Cake

When John McCrea recorded “Rock & Roll Lifestyle” in 1994, he wasn’t wrong. Even though CD collections have gone the way of vinyl and magnetic tape, the lifestyle is in full effect: “And how much did you pay for your rock and roll t-shirt that proves you were there, that you heard of them first?” But it’s inverted now; it’s more like, how much didn’t you pay for your rock & roll lifestyle? Or did you put your money into the wrong place?

In an interview with Tom Tomorrow of “This Modern World,”* there’s a section that really made me feel for the band. McCrea is talking about touring and how he gets motion sickness, so he sleeps in his little coffin-bed as the bus drives on and wakes up feeling sick, and he does it day after day, while still needing (or wanting) to produce quality shows. As a fellow person with motion sickness, I cringed. Then McCrea came out with this statement, in response to Tom’s witty rejoinder that “the easy sex and drugs make up for [feeling sick], right?”:

I think that’s what it may have been like in the seventies, I think it was really exciting in the seventies but now it’s more like a travelling salesman who happens to sell music. I’m sure there’s a lot of that for other bands. (laughs) But increasingly I’m not sure that it’s that way for even the sexiest of bands these days. It’s a leaner business. In terms of how long we have to stay out on tour, that’s just being turned up and up and up by the fact that our recorded music is now, for all intents and purposes, worthless to the people that listen to music. Generally people under thirty tend to think you’re a chump if you pay for music. The value has been transferred over to the shiny and valuable iPod player and away from the music itself. It’s increasingly necessary for us to play more and more shows in order to pay our bills and accountants and managers, et cetera. Despite a lot of hype about Myspace, t’s [sic] getting harder, not easier, for bands to make ends meet, and I know that that’s not a popular statement, but it’s the truth. I’d like to see some sort of solution to it.

There are two things in that statement that REALLY resound:

1) That a musician might feel like a disposable traveling salesman, who comes and sells you a set of interchangeable parts. If a new traveling salesman comes to you the next day, you accept him with equanimity. It doesn’t matter to you, as a consumer; if the salesman quits and refuses to peddle his product to you, you have a million other salespersons to turn to. [Though an artist often has a label to handle the distasteful money side of the arrangement, this is still a sad commentary on art itself; that it's a business. But that's a whole nother discussion.]

2) That people waste more money on their music-holding devices than the music that they put on it. The shiny iPod becomes what you pay $600 for, while all the music you put on it, you’ve jacked from somewhere. Reader, that’s really screwed up.

What? you say. Zara, didn’t you notice that you’re an mp3 blog? Why, you hypocrite. And by the way, record companies couldn’t care less about their consumer either. They’re just soulless machines that suck all the money and rights away from artists. And artists? C’mon, what are you talking about? They write some music and they’re supposed to get all these privileges? I work hard for my money!

That’s all true. But this isn’t an album sharing blog for a reason (besides all the legal ones). Reader, you are receiving a remarkable commodity for pennies on the dollar. Remember how I talked about you paying what you feel is the value of the item? Perhaps you should rethink how much music is worth to you. Cake has a new album coming out, a collection of b-sides and rarities packaged and sold by the band’s own label, and in a bid to get your business, they are making the CDs scratch-&-sniff. I get migraines from smells, and so I will wait for the non-olfactory version to come out on iTunes, but Reader, I urge you to reconsider how you might putting all your money into the wrong place.

Buy more music. Put your money where your mouth is; if you say “I love music,” then love it enough to help it out with your dollars (or equivalent national currency). Now if you’ll excuse me, I just bought some old Cake tunes and I’m gonna groove out to my favorite Cake song ever, “Ruby Sees All.”

Cake: Site | Myspace | Label (Upbeat)

(Long) clips of the new records are available at the site. I won’t include any old tracks; if you’re worth your salt you have some hanging around already. Go listen to ‘em!

*Note: I do not endorse “This Modern World.” In fact, I loathe and despise it. But you take your good interviews where you can get ‘em.