My creative inspiration always flows from the inherent beauty that I perceive in the creation, itself. When I am writing, performing, or recoding a song, I am doing nothing other than engaging in a relationship with that song. Yet when the song is finally complete, when the album is ready to be heard, an artist is then forced to confront the practical. What motivates me at this stage is nothing other than the desire to reach a sizable and appreciative audience. So the goal is simple, but the execution of it is not.
I could care less about financial success when it comes to the Abscondo project. I have worked hard to make money in other ways and it has never been my goal to be financially rewarded from my art. Yet at times it may have appeared that I was trying to go in another direction. The book, "Love It or Leave It: The End of Government as the Problem", was published commercially and then I proceeded to conduct 15 interviews on the seediest, most disgusting of all commercial media formats: American Conservative Talk Radio. Then, to follow that up, I recently completed the best Abscondo album to date and, instead of immediately releasing it for free on Jamendo, I decided to allow time to weigh other options and to pursue other channels. So it wouldn't be incorrect to perceive a bit of wavering from a commitment to free, open source, Creative Commons content which was previously demonstrated with the successful release of Midnight Snow back in 2008.
What has been behind this wavering? The simple explanation is that, once again, the goal is to reach a large and appreciative audience. It is any artist's duty to at least try to do this (even if we seldom succeed). It is easy to be swayed by conventional wisdom. So I have allowed myself to believe that the potential of my work is being limited by my not pursuing the traditional channels, by not going mainstream, by not spending money on promotion, and by not doing everything that all the "successful" artists do. Therefore, I felt compelled to do what seemed necessary. My goal with the book was to change the minds of American Conservatives, so the assumption was that the best place to reach them was on Conservative Talk Radio. It was also easy for me to believe, at times, that releasing content for free might diminish the perceived value of that content. In other words, people might not take the work seriously for the simple reason that it is free.
So the millions of voices of conventional wisdom have been heard, and yet experience has told me that my inner-voice has been a better guide. The only real success I've experienced to date as an artist has been the release of Midnight Snow. The album was recorded with absolutely no investment and released without any financial backing. It was never promoted at all! I simply put it up on Jamendo and a few other websites and the music somehow made its way to a large enough audience of very appreciative fans. To say that the album has been played millions of times around the would not be an overstatement. Midnight Snow is still being played as much today as it was in 2008.
The success of Midnight Snow is probably what has kept me looking forward. Recording an album is very difficult and time-consuming, especially if you are doing everything yourself. You pour your soul and emotions into the project and sometimes end up becoming a zombie to loved ones around you. No sane person would allow himself to do this again and again if there was no hope that anyone out there would listen or would care. This was, indeed, the experience I had with my first attempt at releasing an album back in 2007. I spent more than $10,000 0n the Sungod Abscondo release. I printed 1,000 CD's, hired a firm to do a campaign to non-commercial radio stations, ended up getting played on a few dozen of them, and ended up with basically no album sales. The album was heard by practically nobody until I put it up on Jamendo a year later.
I could go into many more details, but the unavoidable truth is that every time I go commercial...every time I invest money to promote and ask fans to spend money to buy (which must be done to justify my investment)...the result is complete failure to reach an audience. So, over the weekend, I have made the difficult decision to recommit to what my heart is telling me to do and what experience is echoing. In the coming weeks and months, the book will be published for free and the new album, Victory in a Landlocked Sea, will be released on Jamendo on November 15th of this year. Like Midnight Snow, it will also be made available through paid channels (again, in support of my attempt to reach the largest possible audience). But not a cent will be spent on promotion (obviously it wouldn't make sense for me to pay to promote a free album).
So my beliefs have radicalized. Actually I am only remembering what I once knew -- that commercial art is not art. Commercial content is a product. The moment an artist acknowledges the need to please the agent, the record label, the publisher, the talk show host, etc., etc., he or she has already begun to divert the work. The original purity of the idea, the message, or the sound is lost. These people function only to maintain corporate censorship. If they don't want an audience to have access to something, the audience simply will not have access. Let's point out the obvious; that all of these censors are just corporate employees. Therefore, any message, idea, or even tone that is not favorable to corporate interests will be filtered out. Of course there are exceptions to this: Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, Adbusters (which is sold in corporate bookstores), and an endless list of recording artists and other writers. So it is, indeed, possible...just highly unlikely.
My hunch is that, with regard to some of these examples of anti-corporate content succeeding in the corporate environment, the artist/organization had to first find an audience and, only then, did the corporate distribution opportunity come around. Let's remember that the corporate mandate is ultimately greed. Only after an "anti-corporate" artist demonstrates overwhelming success do they tend to come on-board. Yet corporate-friendly artists like Kate Perry and Lady Gaga are made, as products, by corporations (even before they have an audience). This is the double-standard and it is completely obvious and understandable.
The good news is that, these days, all of the necessary tools are available to empower an artist to create and to reach an audience. Each artist must find his or her own unique path. If it is true art we are talking about (not commercial content), then that path must be direct from the artist to the audience. Just as in any relationship, money should not come between us. It is not a weakness to be ignored by the commercial world, but inevitable if you are producing true art...if you are trying to actually say something meaningful and authentic.
People are growing tired of music videos that are indistinguishable from advertising...news that is thinly-disguised corporate and government propaganda..."free speech" so limited that it cannot allow any thought that is anti-corporate or anti-capitalist. We are growing tired of everything getting louder and louder, ever-more urgently and desperately competing for our limited attention. We are at times physically sick from information overload just as we are somehow left bored, somehow starving for beauty and meaning in our isolation. In a desperate race for quarterly profits, corporations are pumping polluted content at us just as fast as they are pumping pollution into the environment. In this sea of multi-channel content 24/7, we are losing our ability to perceive, to think, to feel, to listen, and to see. The corporate content consumer feels mostly numbness beneath a mask of painstakingly-projected coolness and optimism. Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that the corporate content consumer is a lost cause. I cannot reach her over all of that other screaming. None of this will make sense alongside E! Television and Michael Jackson on VH1. We artists must find those few unique, beautiful souls who are still alive and open to art. These are the people we care about anyway because these are the people that actually have a chance to help create a better future for all of us.
To be an artist is to know both pure inspiration and business reality. To reach an audience and to pay the bills, we all must confront the unavoidable business side of our lives. Is it better to corrupt art by making it business (investing in promotional campaigns, counting units sold, whoring yourself on a talk show)? Or is it better to keep the art pure and make money in other ways? I am in the fortunate position to earn a good living in software sales. I have decided that I, therefore, have no desire to corrupt my art with any consideration of business. I will keep the Abscondo project pure and will embrace the privalege of reaching those truly remarkable souls who are open to that beautiful world outside the corporate mainstream. If any corporation is to ever come between us, they will have to one day come begging and it certainly will not be done on their terms.
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