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My brain is fried like a banana after driving to and from Chicago last week to read at Quimbys, but since most of my writing is inane drivel anyway I doubt anyone will notice any difference here. I've been sitting at home drinking Plum Schnapps and burning my collection of cassettes onto CD; when I was in high school and college I couldn't afford CDs so I bought everything on cassette. My cassette deck is currently on its last legs, barely playing tapes, and I decided that instead of either buying a new tape deck, or replacing 500 cassettes with CDs at $10-20 a pop I would just record them as MP3s and burn ‘em. Sure, this means that some of that low-fi cassette hiss and warping gets captured forever in digital, but that's how I've been hearing the songs for years anyway. Error-free digital purity would just frighten and confuse me, anyway. So I sit here in the dark eating pretzels, drinking schnapps, and listening to my entire music collection one song at a time. I've gained 50 pounds, grown six inches of beard, and am now so photophobic even the dim light of my computer monitor is paining me. Soon I will be 100% mushroom, and the world will rejoice. Then my reluctant columnist Tim the Angry Clown wrote a piece about how much NYC radio sucks, and I started to wonder about some of the songs that are currently on the radio - especially the songs which are on like three or four radio stations at once, which is, of course, a bean-counters wet dream. A song being exposed to the over-40 classic rock crowd, the MOR teenie-boppers, the 20-30 post-collegiate alterna-slackers, all at once? Holy crap! That means sales, motherfuckers. I can almost sense the marketing drool coming out of my speakers when these songs (e.g. This Is How You Remind Me by Nickelbach(sp?)) come on. I started wondering why it is that these terrible, awful songs got so much airplay. The simple fact is, they get this kind of airplay because they're bland, flavorless. They have enough rock bite to get played on the rock stations, but are soft and mushy enough to get played on top-40 pop stations. They satisfy weak-kneed sappiness and have a crunchy riff at the chorus for air-guitar. These songs are successful in spite of sucking because they are bland. Simple. That hit me like a truck. Bland=successful. Holy shit. It's so true it's frightening. We live in a country that is increasingly divided up into opposing camps of style and taste, after all; in order to have blockbuster success you must appeal to a wide range of different tastes. You must dilute your style and message with bits and pieces of other people's style and messages, or else the teeming millions will not be interested. If you cast your net too narrowly you might win a lot of strong fans in one cross-section of the country, but your sales will mire in the thousands and you will never reach national prominence. The truth is, the more successful you are, on a national level, the less interesting, daring, and worthwhile your work must be. I know that for most of you, this probably wasn't a newsflash, and you're wondering (not for the first time) why I'm so dense. I had just never really clarified my thoughts on this; I knew it too, but in a subconscious way. Now it's on the top of my brain, clear and bright. This means, of course, that I now realize that Zines and all other DIY publishing or distribution are pretty much doomed to small-scale success. It's simple: we're all too narrow in our appeal. Not necessarily because we're geniuses or even talented; some DIY stuff, some zines, some indie music just plain sucks. No, we're doomed to obscurity because we don't consciously appeal to the lowest common denominator in a bald pitch for sales. Since we don't water-down our idiosyncratic styles, our opinions, or our technique to allow dimwits and suburbanites across the country access our work without fear, we'll never get their sales. Without their sales, we're trapped down below amongst the Mole People, who also happen to be the smartest, the most dissatisfied, and the least assimilated people in the country. The Mole People don't mind independent thought and weird, wacky ideas - they love them, and embrace us. This doesn't bother me. I used to dream of being rich and successful and famous, but I've grown up and now merely dream of being able to quit my day job. I'd love to sell a book to Hollywood and walk away with enough money to quit and live on for the rest of my life - not because that would be a possible entry into fame and fortune amongst the Surface Folk, but because it would give me the means to burrow deeper underground and sever my ties with the Surface for good. Who gives a shit if the Surface People make a book of mine into a terrible movie starring Brad Pitt? I'd take the money, wash my hands of the whole thing, buy a nice house and start up my own small publishing business, and publish my own stuff for my fellow Mole People. No, the blandness of success doesn't bother me, I'm just surprised it took me this long to figure it out. So that's my thoughts from my dark, carefree bunker, where fungus has started to grow on my shoulders. If any of you Mole People want to say hi, you know where to find me. Jeff
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April 28, 2002