I Was There

A few weeks ago I went to my partner Vince’s Monday night show at Union Pool, a celebration of 25 years in business for this Williamsburg bar. Vince and his band the Love Choir have the longest running musical residency in the city, over 25 years. They never charge at the door, they pass the hat. “If you wake up on a Monday morning, and find yourself both spiritually and financially depleted, you can come here,” Vince says every show, and instructs those with money to spare to put some extra in. The first time I heard this, I took note, touched by this generosity.

This particular Monday had special guests for the anniversary, Murray Hill, Meah Pace, and Steve Meyers joined the band. The crowd is usually a mixture of regulars and newbies, there are always tourists. There were a few guys with backpacks, people I hold personal vendettas against: men with no sense of spatial relations for others.

It felt like pulling teeth to get the crowd engaged. They didn’t clap, they weren’t exuberant. When Meah came on stage to sing, Vince introduced her, talking about what bands she’s in, the crowd was silent, and I’m still trying to understand what people expect from performers, how they don’t seem to make the connection that they, the audience, also has a responsibility, not just to exist, but to appreciate, to react, to join along. Maybe they didn’t know the guests, but hospitality rules still apply.

I left the show inspired by the performances¹, and thinking, once again, how we live in such a disconnect between people who make things and those who consume them. I feel the same way when people take videos of buskers on the subway, but leave no money. Later that week, the statement Commodity Fetish: Erasing the Labor Process, written on a whiteboard, popped up on Rachael Ann Jolie’s IG stories. And I can’t get it out of my mind.

When I get nostalgic and wistful for the past, it’s not just for my youth and revelry and something much much cooler than what’s happening now. It’s for a time when people could make music, live off of it, and be middle-class, whatever that is. When the economy made more sense to me. An independent record label could press LPs and CDs and yeah sure tape cassettes and be in business. This vision is definitely skewed by my time in Chicago working in independent music. Major labels usually rip musicians off.² You had to buy or subscribe to a magazine to read it, and those people who put it together got paid. Free weeklies could pay people because businesses advertised in them. People pushed to express themselves, because they were moved to do so, not just because they decided upon a lifestyle like picking cards.

There’s a point when your friends and colleagues keep doing what they care about, even when they can’t solely make a living from it. I love these people, their art, their music, their films, their writing, partly because I care for the expression itself, and partly because they keep doing it. They keep showing up so I keep showing up. Just this past month I saw lots of friends play—Vince, Antietam, a band that’s been in existence for over 40 years, they played with Oneida, a band that’s been together for over 25 years. Hell I even saw Tortoise, they’ve been around since the early 90s.

I’m generally disgusted by the good taste more people have in music these days, because it doesn’t tell me where you’ve been or who you are. Before streaming, the music you liked told me a lot about you, and now, it doesn’t. Sometimes there’s no journey, no story, no anguished-over mixtape. It just tells me an algorithm spun itself silly until it delivered you this song. That what it says for most people. It also tells me that most people care about their convenience, their free access, more than the story of the musicians themselves, including a fair exchange of music for livelihood. And that is just consumption.³

With the ease of discovery, comes a larger audience for many people, more subscribers, more listens, more clicks. But not more of a living. There’s a stagnation for people paying for what we produce, even though there appears to be a lot of interest. But dedication is different than interest. Sometimes the interest is just a grazing glance to speak to any topic at the time to appear engaged and smart. People use cultural signifiers repeatedly to build themselves, their egos, their careers. This isn’t just a pet peeve of mine, or an ax to grind, (but, also, yes and yes) this matters because there is money to make based on hierarchical systems we pretend don’t exist.

I think about how taste is weaponized, a lot, as a marker of value. Taste is a part of hidden systems that pretend to function on merit, but rarely do. These days, everyone’s cool. There are no secrets, because the internet can’t keep any. People want to be liked, but also revered and enamored, the attention economy is a cruel mistress. Taste, it’s so special, so violent. Taste is the foundation of so many influencers and personalities, and as they become ubiquitous, their word is law, ending in such an insipid homogeny.

We really only understand domination and subjugation in the US, not the collective effort or how to work together, because we’re all supposed to be special. Taste helps to establish domination. People think taste will tell you how important they are, or how important they should be. What we consume, where, and how tells you if we are worthwhile. So many white women engage in tastemaker life because who knows more about subjugation versus dominance than the people most markedly positioned closest to the group in power: white men. Power adjacent, with access for a few for demonstrative equality.

“The point of owning a painting like this is not what you see in it but rather what other people see in you,” the loathsome character Jules Zablonski, a painter, says in the show Black Rabbit, trying to sell one of his painters to a reticent client. It’s not about you, it’s about what people think of you, a perfect explanation of a terrible way to live, doing and buying things you don’t necessarily like so others see something in you. Is it tacky to quote a TV show I worked on? I thought so, and that’s perfect.

Maybe I’ve been working on too many shows about rich people. I have. Maybe I’ve been in Manhattan too much, I have, and maybe I’ve been looking for apartments where so many places have been chopped up into condos for starter city kids, with brokers looking at me like I live in a dreamland with my budget and desire for space. Facts. Maybe I’m an intense person who holds grudges and has tunnel vision. True. Maybe I’m a Virgo sun, Scorpio moon, Aries rising? Sigh. I am.

Of course we all have folks we trust when it comes to advice on food, sheets, soap, restaurants, what to order, where to go….the people I’m drawn to for these opinions are pretty thoughtful, sometimes nerdy folks. Trustworthy people. Ultimately, I’m not as interested in other people’s tastes as I am how they treat other people. To me, that’s the real marker of who you are. Not what you like, but what you are like.

1. The song Amazing Grace always makes me cry.

2. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music

3. But they’ll always care about the *right* people. I’m thinking of the words Commodity Fetish, and how when makers are generally in the spotlight it’s because there’s a cache about them, and that cache might benefit anyone in their proximity. Their existence is deemed important enough to be currency.