i saw a comment on a man man track expressing confusion at the lack of hits ("only" 200,000) and it got me thinking.

a band like man man isn't going to headline festivals any time soon, but they're virtual locks in any "best of 2000s" or "best of 2010s" list that may be compiled ten or twenty years from now. and, at that point they're sure to see an uptick in sales and recognition. it may take a while, but those tracks are going to continue generating hits deep into the future. meanwhile, whatever pop sensation was popular in 2008 (i think it was katy perry) is basically just out-of-date porn, now. over time, those tracks are going to plateau and plummet to almost nothing.

man man might not be able to catch up, but something a bit bigger like radiohead might be able to.

there's a historical analogy with record sales if you look at pink floyd - which is really the only example that's old enough yet to talk about. yes, dark side was successful on release, but it wasn't at the level of today's pop sensations. but, consistent sales have slowly brought it up to the second best selling album of all time, by some accounts. in 1979, the saturday night fever soundtrack became the highest selling record of all time (it was surpassed by thriller in 1985). dark side hasn't just caught up in total sales, it's now exceeded saturday night fever by over five million copies. that is, dark side sales have continued at a decent pace while saturday night fever sales collapsed when it went out of fashion.

so, twenty years from now, can we expect records by radiohead or bjork or the smashing pumpkins to catch up? they've got a long ways to go, but we can certainly expect them to outpace records by alanis or avril.....or the titanic soundtrack.

but, what that means is that a band like man man is, in a real sense, writing music for future generations.

and i'd like to think i am, too.

and, in fact, dark side has outsold thriller by over ten million copies since the beginning of soundscan. another ten-fifteen years, it might surpass that.

and, if that happens, i wish the rest of the planet luck in ever catching it.

i hope at least one of them (preferably waters) lives long enough to see it.

townies. ugh.

i expected those, though. it's a miracle it took this long, really. best to avoid them....

"you know, you should open up the advertising a little bit so people know the shows are going on."

"but it's a tight knit scene."

"that's why you should open up the advertising, so people outside the scene know what's going on."

"if you want to join the scene, you should come down. it's very tight knit."

"but, that's why you should open it up and make it less exclusive."

"but, it's a very tight-knit scene."

ugh...

fuck tight knit scenes, i want radical inclusion.

somebody shows up and offers suggestions on ways to open it, and all they get is a lot of attitude and an almost violent desire to maintain a small, incestual clique-y group. that's not something i want anything to do with. it's radical inclusion, or fuck off.

i mean, the bottom line is i haven't seen much of anything that's interesting in terms of local music over the year i've been here. it's all very generic and boring takes on different styles of punk, or equally boring folk music. my conclusion is that there's really not very much interesting music happening in the area at all.

but there's a specific bar that doesn't have a show calendar online. now, i really have little reason to think the bar is booking anything that's worth going to. i think the reverse logic is pretty applicable - if anybody worth watching was playing the bar, the bar would be updating it's listings. but, i'm the type of person that wants to know what's going on at all the bars i can get to, anyways, just in case there's that one rare act that seems interesting....

having idiosyncratic tastes requires this kind of meticulousness.

you wouldn't think a suggestion for a bar owner to update a web page would set off such a defensive reaction, but that it did says a lot about the area and the people that inhabit it. it demonstrates a very clique-y mentality that is suspicious of outsiders and wants to "vet" people before they're allowed to integrate.

going to a bar to watch a show doesn't imply a desire to join a club. and i definitely have zero desire to join a club....

this is why i prefer big cities to small towns. when i go out somewhere, i don't want to meet up with a group of people that i know, i want to fade into the crowd. i don't want everybody to know my name; i don't want *anybody* to know my name! i cherish that level of anonymity.

so, detroit's a good fit for me. windsor, less so...

in the end, if the local bands in the area just want to play to the same group of friends every show then that's their choice. i'll go hang out in detroit and watch some more interesting acts in the process...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoCfiZnOplY

i have a very similar guitar style (developed independently, but he was doing this a few years before i was) so i understand this very well and getting your head around it is not really about asking the question of if it's difficult or not. could anybody do this? sort of, but not really. what bill orcutt does with his solo work is a type of blues music. could anybody play like hendrix? well, you can teach just about any hendrix to just about any ten year old, so it might seem that way if you're focusing on the mechanics. but, not everybody can write music like jimi did - his creativity on the instrument really remains unparalleled. and, if you ask the ten year old that just played little wing perfectly (almost perfectly. no feel.) to write a song in the style, you're not likely to get a good result.

blues guitarists are at their best when they're just flowing. i've seen so many guitarists try and describe this, but you have to experience it to really get it. it's almost a spiritual experience, as though your hands are being guided. it's some kind of trance. the music comes from somewhere else and flows through you. i'm as dour an atheist as you'll ever find, but this is something that happens; it may be largely psychological, or the result of releasing emotion, but the effect of feeling guided is as real as real can be.

you're consequently only really going to get this if you can feel it, the same way you feel a blues or fusion guitarist. it's entirely visceral. the arrangements are different, but the blues aren't about the arrangements. the blues are about the raw power. what an advocate of this will tell you is that it's visceral power is increased by stripping out anything remotely resembling conventional music. all that remains is the trance, and that amplifies it.

but, on some level, is he just fucking around on a broken guitar? well, yeah.

andre pereira
awesome song, why this band have so few views?

deathtokoalas
200K is actually pretty successful for this kind of music. but, the difference is that this will continue generating traffic ten or twenty years from now, whereas whatever was on hit radio at the time will not. you've gotta think in the long run if you're going to make music like this...

i've always thought the missing link between man man and zappa/beafheart (and tom waits) was tortoise.

there's also a lot of elton john and billy joel in there.

you wouldn't be wrong if you described them as elton john rearranged by zappa and remixed by john mcentire.