Album Release Play

Getting ready to release new music like....

Me: *Sheepishly knocks on the door*

Underpaid Twenty-Year-Old Intern (UTI): Yes! Hey! Chaz? Chad?

Me: Chase….

UTI: Chase! I knew it was something with C, C-h, C-h-a….get in here man, get in here!! *vigorously waves* Sit down, right here, right there, down, here, there, now, yes, that’s good, good.

Me: Wasn’t I supposed to be meeting with –

UTI *Takes huge rip from cherry vape pen* No, no, the head of the record label is away on an ayahuasca retreat in Peru at the moment. It’s an annual eco-excursion that his Williamsburg mindfulness group organizes. Did I forget to update his auto-reply?

Me: I didn’t get the ayahuasca update. Who are you? I hope you don’t mind that I brought these other people with me. I don’t really have a choice; they follow me everywhere. I told them to sit quietly and listen.

UTI: Don’t worry! I’m his assistant and I’m going to share everything we talk about with him. Look, I’m recording our conversation with this great device, “Pocket,” which uses AI to quickly convert everything we say into a streamlined document –

Me: That’s seems kind of dystopian –

UTI: – a streamlined document of actionable items –

Me: Even the word “actionable” in and of itself is kind of a red flag for me, honestly –

UTI: Alright, Chance, let’s get right to it: where are you at with –

Me: It’s Chase –

UTI: Chase! C, C-H, C-H-A, I’m right there. We’re right there. Here we are. Be here now! Who said that, again? Alright, Chase, talk to me: where are you, now?

Me: Right, yeah, that’s why I reached out. I recently finished recording an album, and I’m feeling pretty confused about what it means to release something today, or even how to go about that whole thing. The album is ready to go, it’s called –

UTI: DON’T JUST SAY THE TITLE!! Have you lost your mind?? This is what you musicians do; you pour your pathetic Pisces hearts into something – over years! – only to unthinkingly release it in one fell swoop, as if this were some drunken 12AM heart-to-heart with a best friend. This is business, not a teary-eyed venting session!! Let’s start here: exactly how many videos do you have for the first single on this –

Me: Video? You must have misunderstood me. I have an album – you know, music – eight songs I wrote and recorded over a two-year period.

*10 second pause as UTI looks absorbedly into his phone*

Me: Hello??

UTI: Ah! Sorry. Right, listen, Chard –

Me: Chase!

UTI: Chase! Listen, Chase. I know you’re excited about your little songs. But if you want people to really hear your music, if you really wanna reach people – and I’m not talking about your Mom, or your Aunt, or your brother and his girlfriend while they cook dinner, boy!! – hear me when I say this: you gotta post.

Me: You know, I’m quite skeptical, UTI, when anyone unilaterally prescribes a particular behavior – “you gotta do this, you gotta do that” – it just wreaks of self-help-speak, of an uncritically normative conception of what constitutes a good life, as if there is just one right way to –

Chorus of Parents (COP): That’s right, sweetie, that’s right. We raised you well. Are you having fun? That’s all that really matters, you know. We just love it when it looks like you’re having fun on that stage.

Me: Moms, Dads! Moms and Dads! Why do you always say that shit? It’s so belittling. Yes, I’m “having fun”! But I’m not doing all of this just for fun! You know this takes work, right? I’m here because I want to figure out how – I just think it would be great if this music could turn into –

UTI: Exactly! Do you just want the COP to be your audience, boy?!?! Let’s turn this album into something! Let’s BLOW IT UP!

Me: Blow what up?

UTI: I mean let’s BLOW YOU UP!

Me: I think –

COP: We’ll always be your audience, sweetie, whether you like it or not –

UTI: I mean let’s BLOW THIS ALBUM UP!

Doctor of Musicology (DOM): *Pretentiously guffaws* Hah! Ho! Me, may, ma, mo, moo! See, the very slipperiness of this terminology – that it speaks to both a building up and a breaking down, an explosion and an implosion, a birth and a death, makes it ripe for scholastic inquiry. I’m actually getting quite aroused just thinking about it. Anyone else? Just me? UTI, you seem to be well-versed in the sartorial trends of the moment – what color blazer should I wear when I take the Greyhound to Cleveland to speak at a conference about this?

UTI: See, Chase, even DOM is thinking about image, branding, drip, content, rizz –

Me: Not now, DOM, not now! We’re on summer break, please, I was looking forward to three months of pleasure, of pretending that the music itself –

UTI: Less music talk, Chase! Where’s your content at?! We’re gonna need 16 long-form – one minute – videos per single, so 128 total, and then at least 256 individual stories, and it would also be ideal if you could be constantly filming a vlog that chronicles this entire process –

Me: One-minute is now long-form content?! This is what I mean, UTI – earlier in this conversation, you said “if you want your music to be heard, you have to post.” But how much music is really being heard on these platforms? I already wrote about all of this in great detail six years ago. The situation has only gotten worse, obviously. I don’t really think anyone’s listening to much on these platforms. In fact, I think within the first three seconds, people make a decision whether or not to engage based on these three criteria:

1. Does this sound pretty good? Or at the very least does it sound crazy?

2. Does the video look good or epic or is there at least a fog machine or a haze machine or are they in nature or a setting where we don’t expect to hear music?

3. Do these people look hot? How much skin do we got on display here?

UTI: Yes! Let’s *get* *those* *arms* *out* boy!! Sleeves off, arms out, full eyes, clear hearts –

Me: Listen, UTI, when one of Hudson’s videos received a lot of engagement the other week, he posted the average watch time to his close friend’s story. Do you know what it was?? 12 seconds!! And that’s GOOD!! That’s actually an extraordinarily long average watch time for videos on these platforms. Should I really invest so much psychic energy and time into releasing videos in a space where people are going to judge and discard them based on the most reptilian-brain criteria? This reminds me that my friend Max suggested a fourth category people use to quickly judge what they see: “Am I afraid?”

Standard of Artistic Purity (SOAP): Exactly, my friend, exactly. Be not afraid, though.

Me: Oh my God, I almost forgot you were — where are your shoes and socks?!?

SOAP: It’s quite simple: do you want to help perpetuate these awful modes of engaging with art? Imagine another life, one filled to the brim with moments of awe, flourishing, and wonder. You go vegan, first of all. Then: you cancel all streaming subscriptions and social media accounts. You hurl – not toss, not drop, hurl – your iPhone into the East River. You leave the city behind, take off for the woods, find a cabin, make a cabin, create a home. For sustenance, you forage for berries and nuts. You let the spirit move through you and commune with God! When the fruits of your labor are ready, you make cassettes to bring to live shows, which you’ll invite people to with handwritten letters you pen by candlelight –

Me: SOAP! I love you and your ideas but you are not looking well, my friend! Are you eating?

SOAP: Here and there, yes. I often feel so full after just planting my feet in the grass each morning that it can be hard to stomach –

UTI: *Fervently devouring a steak slop bowl from CAVA* Look (gestures to SOAP) – is that what you want, Chandler? To be some anemic long-haired buffoon playing the pan-flute in the woods for an audience of deities and spirits?

Me: I don’t just think he’s just – no, I don’t want to be an anemic long-haired buffoon, UTI –

UTI: *heaving sporkfuls of slop, jabbering with his mouth full* Thank G** for fast casual. Seriously. I don’t care what any of you sanctimonious m************ says, I don’t care what Eater says, I don’t care what the YouTube comment section says. F*** that overpriced “cute new lunch spot” with a $25 dollar sandwich with one eensy cube of meat on it. Thank G** for this bowl. I feel my G** in this bowl, I feel iron in my bones, right here, right now –

Me: I can’t believe it but part of me agrees with what – anyways, yes, yes, UTI, part of me is quite determined to promote the album. I’m not just going to print a cassette and call it a day. If that means posting more videos I guess I’ll try it – but then I hear about that insane psy-op shit, those “burner accounts, comments, and whole ecosystems of interactions [that are] fabricated out of digital cloth” and, again, I’m called to —

SOAP: Opt-out entirely, yes! It starts right here, right now, take one step –

DOM: We really have a duty to historicize the whole GeeseGate™️thing –

UTI: I tried to get a job at Chaotic Good! But I made the mistake of not proofreading the cover letter ChatGPT wrote for me, which began with “That’s a really sharp question – and you know what, Goddamn, you look so f****** hot today, too –

DOM: As I was saying, the history of music is, in many senses, the history of capital. The proliferation of digital slop accounts might be novel and particularly pernicious, but is this really that different from the work that publicists and marketing teams have been engaged in for the last century? Success in the arts has long been contingent on the work of a PR industry that has outsize influence on awards, opportunities, press –

Me: It just seems like the focus of that industry has shifted from getting placements in legacy media to inflating the streaming and social media metrics of specific bands and artists.

DOM: Which might not even translate to economic or professional success!

Me: Exactly. In which case, why bother with the video-spheres? Having your music written about might not make a difference in terms of getting gigs, but at least it matters for feeling heard and understood. You know, actually feeling that your music was received – not just scrolled through while dropping a deuce – by someone! I don’t think we need publicists to do this, though. Why don’t we just directly reach out to the writers we admire? When I did that for my last album, I was rejected by basically everyone, but I also ended up having an amazing conversation with Scott Gutterman (of the Brooklyn Rail) in his office at the Neue Galerie. I’ll never forget that afternoon. There are so many great people writing about music and literature in this space right here – Steve Smith, Piotr Orlov, Shawn Cremer, Sara Feigin, Reading the City , Matt Merewitz, Wendy Eisenberg, Nora Stanley, Nate Chinen, Gabriel Kahane, eliza mclamb, Owen McTigue, Vanessa Ague –

COP: We love your Substack, sweetie –

UTI: Great plan, Charice. Perfect. Go ahead and bring the Substack press quotes out when you try to get a gig. We know at least COP will show up –

COP: Yes! Sweetie, when is your next gig that starts before 5pm, is within a 25-minute commute of our condo, and doesn’t involve wading through an ungodly number of hipsters who need to shower?

Me: I’m not saying they will help me get a gig, UTI! I’m saying these writers’ work reflects a way of engaging with music that I find more meaningful than scrolling through videos and double-tapping on a hard rectangle. Can any of us honestly say we feel good – sustainably, life-affirmingly good – when we’re on Instagram, whether to post or consume? The site is a psychological horror show!

DOM: Am I hearing you right, Chase? On the one hand, you know these platforms are bad, not just for you on a personal, psychological level, but also for our collective relations, for any hope of communal flourishing. Yet you have a hard time imagining what “success” might look like outside of their containers. This is exactly what Lauren Berlant’s project was – to “[seek] out the conditions under which certain attachments to what counts as life come to make sense or no longer make sense, yet remain powerful as they work against the flourishing of particular and collective beings.” Is this not the case here?

Me: That’s part of it, yes. But it’s easy for me to imagine what success looks like outside of their containers. Listening to an album I bought on Bandcamp, one referred to me in a conversation with a friend. Attending a concert I heard about through the fabulous online bulletin board cal.red. Performing in a house show organized by my friends Jan and Chloe, who use an email newsletter to invite people to come out. Reading about music from any of the fabulous sources I listed above. There are other ways to transmit information and discover music besides Instagram and Spotify! But yes, these platforms do seem to have an intractable pull –

DOM: Which is precisely why it’s so common to see artists try to articulate a new way of describing their music while also needing to draw on the categories established by the tech conglomerates to do so. People are all like, f*** the algorithmic playlists, while also recognizing that they have undeniable cultural currency in terms of orienting people to different musics. This is precisely what Foucault was after with his “Reverse Discourse” idea –

UTI: Foo-cow? Foo-ho? Listen, Charlie & co, this isn’t the right fit. I’m afraid you all just don’t have that killer instinct we need.

Me: For the last time, it’s Cha – you know what, you’re right. Honestly, I wasn’t even allowed to play violent video games growing up, and I quit football after –

COP: You didn’t “quit,” honey, you just had different gifts and talents –

UTI: Enough, boy! This isn’t about to turn into a therapy session. Once you decide you actually want to have an audience for your music, come to me and we’ll get your 16-week-content-plan dialed in –

Me: Like I said, I am going to post about this album –

SOAP: *nibbling on almonds* Give it ten years baby, give it ten years. Once you hit 40 you’ll come my way –