Results tagged “bill hicks” from Andy Best

Not so long ago I read a post by Dan Shapiro about The Factory's proposed model for signing bands and producing music. I then wrote this post about it.

The basic idea is that they are underwritten by an ad agency and create in-house solely to pitch material for use in jingles etc. I'm not down with that. Well, it's OK if you want to be a professional jingle writer/corporate shill. Just be honest about it.

So today over at Shanghaiist, Elaine Chow reports that they will close shop for a while. She's references this post at their own house blog. They say:

I'd love to speculate on stuff like evil and karma but to be fair Factory does all kinds of stuff in a large complex and I'm pretty sure that their hiccup has little to do with their music making model. 

Well at least it gave us that pretentious quote. Made me smile this morning.

Recently Dan Shapiro reported on The Factory project that recently opened in Hongkou's 1933 development. Dan knows what's what and this post is in no way attacking his post per se. Dan's blog has been ruling lately. Ha. 

The Factory aim to sign and develop bands strictly for use in the ad industry:

"The main idea is basically this whole factory is being underwritten by [local advertising agency] Profero. It's all about content, content, content," explains Sean Dinsmore, The Factory's Creative Director. "Looking at it from this angle it makes it a lot more manageable. Looking at it [ just] from a music label point, it's fiscal suicide.

"It's totally transparent for musicians," says local singer / guitarist Dave Zhao, whose interest was piqued by The Factory's unique approach. "They can record the songs here and then bring the songs to the advertising company to see if they're interested in them."

That's right.

I'm sure most of my readers are familiar with Bill Hicks. Maybe not. He was an American comedian who was tragicaly struck down by cancer at just 32 years old. Anyway, Bill was big on music, especially rock and independent music. He paraphrased this many ways during his shows but we can get the basic gist here:

Rock stars doing Pepsi commercials? Are we living in Reagan's wet dream? Let me say this, just once so we can set it in stone. Anyone who advertises a product on TV should be struck off the artistic register for ever. I don't care if you are shitting Mona Lisa's in your sleep, you have made your fucking choice. You are sucking satan's cock. You can't be trusted anymore.

If there is no existing structure, industry or community for music in your city. Build one. People are doing it. Accept that there's no chance to 'make big money' from it at this time and just make your music.

Just stay away from that big scaly member.