2004-11-05 - 6:34 p.m.

speaking of singing martyrs

John McCrea, of Cake, as quoted on VH1.com:

"Long live your fantasies about being in a touring rock band, but it's actually really rootless and depressing."

"When you're a creative person and you have to play the same song over and over every night and live on a bus and eat truck-stop food, that's not a very creatively fulfilling lifestyle."

"Things that become popular have a mandatory expiration. When too many of your neighbors know about something, it's no longer cool. Things have to reinvent themselves, whether it's rock bands or a new flavor of dishwashing detergent. There's this endless appetite for new inducements to buy, sometimes unnecessarily. And I think strident rejection of gratuitous innovation has made us culturally irrelevant."

"I don't think we're building our fanbase with this album; I just think our pre-existing fans are deciding to buy another album. Culturally, we're totally not right for the time, and I'm sure next week we'll have, like, zero more records sold."

Wow. Dude. If touring is going to make you that miserable, stay the fuck home.

While I share to some extent his exasperation with the need of the industry to create a new flavor of the month a lot more frequently than monthly, it should be noted that a lot of creative people don't find all innovation gratuitous, and can't be bothered worrying about being culturally relevant or irrelevant.

And as far as your theory about attracting new fans - you sure talked me out of it.

my mood -

the mood of the whole world wide bleepin' web -