This short story just appeared in Number One Fan, Kris Rothstein & Sam Macklin’s collection of smart essays and fictional forays on the theme of fandom. The book not only walks the tricky line between analysis and enthusiasm, but it’s also a beautiful object: each one is a hand-made, one-of-a-kind hardcover that the pictures don’t do justice to. (Scanners don’t pick up iridescent fabric very well.)
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This article has been on my site in a different form for a while, but it recently was published in Mix Magazine accompanied by Marc Ngui’s hilarious and brilliant microbial analysis of the sellout dynamic. Especially now that I’m writing a videogame column for the Torstar media conglomerate-owned eye weekly, it addresses issues I deal with on a daily basis. I invite you to read and comment on the piece.
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I’m leaving you. The book we had… well, it was special. I was willing to give it a try even though we were very different people — me, an anarchist zinester and you, a right-wing media magnate — but it’s just not working out.
At first, I was amazed by all the things you owned: Fox, News Corp., New York Post, HarperCollins… my friends were impressed that my new sugardaddy owned their favorite shows, The Simpsons and the X-Files. Like me, they slipped under your spell.
“Before you sell your soul, better do the math” — Ice Cube
Steve Albini’s classic article “The Problem With Music” (from The Baffler #5) is written from the perspective of a producer who worked with artists he liked from both major and indie labels. He proposed that the ethical reasons for going independent were reinforced by, perhaps even overshadowed by, the economic ones.
Since it had long been assumed that people “sold out” for the money, this was quite a shock for many the armchair pundit. Certainly I was appalled and fascinated at the amount of money involved in the music business and how little of it actually got to the music makers.
While the publishing industry isn’t nearly as exploitive or as lucrative as the music biz, looking at the numbers involved can be interesting. Continue reading »