That’s right, Kids! He’s creating SHIT!!!
That’s what the donor page tells me at least.
But, hold on! There’s PERKS!!!
For $156/ year you can get on a pretty sweet email list which is apparently better than the $39/ year and $78/ year email lists.
For $1,200.00/ year you can get a postcard!
For $12,000.00/ year you can fly yourself to LA to have dinner with the guy, or even hang out backstage (if I’m not mistaken, I think SMM is playing an extended residency at Madison Squre Garden)!
I will support Al by purchasing a CD of music when he makes one. I’m not going to pay a monthly fee so he can make YouTube videos about “fashion”. Ugh.
Nikki Sixx had a really poignant thing to say re: an interview MTV did with them in 1994 when Vince Neil was ousted from the band.
They really played up the “music about sex, drugs, fire & rocknroll” image Crue had in the segment, which they got ultra defensive about.
Now, in retrospect, Nikki said - why didn’t we own it, and then thump their chest in a more positive direction? ‘Yes we are about all that, and we are gonna rock your asses even harder with even better music!’ Paraphrasing but you get the idea.
Al has the persona of an OCD-riddled Gene Simmons: putting out product after product of music no one is buying, no one is seeing and no one cares for, but continues to do so anyway in the name of profit. I know divorce court costs are a bitch, but he’s really holding back and trying too hard to be a grown-up version of what Butt-Head would be if you really don’t think too hard about it for a second.
Why doesn’t he admit that his wife had too much control or say in his life in the past decade and that some mistakes were made?
Why can’t he get more into what or why he digs about the old Arista stuff, which he slyly observed to Skot at the Shanley photo showing?
Why won’t he shave his head and take all that shit out of his head and face? This is a scarier Al imo:
I agree. This is maybe a point I’ve labored on these boards too much, but I think Ministry were in fact scarier when they had no clearly defined signature ‘look’.
The rag-tag crew of the “Mind…” tour still looks more threatening than, say, the band which you can see in recent live festival vids from Rio.
The newer lineups have a coordinated look that, though it draws on a lot of ‘badass’ templates, kind of conforms to expectations of how you’re supposed to look as a rock star. Which I have no problem with, really, but -
With that earlier incarnation…hell, you’ve got a well-groomed guy in a suit, another guy in ugly plaid and dreads haranguing everyone, some freaks in pseudo-cowboy garb…they’re totally mismatched and that gives a much better impression of a world where shit seems to be hitting the fan. In the kind of apocalypse scenario that the LORAH / Mind era tracks want to conjure up, I think people in general would look a lot more like the “Mind” tour crew than a well-oiled rock n roll machine.
Funny you should say that because that is how he looked when I first saw Ministry and I actually was a bit frightened that he was going to go nuts and hurt someone. But, that said, I was only 19 or so at the time and pretty naïve. It was my first rock concert and I was in a crowd of people with giant mohawks and chains connecting their ear and nose rings (pretty hardcore back in those days) so I was a little on edge to begin with.[/reply]
Oh definitely, it’s possible that my affinity for that older lineup was a function of me being an impressionable kid, and it was just easier to convince me that these guys meant fucking business.
I get pretty nostalgic for that first “alternative concert” experience…watching some standard hardcore-by-numbers bands playing in some dingy “youth center” in a near Chicago suburb whose name I can’t even remember anymore (my brother’s band was on the bill, bravely playing Jaco Pastorius-style jazz funk, lol)…I had such a feeling of accomplishment when I “survived” being in a packed space with intense-looking punk rockers.
I’m right there with you guys.
Seeing Ministry for the first time on a local independent music video show with “Burning Inside” just rattled my world. Holy crap!!! It’s Thunderdome on stage! Fire, robots, chainlink . . . and yeah, it was way crazier when they were complete misfits with no theme or pattern. It was like the rag tag bunch of weirdos in one of the Alien movies or . . . well, any awesome 80’s movie.
But my hatred of this crowdfunding crap isn’t because of the polished/ packaged version of Ministry or Al . . . it’s because he’s straight up begging for money for . . . . nothing. He actually thinks we (and some will, obviously) will give him money just for periodic Tweets or YouTube messages or something.
Just make a legit fanclub or something. At least offer SOMETHING for those pledges . . . a t-shirt, a patch, and a membership card, perhaps. Heck, I joined the Iron Maiden fanclub a few months back just so I could buy presale tickets. For about $40 or so. They sent me a really high-quality book with a crapload of pictures, stories, etc., a cool pin, a welcome letter and a subscription to their quarterly newsletters/magazines (hard copy), an 8 x 10 of the band, a cool printed membership card . . . and some other stuff I can’t remember.
I joined a Metallica fan club for the same reason several years back (I think it was about $20). They sent me a t-shirt, and high-quality magazines every few months.
I’m just saying, $75 a year for tweets is not a perk. It’s a fuck you.
Oh, the “fans” were of course making sure to praise it on his FB page. One poster said it was really “punk rock” what he was doing. I noted that it was indeed punk rock, because it made me think of the stupid punks that would have their parents drop them off in their BMW’s so they could hang out with their spikey-spiked loser friends on Haight-Ashbury begging for beer money.
I’m just saying, $75 a year for tweets is not a perk. It’s a fuck you.
Oh, the “fans” were of course making sure to praise it on his FB page. One poster said it was really “punk rock” what he was doing. I noted that it was indeed punk rock, because it made me think of the stupid punks that would have their parents drop them off in their BMW’s so they could hang out with their spikey-spiked loser friends on Haight-Ashbury begging for beer money.
Get a job, Jerk.
Although I don’t find Steve Albini to be an unassailable character either, his thoughts on the Amanda Palmer situation I mentioned above would probably be the same ones he’d sling in Al’s direction. Quote:
[i]I have no fundamental problem with either asking your fans to pay you to make your record or go on tour or play for free in your band or gather at a mud pit downstate and sell meth and blowjobs to each other. I wouldn’t stoop to doing any of them myself, but horses for courses. The reason I don’t appeal to other people in this manner is that all those things can easily pay for themselves, and I value self-sufficiency and independence, even (or especially) from an audience.
If your position is that you aren’t able to figure out how to do that, that you are forced by your ignorance into pleading for donations and charity work, you are then publicly admitting you are an idiot, and demonstrably not as good at your profession as Jandek, Moondog, GG Allin, every band ever to go on tour without a slush fund or the kids who play on buckets downtown."[/i]
Ouch…
There’s a [url http://www.electricalaudio.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=60267&start=20]NINETY-TWO PAGE THREAD on Electrical Audio’s forum dealing with that; some actual very insightful comments on there among the expected snark if you have some time to kill (Albini also backpedals on his ‘idiot’ comments as well)…
I will support Al by purchasing a CD of music when he makes one. I’m not going to pay a monthly fee so he can make YouTube videos about “fashion”. Ugh.
I just read the whole preamble on that PATREON page (earlier I just skimmed through the perks). He mentions like three times that he’s doing this to go the “DIY” route. Does he know what DIY stands for? It means “Do it yourself”. Or at least it used to. It was a phrase that sprung up in the punk community with respect to guys who didn’t just wait for things to be handed to them or expect others to clear the way for them. It was bands and artists working their asses off and going out and taking risks to realize their vision on their terms.
Asking for handouts so you can dink around and make monthly tweets or YouTube videos is not DIY, no matter what you may have read in a book at Hot Topic or Urban Outfitters.
It’s not DIY at all. It’s actually the opposite of DIY.
It’s mooching.
And it’s retarded.
I’m starting to like this Albini guy.
Who is Amanda Palmer?
Albini’s great in certain circumstances, even though he gets puritanical on some issues of personal taste.
Anyway, doing my best to describe Amanda Palmer without just linking to the Wikipedia page…let’s see…
She came to fame earlier with a goth-y / cabaret act called Dresden Dolls, now is married to comic book superstar Neil Gaiman, and occasionally refers to herself as “Amanda Fucking Palmer”. The cuss word adopted as her middle name should alert you to her, uh, special brand of edginess. For some reason she also wrote a poem to one of the Boston marathon bombers and made some stupid rationale for it that neither excuses the crap-ness of the actual poem nor the sentiment behind it.
More important to this conversation, though, she’s a kind of crowd-funding / fan-funding superstar who, despite reaping pretty good profits for what she does, keeps coming up with these silly schemes for money like “pledge me $1,000 and you can play with me on stage at a show…”
The people in the linked thread dissect the lameness of that move pretty well, I think. One poster called her out especially well on how, by having other musicians pay to sit in with her, was showing how she considered her art to be a commodity worth paying for but not the art of the people coming along for the ride, as it were.
More important to this conversation, though, she’s a kind of crowd-funding / fan-funding superstar who, despite reaping pretty good profits for what she does, keeps coming up with these silly schemes for money like “pledge me $1,000 and you can play with me on stage at a show…”
The people in the linked thread dissect the lameness of that move pretty well, I think. One poster called her out especially well on how, by having other musicians pay to sit in with her, was showing how she considered her art to be a commodity worth paying for but not the art of the people coming along for the ride, as it were.
Does anyone remember when one of the Ozzfests included only one or two big name acts because Sharon decided to have all bands that were willing to PAY to play at the fest? I don’t remember all the details, but I remember it was such a cluster of crap.
If Al wants to do a Kickstarter to release Surgical Meth Machine, I’d chip in (and I think most people here would do the same). Hell, if he offered music as part of this deal - a monthly rarity or remix download, say, that’d be graeat. But like everyone else, I have no interest in paying for his blog posts or whatever.
As for Amanda Palmer, I used to be quite a fan of hers. But she really is an insufferable character.
