amanda "$1.2m" palmer wants you to play with her for free

[lemur68]

Amanda Palmer got to deviate from the norm

Not so much, really.

If looking like a disgusting slob was revolutionary, then Wal-Mart itself would be the seat of the rebellion.

^^A bit too Rush for me.

[Boombats]

i'm totally down with pit hair.

Same here. I operate in an area with lots of trim, fit, organic farmer chicks with nice arms and hot armpussies. It's all good, wo haare sind macht spaß

You said grooming habits. If you think not having your armpits shaved merits being called gross then you are seriously fucked up.

It's not just the grooming thing. The "gross" part also entails flaunting one's lack of grooming as something extra-sexy. ?

you don't think she looks "groomed"? i think she does. she's groomed like a show dog. her hair is perfect. her makeup is a quarter-inch thick. her eyebrows must have taken 25 minutes each to paint on. yeah, she has chosen not to shave her pits and her crotch. big deal. more than half the guys on this board have chosen not to shave their faces.

i wouldn't call her ungroomed. i don't like her music, and I don't find her attractive (the eyebrow thing just turns me off) but i don't get the "gross" part.

I don't get Col P's revulsion, unless it is a trolling joke. I would totally slurp Erawk's hairy whatevers

but I digress

[Colonel Panic]

Yet again, I'll point out that it's not just about the pit hair.

[morespaceecho]

just fwiw, as far as the sexism thing goes, ms morespace has been gleefully bashing amanda palmer for days now, so i directed her to this thread. she read a bunch of it and said she didn't feel like dudes were being sexist, nor did she feel at all intimidated by the manly aluminum beard vibe here.

[Colonel Panic]

i am extremely uncomfortable with a lot of the opinions posted in this thread regarding amanda palmer's appearance. they are irrelevant to the discussion at hand

So sorry about your discomfort, but those opinions are not irrelevant.

When an artist introduces one's own sexuality as a blatantly erotic element in one's work, that element is just as open to criticism as any other facet of that work. As long as a discussion of her performance aesthetic is within the scope of the discussion, that particular aspect is equally relevant.

and, when so many of are coming from men, comes off as not objective, fair criticisms that anyone might level at a female artist but as rooted in what men, specifically, think is "gross" in women. yeah, i know, you can't help that you're a man and you can't help that the vast majority of posters here are men.

How about this for an answer: now you're the one being sexist with the above remarks generalizing and denigrating the entire male gender as a whole.

that doesn't change the fact that a mostly-male environment is inherently kind of intimidating to a lot of women, and i feel like if you're a considerate person you'll take into account your responsibility to be aware of that intimidation, and how threads like this may read to some women (hint: it reads as a nearly all-male community dogpiling on a woman for being "gross" to them).

I can't help the fact that some women might be intimidated by a "mostly-male environment," but I disagree with your assessment that I have a responsibility to refrain from voicing my opinion about some sexually-charged art piece (however jokingly I might present it) just because somebody might read it and feel uncomfortable. I'm not the one who brought the question of sex appeal into the discussion of Amanda Palmer's videos and performances. Ms. Palmer initiated that discourse herself by blatantly marketing herself as an edgy, hipster culture sex object.

Perhaps if these disadvantaged, put-upon individuals took the effort to read what people are actually saying instead of what they'd prefer to be hearing (for example, as a result of confirmation bias toward some preconceived notions they harbor regarding the masculine gender as a whole), they might realize that nobody is simply "dogpiling on a woman for being 'gross,'" and that there are actually valid, defensible reasons for many of the opinions being expressed here.

as for amanda palmer, she sucks. continuing to ask for favours from your fans after they already gave you $1.2 million is incredibly unethical bullshit.

She sucks, she's arrogant, and her glorified steampunk vaudeville softcore porno aesthetic is trite and sleazy.

[mazacultura]

I'M SORRY, I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER MY OWN PRIVILEGE

Fixed all your posts.

[Colonel Panic]

Privilege?

I'm sitting at home typing on a computer on a perfectly fine Friday night. How "privileged" is that?

[mazacultura]

Privilege?

I'm sitting at home typing on a computer on a perfectly fine Friday night. How "privileged" is that?

Beats me. All I know is I'm not the guy dropping reverse-sexism accusations like a tool on a Men's Rights forum.

[J. Burns]

There are a lot of reasons Amanda Palmer fucking sucks.

Her armpits and bush are at the very bottom of that list.

[waltermalling]

Again, not to be that guy and all but if anyone has any information on playing with her at the gig in Chicago, please let me know. Also, if anyone has a bass amp for rent or that I can use (preferably one that sounds good with horns/saxophones), please get back to me. Peace. Any fans of Foster the People on this forum?

[steve]

i am extremely uncomfortable with a lot of the opinions posted in this thread regarding amanda palmer's appearance.

I don't blame you. Whatever the rationale, men getting picky about what a woman looks like is never going to sit well in a discussion that strives for substance.

I just finished an email reply to a journalist about this thread. Heck, I'll just post it here. I guess I'm blowing his "scoop," but I find it hard to care.

On 9/14/2012 9:58 AM, Alex Denney wrote:
>
> Hello Steve,
>
> I’m web editor with The Stool Pigeon newspaper in the UK, wonder if you’d mind taking time out to answer a few questions regarding your latest blog post about Amanda Palmer?

To be complete I need to address several assumptions in your questions, so answering this email is going to take me a lot longer than it took you to write it, and will require some attention to read. Please pardon the unavoidable wordiness.

The forum I posted in is not a blog. It's a message board forum with an active international community numbering in the thousands. You can tell the difference because the forum I posted in is one of several, there are hundreds of active topics and each original post has a separate author. Calling the Electrical Audio Forums a blog is like calling Stool Pigeon your daily diary, and makes me instantly suspicious of your intent, research and reporting. If it was just a slip of the pen (or iPhone) then it suggests several other problems, but I wish you luck in that regard either way.

>
> Do you think websites running stories with headlines like “Steve Albini calls Amanda Palmer an idiot” are somehow unfair when you have, in fact, taken to your blog to call Amanda Palmer an idiot?

It should be apparent that my complaint is with this style of reporting-free copy/paste "journalism," not any perceived unfairness. It is exceptionally lazy, whether it involves me or anybody else, and it feeds the gossip-and-fluff-content bonfire that is burning the entire framework of public discourse.

Since you appear to think the point of my first post on the topic was to call Amanda Palmer an idiot, I'll break it down for you like a lesson.

In the first paragraph I made a parallel between several different forms of audience participation in a band's business, some of which have been used by Amanda Palmer and others, one of which was a reference to the Gathering of the Juggalos. In the first sentence I said I have no problem with any of them, meaning that there is nothing inherently ugly about any of them, and they are all of a type. I then explained why I don't do any of them myself or with regard to my band. I don't because I value self-sufficiency and its implied efficiency and economy very highly. This personality trait has enabled my bands to turn a profit on literally every tour we've ever undertaken, from the first road trip to Minneapolis in 1982 to the tour of Australia we'll be starting a couple of weeks from now. It has also kept my business afloat while most other studios are failing, despite the relatively low rates we charge. It's a sound and productive way to see the world, it has served me well and I don't apologize for it. It's also not unique to me. There is a whole culture of people who do things independently and efficiently, and it isn't an accident that they have been at the vanguard of culture for decades.

I then said that admitting that one can't fathom how to make things pay for themselves, when so many other people seem to do it, is a tacit admission of ineptness, for which I used the poorly-considered word "idiot." I implied that Amanda Palmer was an idiot by describing this idiot behavior which the reader would then ascribe to Ms Palmer, making the inference that she is an idiot. It was rude and poorly served my argument, but then again I was speaking informally to a familiar audience of peers on the forum, not the world at large. When it became obvious other people would be reading it I felt compelled to clarify my thinking. In the future, if you or another member of the press is concerned with whether or not I think someone is an idiot you can call and ask. The phone number is on the same page where you would look to sift messages for gossip.

>
> If you know everyone’s going to repost the story, why do it in the first place?

I make up to a dozen posts a day on the EA forums, and I don't presume that they will be "reported" in the "press." It's only happened a couple of times and it has caught me off guard. I noticed very little coverage on the post I wrote regarding the use of a Urei 1178 peak limiter on the overhead mics of a drum kit for example, though that post was probably more significant to its audience than this sort of micro-celebrity troll bait. My natural expectation is that there are more important things to report than what happens on a goddamn recording studio message board.

So no, I don't know everyone's going to repost things until they do. Then sometimes it's a face-palm moment, sometimes not.

>
> Part of Amanda’s defence of her scheme seems to be that, simply, many fans would jump at the chance to play with their favourite musicians for no money — does this argument seem fair?

On the part of the fans, I totally understand and sympathize with this impulse. That's starkly different from a millionaire asking people to do things for free, under the guise that she is giving them something by indulging them. It's cheapness repainted as generosity and it's gross. Using people in this way, exploiting their good nature for one's own benefit, is a cancer that taints many enterprises and it always reflects poorly on the exploiter. It's one of the things I hated most about the old-school record business, the practice of fucking with people who loved music so much they would put up with endless greed and abuse just to be a part of it. A new music business paradigm, if it is worth anything, should strive to be free of exploitation and be honest about its motives.

>
> You take issue with Palmer paying people to take care of the Kickstarter fund as inefficient, does this not seem like a reasonable expense for such a large amount of money?

No it doesn't, and I said as much. Paying someone to spend your money for you is pretty ridiculous. That there is a lot of it is all the more reason to keep tabs on it yourself.

>
> What other aspects of Palmer’s scheme strike you as ‘absurdly inefficient’?

Given that the typical budget for albums I work on is less than $10,000, you can take your pick of line-items in her budget, divide by ten and still have an order of magnitude worth of waste from my perspective. I haven't looked at the breakdown since I first saw it so don't quote me on it (haha, "don't quote me," I just said something funny), but I recall that she skimmed a couple hundred grand off the top for her pleasure prior to beginning to make the record. That alone is enough to make the record of your dreams a couple times over and seems like a straight-up "fuck you" to everybody who pledged money to the project.

It's crazy that I have to explain to you how ridiculous it is to blow a million dollars. More than a million dollars. Just say it out loud and think about how much fucking money a million dollars is. That's several really nice houses with a Jaguar in each garage. A lifetime's wages. It's just an incredible sum, enough to make a hundred records. Palmer had more than that at her disposal and now claims not to have enough left to pay musicians. To pay them for gigs she is also being paid to play. This coming from someone who already had a successful career before she had her audience begin paying all her expenses in advance. A millionaire pleading poverty and asking for additional charity. It's fucking ridiculous and it mocks all the bands who genuinely need their audience to help them conduct their business.

So that's what I think. Nobody's an idiot, some ways of conducting business are just uglier and more exploitative than others.

-steve albini

[amelia]

Again, not to be that guy and all but if anyone has any information on playing with her at the gig in Chicago, please let me know. Also, if anyone has a bass amp for rent or that I can use (preferably one that sounds good with horns/saxophones), please get back to me. Peace. Any fans of Foster the People on this forum?

My best friend's son is a fan and got me into them. They are tolerable acoustic, but I'll tolerate their recordings for the little man. I want to teach him to play Helena Beats next time I see him.

[MrMattDiehl]

Steve, while I think that some of the incendiary language you used was part of why this commentary went viral (not to mention the fact of one well-known person commenting in public on another well-known person with a rabid, professionally-cultivated Internet following), I think much of the reproduction of your commentary in this thread is because some/many people admired it, and thought Palmer was full of shit, and felt your reasoning made sense and needed to be heard. You have thought deeply about this stuff, and that is a large part of why it resonates, well beyond the controversial aspects. It's like with "The Problem With Music" - we're at a certain weird place/contraction in music culture, and I'm glad that some of the people who have spent a lifetime thinking about this shit are contributing to/helping shape the conversation. That to me is worth some of the superficial aspects of this kind of dissemination of information, which at this point appears to be a fact of life.

[J. Burns]

[lemur68]

Posters On Steve Albini's Blog Making Fun Of Black People Now

[J. Burns]

Posters On Steve Albini's Blog Making Fun Of Black People Now

censoredalexdenney.blogspot.com

[Bill Flaig]

Hey, there's at least one Spaniard in that gif.

[scott]

Steve, seriously, will you marry me? It's wordsmanship of that sort that just keeps me coming back to this blog for more. Where's the Like button? God I can't re-tweeter this shit fast enough.

By the way, HUGE mistake opening the door in there. I've got unlimited night and weekend minutes, buddy. Let's start with Lars. I'll call tomorrow and when they ask who's calling I'm just gonna say "It's me, The Press". People have a need to know these things. Or was the "ask Steve if xyz is an idiot" invitation specific to just this one doude?

Btw if anyone is keeping score, the correct thing you do with the $1.2m dollars is buy a $200k house, cash, set aside $100k in an escrow account to pay the property taxes for lotsa years so you can be an idiot and not have to think about it, and then invest $900k in a conservative way getting like 3% interest and use that $15,000 every year (whatever it is after capital gains tax) to record and release an album and/or play a tour where you maybe get lucky and make enough to live your life without a day job. At the very least you got a free house, don't even have to be smart enough to remember to pay the property taxes for a while, and get to release an album and/or go on a modest tour every year FOREVER, without being beholden to anyone for anything, and with a nearly $1m safety net sitting there for you.

That's the correct way, it's a fact that was verified by scientists.

[lemur68]

Hey, there's at least one Spaniard in that gif.

Fuckin' Spaniards crossing the border illegally and taking our jobs

[treasuretech]

Steve, while I agree that cut-and-paste gossip journalism serves to lower the level of public discourse and renders hollow the whole notion of the journalist as investigator, is there some kind of distinction between a post on a forum and one in a blog? Any post on a forum was written with the intention of being published (albeit in a limited fashion), just as any blog post would be. Certainly, it may be assumed that posts on message boards constitute a response less considered than an actual blog post would.

Additionally, it is certainly granted that there is not assurance the forum post is actually the work of the person it purports to be. I'm sure nobody at EA would ever stoop so low as to hack your account.

Should journalists treat these posts as 'off-the-record' or 'off-the-cuff' remarks? There have been an increasing number of politicians for whom 'off-the-cuff' seems to be a defence for any poorly chosen verbiage, regardless of its forum of expression.

Are there some sources which, for a journalist, where the context is the overarching consideration in its worthiness in news. Twitter? Facebook? PRF?

Without getting into the whole Derridean deconstruction of the independence of language when severed from context, doesn't any language in any forum bear journalistic consideration (appropriately handled)?