Post by twigs on May 30, 2017 21:24:07 GMT
A. G. Cook is not your bitch.
This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly Alex is, indeed, your bitch, and should be out there making what you want to listen to right now.
People are not machines. Musicians and artists aren't machines.
You're complaining about Alex doing other things than making the music you want to listen to as if your buying the first single release in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your dollar, and Alex for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the music for you.
No such contract existed. You were paying your dollar for the music you were listening to, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what comes next.
It seems to me that the biggest problem with internet labels is that either stans complain that the music used to be good but that somewhere in the effort to get out a release every month the quality has fallen off, or they complain that the music, although maintaining quality, aren't coming out on time.
Both of these things make me glad that I am not currently writing a LP, and make me even gladder that the decade that I did write LP things, I was young, driven, a borderline workaholic, and very fortunate. (and even then, towards the end, I was taking five weeks to write a monthly song, with all the knock-on problems in deadlines that you would expect from that).
For me, I would rather listen to a good EP, from a contented producer. I don't really care what it takes to produce that.
Some musicians need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their music very rapidly. Some musicians write a chorus or so every day, rain or shine. Some musicians run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they're ready to write again. Sometimes musicians haven't quite got the next song on an EP ready in their heads, but they have something else all ready instead, so they write the thing that's ready to go, prompting cries of outrage from people who want to know why the musician could possibly write Song X while the fans were waiting for Song Y.
I remember hearing an upset comics editor telling a roomful of other editors about a comics artist who had taken a few weeks off to paint his house. The editor pointed out, repeatedly, that for the money the artist would have been paid for those weeks' work he could easily have afforded to hire someone to paint his house, and made money too. And I thought, but did not say, “But what if he wanted to paint his house?”
I blew a deadline recently. Terminally blew it. First time in 25 years I've sighed and said, “I can't do this, and you won't get your story.” It was already late, I was under a bunch of deadline pressure, my father died, and suddenly the story, too, was dead on the page. I liked the voice it was in, but it wasn't working, and eventually, rather than drive the editors and publishers mad waiting for a story that wasn't going to come, I gave up on it and apologised, worried that I could no longer write fiction.
I turned my attention to the next deadline waiting – a script. It flowed easily and delightfully, was the most fun I've had writing anything in ages, all the characters did exactly what I had hoped they would do, and the story was better than I had dared to hope.
Sometimes it happens like that. You don't choose what will work. You simply do the best you can each time. And you try to do what you can to increase the likelihood that good art will be created.
And sometimes, and it's as true of musicians as it is of stans, you have a life. People in your world get sick or die. You fall in love, or out of love. You move house. Your aunt comes to stay. You agreed to give a talk half-way around the world five years ago, and suddenly you realise that that talk is due now. Your last LP comes out and the critics vociferously hated it and now you simply don't feel like making another. Your cat learns to levitate and the matter must be properly documented and investigated. There are deer in the apple orchard. A thunderstorm fries your hard disk and fries the backup drive as well...
And life is a good thing for a musician. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.
The economics of scale for a musician mean that very few of us can afford to write 13 song LPs and then break them up and release them annually once they are done. So musicians with internet labels, or ones that, as the netlabel scene did, grow in the telling, are going to write them and have them released as they go along.
And if you are waiting for a new song in a long ongoing series, whether from Alex or from Danny or from SOPHIE or from someone else...
Wait. Listen to the original songs again. Listen to something else. Get on with your life. Hope that the musician is writing the song you want to listen to, and not dying, or something equally as dramatic. And if he paints the house, that's fine.
And PC Music boards, in the future, when you see other people complaining that A. G. Cook has been spotted doing something other than writing the EP they are waiting for, explain to them, more politely than I did the first time, the simple and unanswerable truth: A. G. Cook is not working for you.
Hope that helps.
This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly Alex is, indeed, your bitch, and should be out there making what you want to listen to right now.
People are not machines. Musicians and artists aren't machines.
You're complaining about Alex doing other things than making the music you want to listen to as if your buying the first single release in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your dollar, and Alex for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the music for you.
No such contract existed. You were paying your dollar for the music you were listening to, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what comes next.
It seems to me that the biggest problem with internet labels is that either stans complain that the music used to be good but that somewhere in the effort to get out a release every month the quality has fallen off, or they complain that the music, although maintaining quality, aren't coming out on time.
Both of these things make me glad that I am not currently writing a LP, and make me even gladder that the decade that I did write LP things, I was young, driven, a borderline workaholic, and very fortunate. (and even then, towards the end, I was taking five weeks to write a monthly song, with all the knock-on problems in deadlines that you would expect from that).
For me, I would rather listen to a good EP, from a contented producer. I don't really care what it takes to produce that.
Some musicians need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their music very rapidly. Some musicians write a chorus or so every day, rain or shine. Some musicians run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they're ready to write again. Sometimes musicians haven't quite got the next song on an EP ready in their heads, but they have something else all ready instead, so they write the thing that's ready to go, prompting cries of outrage from people who want to know why the musician could possibly write Song X while the fans were waiting for Song Y.
I remember hearing an upset comics editor telling a roomful of other editors about a comics artist who had taken a few weeks off to paint his house. The editor pointed out, repeatedly, that for the money the artist would have been paid for those weeks' work he could easily have afforded to hire someone to paint his house, and made money too. And I thought, but did not say, “But what if he wanted to paint his house?”
I blew a deadline recently. Terminally blew it. First time in 25 years I've sighed and said, “I can't do this, and you won't get your story.” It was already late, I was under a bunch of deadline pressure, my father died, and suddenly the story, too, was dead on the page. I liked the voice it was in, but it wasn't working, and eventually, rather than drive the editors and publishers mad waiting for a story that wasn't going to come, I gave up on it and apologised, worried that I could no longer write fiction.
I turned my attention to the next deadline waiting – a script. It flowed easily and delightfully, was the most fun I've had writing anything in ages, all the characters did exactly what I had hoped they would do, and the story was better than I had dared to hope.
Sometimes it happens like that. You don't choose what will work. You simply do the best you can each time. And you try to do what you can to increase the likelihood that good art will be created.
And sometimes, and it's as true of musicians as it is of stans, you have a life. People in your world get sick or die. You fall in love, or out of love. You move house. Your aunt comes to stay. You agreed to give a talk half-way around the world five years ago, and suddenly you realise that that talk is due now. Your last LP comes out and the critics vociferously hated it and now you simply don't feel like making another. Your cat learns to levitate and the matter must be properly documented and investigated. There are deer in the apple orchard. A thunderstorm fries your hard disk and fries the backup drive as well...
And life is a good thing for a musician. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.
The economics of scale for a musician mean that very few of us can afford to write 13 song LPs and then break them up and release them annually once they are done. So musicians with internet labels, or ones that, as the netlabel scene did, grow in the telling, are going to write them and have them released as they go along.
And if you are waiting for a new song in a long ongoing series, whether from Alex or from Danny or from SOPHIE or from someone else...
Wait. Listen to the original songs again. Listen to something else. Get on with your life. Hope that the musician is writing the song you want to listen to, and not dying, or something equally as dramatic. And if he paints the house, that's fine.
And PC Music boards, in the future, when you see other people complaining that A. G. Cook has been spotted doing something other than writing the EP they are waiting for, explain to them, more politely than I did the first time, the simple and unanswerable truth: A. G. Cook is not working for you.
Hope that helps.
journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html
