs. the US for as long as I've been paying attention to music (including US bands going to England, like all the Meet Me In The Bathroom bands). Expecting the music culture there to derive meaning from the flagellation of driving a piece of shit Econoline from Reno to Vegas is harder when there's not a desert and the entire landmass is smaller than several US states.

I’m enough of a poptimist to think that getting in the van is not a virtue in and of itself

So the music industry has a class problem. What creative industry doesn't?

It's easy to take shots at artists from privileged backgrounds. But the real hard work is in uplifting voices from less privileged backgrounds. I don't see these moaners doing that. Just talking shit and complaining about their own relative lack of success.

Yes, Wet Leg and Clairo got a headstart from privilege. But more importantly, they make good music. We should be uplifting all good music, regardless of background.

Call me idealistic, but I think it's more productive to give exposure to artists from less privileged backgrounds, than to tear down more privileged artists for their success - regardless of how much you think it's deserved or not.

You had me up until Wet Leg make good music.