My pal Rob Siegel wrote a book – a great, great book called “Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic”. You’ll notice that it has nothing to do with music (well, it has a little to do with music, but not much, really) – it turns out that in addition to being a marvelous songwriter, Rob is a car guy, and he’s been writing a column about cars for 25 years. I can’t recommend the book highly enough – it’s charming, deeply engaging, funny, beautifully written. And (I hope you can tell, because of these monthly missives) my standards are pretty damn high.
But my goal here is not to plug Rob’s book (although I seem to be doing that, anyway).
After I read it, and wrote Rob to praise him effusively, he wrote me back and asked me to post a review on Amazon. A perfectly fair request – his publisher snagged reviews in the Globe and the Times, and he’s trying to do his part to plug the book. And we should all be doing that sort of thing, right? Those of us with products, of any sort, owe it to ourselves, and our products – music, books, widgets – to tell as many people about them as we can. They’re great, after all!
I’ve written before – at least, I’m pretty sure I’ve written before – about the artist’s complicated relationship with marketing. Those of us who can do it well, on balance, are more successful than those of us who can’t – because, really, it’s all about how many people have heard about you, and there are only two ways for people to hear about you: either you tell them, or someone else tells them – and either way, you’ll do better if you have a hand in it. But that morning, as I happily composed a review for Rob, it occurred to me that —
Well, we’re not going to go there quite yet, because I now have a rare opportunity to show you folks how the Low Notes sausage is made. I read Rob’s book almost a month ago, and it gave me the idea for this column, and the way the sentence above originally ended was “it occured to me that the extent to which the entire world is moving in this direction can’t possibly be a good thing.”
And then I stared at that sentence for three weeks, and realized: nope, I’m full of crap. It was the “you kids get off my lawn” alarm going off, the rose-colored view through the Vaseline-smeared lens of nostalgia (and bad metaphors, apparently). And the thing that showed me that it had to be nostalgia was the realization that the way that the world used to do this, frankly, sucked more.
The thing is, a good number of us used to outsource our dreams of fame and fortune to others. We could slave away, and maybe the big record company would discover us, or we’d get that book deal, or something. And sure, we musicians would make our own cassettes (remember playing those things through your Flintstones-era stereos, powered by tiny dinosaurs on treadmills?), but the record contract was the dream; hell, if you were an author, self-publishing was “vanity” publishing, barely more dignified than vomiting at a wedding reception.
Nowadays, the slogan is “You are your own brand”. And the distribution channels are, more and more, channels that we’re expected to drive ourselves, or do a big chunk of the leg work for, at the very least. But the thing is: they’re there. Yes, the long tail of attention still condemns most of us geniuses to unjustified obscurity – but the chance is there. The levers are, more and more, levers that people like you and me can pull – if you know how to pull them. Sure, that’s one more thing you have to learn to do, in addition to figuring out whose sofa you can sleep on and how to shrink-wrap your own CDs, but it’s better than having those channels completely owned and controlled by enormous corporations.
I’m not fooling myself here. I understand that the enormous corporations have a lot to lose; and I understand that they’re still better at manipulating the channels than we are. But the battle isn’t as one-sided as it used to be. It’s easy to make fun of the reality show culture, the folks, like Snooki, who’re famous simply for being willing to make asses of themselves in public; it’s like shooting overly-tanned fishi in a barrel, frankly (and don’t think I haven’t fantasized about it). But that’s just the flip side of an opportunity that those of us who can market ourselves finally have access to.
In another great book, “The Art of the Solo Performer”, my pal Steve Rapson gives a hypothetical example of a person who takes off all his clothes in public and attempts to perform, before being hauled away by the police, thereby establishing his reputation as the “Naked Songwriter”. Steve’s point was: attention is a valuable commodity. Seize it, and you will be successful. It’s more true today than it ever was, and while I can’t say that I’m thrilled at having my incompetence rubbed in my face by the likes of Snooki, I can’t say – although I tried, for a month there – that I’d prefer the old way of doing things.