After months of distraction or preoccupation, I'm working on music again. After digesting experience, it's time to take a dump. Not to defecate – I mean, deprecate – my own art, but when I'm asked what my artistic "process" is, I have no more appropriate description to offer. I can only imagine what it's like for a musician with a "team" or whatever – management company, record label ? – to satisfy with viable "product" on time and under budget. Heck, I don't even have an audience (that I know of) to not disappoint. As far as I know, I'm muttering to myself with a bucket over my head. I was thinking about the music industry, the other day, and how it's like a pet tiger for a professional musician. If you can tame it, feed it, accommodate it, pet it, and keep it from turning on you, props to ya. My situation is akin to being able at best to deal with a cute little bunny-rabbit. Just feed it vegetables. Its poop is easy to deal with. It probably wouldn't attack me.
Think of some band that is really popular in its hometown, and then it gains enough of a "buzz" to do some regional tours. It carries its particular musical style and sound, forged by the circumstances of their local scene and the lives the band-members lead in that town. Then a major label signs them on the basis of their following – but part of the deal is that they have to alter their musical style and sound somewhat in order to appeal to a broader audience, while capitalizing on the reputation that the band carries as this local phenomenon. Within the time of a couple albums' releases, the band's style and sound has been unrecognizably altered, and they have stylists dressing them and making them wear mascara 'n' shit. An even broader audience is gained, whereby normies and yuppies view themselves as really hip and edgy to be "into" the band whose reputation is still based upon their formative state as an unique local phenomenon. Icky big-name mainstream celebrities befriend the band and are shown in candid photos with them and are spotted in the VIP sections at their shows. Meanwhile, the band's old friends back home (where the band's members no longer reside) play their self-released first record and wonder "what happened to them?" because their music has sucked for a while since. Add to this that the original fans and friends have come to be embarrassed for the band, which has become the favorite of frat boys and tech bros who don't even know about the band's self-released first record. Well, metaphorically, Austin, Texas is that band.
The title of this blog post isn't an announcement of the winner of a contest for optimal buttocks. It's the title of a song by me that I like a lot. The beginning of July is, effectively, the bottom of the year.