An Uncommon Connection
Commerce rampant in an age of mistrust
My mood keeps whipsawing this week between elation as orders come in and tubs of mail fill, and brooding doubt when the spigot shuts off or some new tendril of weird information snakes its way into the pondering I’ve been doing over the last year about what I want to be when I grow up.
I don’t think I was ever naïve enough to expect an easy life or guaranteed success, but my options seemed a lot simpler and more straightforward in the glare of the bright future of the twentieth century. If I wrote, I anticipated steady work from a gradually growing pool of freelance outlets who’d give me a pittance for putting words on paper in a pleasing way. If I hung out a shingle, people would come sell physical media to me, and I’d display it with the new releases of the day and peddle it from my perch on a barstool behind a Windows 95 PC covered in band stickers.
If I did both, I figured I could be indulged in my efforts as a hack drummer, eventually eulogized as a triple threat and an essential pillar for a time in the cultural history of whatever corner of the world I’d deigned to park my ass. There are worse ways to fritter away a life.
We all know what happened to print media – and continues to happen. Just this week, Goldmine, Revolver, Alternative Press, and Brooklyn Vegan – some of the last stalwarts of music journalism in this country – were eviscerated by their parent company, which is apparently some sort of ticket-reselling platform owned by the Good Charlotte guys, because every piece of bad news has to read like Mad Libs from Hell these days.
I can’t imagine anyone writing for those outlets was making subsistence wages, but the current culture begrudges you even pocket money for a lifetime of voluntary rock ‘n roll immersion.
It felt for years the same way comedy did, and the way playing in a band did, an endless Ponzi scheme of work-for-free and pay-to-play “opportunities” all in the service of a big payoff that never existed. Try to find a niche and just do your thing and put in the work, and you’ll eventually be stymied by gatekeepers, left out of an infrastructure built on the backs of generations of creative people sold the idea of “making it” as the mythical dream of just doing what moves you as more than just an auxiliary hobby between bouts of scratching for survival.
