Emmet Reads

There is an issue with some aspiring musicians, the ones who continue long into adulthood without steady employment dreaming of a career if only they can expose enough people to their music. I suspect these are the musicians you are referring to in your question. I like to call this ‘friend rock’. Their audiences are friends the band has asked to come, not people who have requested to be there. These aspirants constantly ‘ask’ everyone they know to come to their shows and please ‘bring your other friends too’. Social network event pages are flooded every month with their invitations. There is no discrimination in location, it doesn’t make a difference to them if they are playing a pub in Ipswich and you are in Reykjavik. All publicity is good publicity. Shows are listed as birthday parties or pub nights, and then they mention that if you say ‘baba booey’ at the door you can get in for free. Even if you go a few times, it’s not enough. It seems like every human interaction becomes a marketing opportunity. At shows, they ask people to stand closer to the stage and complain that people at the bar are not listening to them. Eventually the friend rocker morphs from forcing copies of CDs in your hand to asking you to go to their Kickstarter page to purchase a limited-edition MP3 or give money for privileges such as having them play in your living room, or having them send you a ‘signed framed photo’ so they can fundraise for a European tour.

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…And there are people who prefer to read books and stories where the author isn’t present. If you have a preference for a type of literature it’s tempting to think the literature you prefer is a better literature, a higher form. From that perch you can look down and say people who use their own lives in their writing are creating work of less value, of no value. They’re narcissists, confession junkies.

I think people that try to create without accessing their own experiences are like carpenters trying to build a house without a hammer. It’s impressive to build a house without a hammer, but it doesn’t make a better house, and it doesn’t mean much to the reader, who has to live inside the house, and is primarily concerned about whether the roof leaks.

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For all the supposedly progressive politics of rock and pop, the structure of the business is incredibly entrepreneurial, with musicians required to front a remarkable amount of their own money for instruments, travel, and recording before they see any sort of return on their investment. There’s no large-scale structure that can provide steady employment (and health insurance) while nurturing innovation, just a produce-or-die ethos that receives no subsidies or grants. In America, at least, one of the few areas of life in which government really does have minimal involvement is pop music.

This is especially true for Clarkson, whose story at times sharply parallels that of Howard Roark, the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s libertarian erotic novel The Fountainhead, a book well-loved by Paul’s fanbase. Like Roark, she was stymied by the establishment, and had to take her appeal directly to the people on American Idol. Just as Roark was vindicated by a jury at the novel’s climax, Clarkson was ultimately successful through a powerful display of her talent to the masses, who rallied behind her when the powers-that-be would not, voting her into freedom. Bands are at least nominally collective affairs, but as a solo artist, Clarkson is a fierce sole proprietor, a creative who, like Roark, refuses to compromise. Her songs frequently sound the theme Roark summons in his courtroom speech: ‘A man’s spirit, however, is his self…the man who enslaves himself voluntarily in the name of love is the basest of creatures.’ This is, basically, the idea behind ‘Miss Independent.’

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This transformation of the viewing public into a nation of smug Bela Karolyis, concerned only with whether our favorite shows are able to ‘stick the landing’ is problematic to say the least. Television is a medium predicated on opening doors, not closing them. Until this recent, highly serialized era, the thought that programs needed to provide any resolution other than a group hug, or a high-concept joke was completely alien. Now we expect flawless narrative consistency in a medium that tends to have less reliable end dates than Harold Camping.

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