Worlds, real & imagined

Standing on a remote hilltop some months ago, attentive to the sounds we too often dismiss as background noise — the enveloping wind brushing leaves, the rumble of a distant car — made me think about just how the world sounded before recorded music permeated, then saturated the air. The privilege of birdsong; the preciousness (and impermanence) of human performance.

Which is one reason why I’m observing No Music Day.

Returning to the topic of careers (the length of, and when to stop) inspired by a recent Saturday morning drive with the CBC as aural accompaniment (praise Sirius), it occurred to me that there are potentially two stages to the career of the typical quirky, niche-audience indie-type performer.

The ‘make records that get decent ratings, sell a few copies, and tour 500-capacity venues while sleeping in a van’ stage is one that can continue until you decide it’s too much bloody hassle.

But at some point, a fan who got into your music at student age may well end up in the advertising business, with the power to say, ‘hey, this track fits perfectly with…’ and you can insert the product here, but if you’re in the indiepop business, you’re going to be hoping beyond hope that it’s something with at least marginal credibility, and not tampons or fibre supplements. Dear gods, let it be Apple.

Consider it the musical equivalent of a mercy shag, albeit one that has the potential to get you on Saturday Night Live.

Thing is, you can’t predict when the commercial interest is going to kick in, and if you try too hard to court it, you become Moby — or worse, Liz Phair. But you don’t want to act too coy, because the last thing you want is the loyal fanboi who’s a junior producer at Creative Cokesnorters, Inc. thinking that your niche appeal is too precious to be exposed to the masses as part of a thirty-second sales pitch.

It raises a quandary: given that it generally takes a handful of years for your college-student fans to graduate and climb the ad-industry career ladder, is it worth flogging out another tour in a van before calling it a day? After all, there’s basically a point (again, hard to measure) where your commercial revival won’t happen till you’re dead.

Thus, the LFFI (not to be confused with this slightly more established financial venue) to quantify the likelihood of your favourite niche popster getting a career-enhancing, ad-fuelled moment in the limelight, and not alienating the fanbase as a result.

Picking up on what Danny said[1], some thoughts on fame. Stewart Lee’s answer gets it right, I think: fame enough to be financially comfortable and comfortable with one’s audience. The further question is whether that’s only achievable — or only recognisible in a way that brings the associated comfort — on the downslope, after you’ve tasted celebrity — and celebrity, in turn, has spit you out.

Fame has frontiers, and some you only notice when you return. There’s only a step between a comfortable, loyal fanbase and, well, this.

But I mostly wonder what happens ‘after’ fame. Not many of the bands and artists whose careers I followed (and, I suppose, helped sustain) in those formative college years are still around. The first thought is of a quiet retirement living off the royalties, perhaps a production job or similar to keep busy. But then you realise: that only happens to a few former popstrels after they put away the bleach and bad outfits. For those earnest indie types I came to love, if there was any money left at the end, it was barely enough to pay the rent, let alone relax by the pool. And that’s okay, in its own way, as long as you park the tour bus and pack away your gear knowing that the rest of your life is waiting.

Stephen Fry (now, more or less, the best blogger ever) talks expansively about what fame is. What fame was, though, is another thing entirely.

1. Ten years ago? I remember that night, not least for Charlie Brooker’s interlude. Who knows where the time goes? Anyway, keep writing, you bastard.

On my first weekend in the US, I took a town car from Manhattan to Newark airport. As we hit the Turnpike’s miles of steel and brick and smoke, (think: opening minute of The Sopranos) I joked to the driver, a middle-aged Russian man, that it felt like home. It took me the rest of the drive to explain.

The look and feel and talk of hard industrial graft is deeper in my system than anything the chimneys spewed out. The bridges and old works may be steampunk, but take the trunk road to the coast at night, and the lights lay bare something that forces itself beyond modernity. And, dear god, did we have sunsets.

Which is just to point to this interview with Ridley Scott, in the knowledge that, like him, I’ve seen the first light from the flaring.

What’s so delicious about Stephen Fry’s survey of smartphones, as deep as it is wide, isn’t the unabashed geekery, though that has generated an antiphonal ‘squee!’ from all corners of my digital neignbourhood. No, it’s the unconscious connoisseurship of the thing: the sense that you (well, that he) can write about geek toys in a mode that’s neither Mossberg nor Gizmodo nor anything in-between is as exhilarating as the breeze that waves farewell to a stultifying summer.