Amanda Palmer and the whole free musicians thing? Don’t punk bands do that?

Friday, September 14, 2012

Anonymous asked: Amanda Palmer and the whole free musicians thing? Don't punk bands do that?

They do. Those punk bands do not have $1.2 million and probably do not give a shit if the people playing are incompetent. I am really all for Kickstarter and if Amanda Palmer’s strange (but not in the way they think they’re strange) fans want her to have that much money and want to play on stage with her for free then good for them. But the thing with people giving you all that money is that everyone knows you have $1.2 million, and all the justifications and expense breakdowns in the world cannot make that sound like a small amount of money to people who are fucked for cash and actually have to think about whether they get to buy a few albums this month, so a lot of the things you subsequently do (which would’ve been forgivable when you were still somehow fostering that illusion of forthright independence, struggling obscurity and brave tininess) are gonna come across as pretty stingy at best and, at worst, positively Romneyesque. ROMNEYESQUE! Except Mitt Romney never released an album of Radiohead ukulele covers, which sounds like a joke written about hipsters by a freshman SNL writer 8 days out of a small Mountain Time Zone college comedy troupe trying too hard to cover-up for the fact that they cried watching 500 Days of Summer and again rewatching it, but is a thing she really did.