It’s Too Bad That Your Music Doesn’t Matter

Archers of Loaf “Let The Loser Melt” – The Archers of Loaf’s 1995 album Vee Vee overflows with skepticism and resentment, mainly directed at a music culture focused on consuming artists alive in a greedy, self-serving hype cycle that reduces art and youth culture to a cheap, disposable commodity. The record comes from the perspective of an indie punk band who seem proud to speak for non-careerist “underachievers,” sarcastically lament the passing of “the world’s worst rock and roll band,” and toss the word “overrated” around like a dart intended to puncture the bloated ego of anyone involved in celebrating mediocrity. Twelve years later, Vee Vee sounds more relevant than ever before; a bitter testament to the old cliché: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The thing is, Vee Vee may now seem like a prescient album, but it’s very much of its time. People complain endlessly about today’s internet hype cycle, but the only thing that’s really changed about fan culture in the past 20 years is the speed at which it progresses. The internet is simply a medium that accelerates a process that’s been going on ever since anything that can considered “indie” or “punk” or “alternative” became a marketable commodity.

The Archers of Loaf wrote Vee Vee while the record industry was still in the midst of the gold rush to find more Nirvanas, and A&R people were desperately snapping up cult bands and indie acts in the hopes of scoring a fluke hit. In this era, the stakes are much lower — no one is expecting to pull Nirvana numbers, that’s for sure — but more people than ever are looking for a way to stake a claim on artists who could reach…well, ANY… level of success.

It’s not just about directly making money off an artist’s work now; the new music market is increasingly driven by a sort of reputation economy based on building a portfolio of acts that read as part of a publication’s “brand,” and then doing everything possible to pump up the audience’s awareness and expectations in order to make them seem like a success. It’s almost irrelevant whether or not those people actually sell records — it’s not a magazine, television show, radio program, or blog’s concern to move units or make an artist money, it’s just about perpetuating the notion that THEY are the ones out there discovering this HOT NEW MUSIC. “Taste makers” have to constantly build their brand if they hope to parlay what they do into a career, and so there’s an ongoing need to dig around for something new to push, even when the underground is overcrowded (ha, see what I did right there, Archers fans?) with rival taste makers and unremarkable musicians.

It’s not just the writers, though. The audience is full of people doing the same exact thing on a smaller scale, and while they might follow blogs, webzines, and college/public radio DJs so far, they often need to establish their own identities by ostentatiously rejecting consensus-builders like Pitchfork and Stereogum. This has always been the case — rewind to the Archers’ era, and it’d be people bitching about Spin or 120 Minutes. (Fun fact: I found the Archers of Loaf via MTV, I think it was actually on an episode of Alternative Nation.)

When it comes to art that is practically defined by it falling on the outskirts of the mainstream, the audience is almost always going to be comprised of people just waiting for the right moment to get into backlash mode. They kid themselves into believing that they sincerely care about the art, but what they really love is the social capital of hipness, and can’t afford to put too much of themselves into something that may become unfashionable. This is the real problem, if we’re going to be very honest — at the root level, indie/alternative/college rock/blog rock/whatever you want to call it is poisoned by the vanity of its audience, and as a result, the industry built around it will always be unstable, and the culture around the music will be dominated and debased by swarms of self-styled experts attempting to one-up one another. As a wise man once said: “This ain’t a scene, this is a god damn arms race.” (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Elsewhere: It might only be up on the WFMU site for one week, so please do check out the archive of my appearance on Trent Wolbe’s Safe and Sound show while you can. We talk a bit about my Pop Songs 07 site, and play about three hours worth of R.E.M. songs. Not to be all Jarvis Cocker about this, but I suggest that you refrain from looking at the playlist whilst listening to the show.