Performing "Content"
February 20th, 2024
A couple of weeks or so ago I bought a tripod for my cell phone. Since my partner moved out of country, I no longer have the resources to consistently do things like photoshoots. The objection was to do a photoshoot myself, in my house somewhere, like a stupid asshole. I decided that I would stack a bunch of books and other trinkets around me, draw stitches all over my skin, tie colored threads to my fingers (ala Jade Harley), and cut a bunch of childlike self portraits of myself in half, scattering them around. Theoretically it sounds as though this could create some sort of attractive and thematically appropriate promotional tie-in for the album that I am releasing, but the gravity of the situation is that I absolutely DESPISE this part of the release cycle more than anything. I HATE having to come up with these stupid ideas and trying to figure out how to execute them utilizing my atrociously limited resources- see: money. When you are a wage worker trying to make art you can do one of three things: pour any and all of your disposable income into your passion projects that you will absolutely not see returned, say screw it and just try to wing it yourself, or somehow develop the greatest social networking skills of all time to where you can ring up one of your 5000 local friends to help you for free, which circles around to the money issue because meeting people is typically dependent on being able to pay for and transport yourself to social events. Your wardrobe is limited, your props are limited, and instead of having some sort of nice SLR camera you have your cell phone, which with you need to be lucky enough to not hate the way your camera makes you appear. This last point is a personal problem for me and it makes the circumstance that much more grating, taking it from being a nuisance to being a breeding ground for neuroticism. I’m MTF. I do not want to have to scroll through two hundred pictures I had to take of myself and mentally fall apart over the fact that my jawline looked slightly more masculine at that angle, or that my larynx was more visible at another. I feel stupid doing my makeup and trying to make up some sort of costume just to go sit in my basement or the field near where I live just to take what amounts to a bunch of hyper-stylized selfies.
Photos are easily my least favorite part of the release process, and easily the most necessary. Not only are social media platforms algorithmically curated to prefer showing people’s faces and bodies over something like a piece of artwork, it becomes a draw point to the post in the first place, whether that be an announcement, release, or reminder. If your friends and fans all get to see how oh super cute and fashionable you were in your shoot, then they can repost your announcement that carries the photos like a tick. I’m a musician, not a photographer, or a video editor, or an expert on email etiquette, and I strongly dislike that the modern industry shackles you to the prison of necessitation that is being a multi hyphenate. You are expected to do everything to achieve anything even resembling success. Music videos, visualizers, teasers, running your social media in a perfect way to make yourself seem as cool as possible without being too online, but extremely in tune with social trends. You need to do your pitch for Spotify a month in advance to get playlisted. You have to send out 100 emails that you won’t get responses to. You have to make sure that you can post everything, everywhere, at the perfect time, which is virtually always 3pm EST, on Friday. You are still at the mercy of the social platforms you use (all of them) making your post show up for the intended audience.
There’s nothing that makes you feel goofier and less cool than “making content” for your art by yourself. It feels inherently disingenuous and humiliating. I use the term content here to categorize anything used as promotional material for your art that isn’t the art itself- photoshoots, tiktoks, youtube videos, and generally the way you are forced to dance about like a clown on social media and engage directly with the fans that you so wish you could maintain a purely parasocial relationship with. It always feels as though there’s someone voyeuring the construction of your content unless you are so emotionally broken to where you can go out in public and film yourself talking to the camera like a jackass without shame. It never feels worth it and its always a chore. At this point the idea of being able to release something successfully without dealing with the exterior nonsense is completely foreign. Too many times have I watched the tragic fate of a song’s release without a photoshoot, or “meat aesthetic” of some sort to back it up. At least in my own experience it has always gone poorly. My art is supposed to be the truest representation of myself, and grappling with the increasingly necessary and demanding marketing aspects of releasing has the inverse effect in which it makes me feel a total phoney. It’s a dissociative dance- you have to disconnect authenticity from authenticity itself and repackage it as a consumable product. If you’re lucky you might blow up for a year before everyone moves onto the next trend. After all there’s no more superstars with staying power in the age of addictive, decentralized, antisocial social media designed purely to devour and dispose of trends as rapidly as possible. How else are we supposed to make money for executives? The slop mill must roll on!!!
