People are always making requests of me. And they are never anything I find remotely interesting. "You should do an extended guitar and synthesizer improvisation." "You should cover 'Ring of Fire.'" "You should do an album about transdimensional shape-shifting sentient lambchops." Let me shoot down these ideas one by one:
- Guitar and keyboard noodling is the most boring thing on the planet. There's a reason I don't have any Pink Floyd albums dating from 1968 to 1983.
- 'Ring of Fire' is the song I am most often requested to cover. Do all of these people hate Johnny Cash that much? Let the poor man enjoy the afterlife without having to hear me destroy his work.
- Double-you Tee Eff?
Now, despite the seemingly widespread variety of these requests, there is a common trait underlying each of them. Can you figure it out? I'm going to give the answer at the end of this paragraph, but I'm going to jabber on a bit in case you want to guess (this sentence should give you enough warning to stop reading, because I am totally going to give the answer right now). All of these requests assume that I am some oddball experimental artist. Someone who does artsy things, deconstructs familiar territory, or seems to be on another plane of existence altogether.
Even close friends... view me as a kind of uncategorizable enigma in the music world.When such a view is held by Interweb folk who don't really know me, I can sort of understand. Maybe they've only heard one or two songs. Maybe they've only read a couple of emails or postings I've made. That's a result of too few details to form a complete picture. No problem with that. But even close friends who have known me for years will sometimes let slip that they view me as a kind of uncategorizable enigma in the music world.
Why should this be? I'm not making two albums of white noise each month and releasing them to faux intellectual snobs. I'm not parading around on stage with ugly things on my head. The only "artful" practice I am aware of doing is not paying careful attention to tuning. But that's not artfulness, that's laziness.
I understand fully that different people hear different things in a musical artist. Let's take The Beatles. Some people hear pop song smithing, and equate them with early Beach Boys. Some people hear more of the experimental side, and lean towards Frank Zappa. Those make sense. But if I ever come across somebody saying "my band sounds just like The Beatles," and they play me their demo and I hear some reggae track, I'm going to be upset. I've worked a long time on this example, wanting very hard to not appear as some music snob. I feel that, no matter how much a person may like the two, it is a simple fact that The Beatles are not reggae, and a reggae band does not sound like The Beatles, even when doing a cover. Especially when doing a cover, come to think of it.
My favourite band is The Residents, which I will contend is difficult to categorize (I'd call them "post-punk experimental" if they hadn't predated post-punk by a decade). But I can tell what sounds like them and what doesn't. I used to be the webmaster for a fan club site, and we had a Fan Art section. We had to institute a rule that we only allow musical fan art if it's a Residents cover, because we'd get submissions from bands saying "we sound just like them" but they would make the most godawful noise. And I don't say "godawful noise" in a sense of your parents complaining about the music on the MTV - I mean actual godawful noise. Screams, crashes, machinery (and nothing else). It's true that The Residents sometimes made godawful noise, but for legitimate reasons (the Great War finale of Mark of the Mole), not as oddball experimental artists ("let's do an extended guitar and synthesizer improv on 'Ring of Fire' in order to symbolize the malleable nature of the lambchops as they cross dimensions").
Shouldn't I, as a modern-day independent artist, thrill to the cool chic of being my own brand?You can imagine my frustration when somebody misrepresents my favourite band. But to misrepresent me? That is entirely too weird. Plus, shouldn't I, as a modern-day independent artist, thrill to the cool chic of being my own brand? Shouldn't I be proclaiming things like "labels are phony names assigned by record companies" and "labels stifle creativity?" But really, why should I care? The label isn't for me. The label is for the consumer. How is a potential fan going to even be interested in giving me music a chance if I'm standoffish and "untouchable" by anything they are familiar with?
I think I'm a rock 'n' roll guy. I honestly do. I recognize and respect that possibly nobody else would even consider this. But I don't know why I seem to be my own category. I've always found myself starkly derivative of other people. But perhaps the best way to be your own genre is to copy someone else unashamedly. Hell, it worked for Primus.