Earn-it-yourself

Tonight, I read the Manifesto over at Earn-It-Yourself.com. It has a powerful message and one that should challenge any of in the arts who are sort of praying for a benefactor (yes, I mean me). It’s by a young woman who founded a band that started getting there in Wisconsin and now is trying to make something of herself on stage in California, even as she rises up backstage.

As her earlier projects became better known, people around her said she was selling out (because her band was touring with bigger bands and getting radio support, etc.). Troubled by the accusation and worried that she was losing hold of her values, she decided to take do-it-yourself a step further, to earning everything herself.

I read it and I’m still not 100% sure what it means. Does it mean musicians should all be like Ani Difranco and start their own record label? Isn’t there something to be said for economies of scale when bands team up by joining one publishing institution? At what point are you no longer teaming up and begin accomodating someone else’s priorities? And sometimes can’t you call accommodation collaboration as easily as co-optation?

I don’t know the answer, but I think trying to find a precise line would be to cut the issue a little more finely than the E-I-Y’ers want. I think what’s really going on is that Sarah Saturday is giving herself a permanent pep talk with the underlying message that as long as she really works her ass off she’ll have no one to blame but herself if it doesn’t work out. And that’s sort of empowering and comforting in a crazy kind of way; so long as you have the will.

Earn-It-Yourself is not a “Kum By Yah” lefty, co-op’esque philosphy. For example, Sarah writes, “We want to see good music thrive, and shitty music get trampled. We want the bands and people who know what their values are, and who stick to those values, to be rewarded for their integrity.” And so on.

I should mention that I’ve met Sarah and I’ve seen her old band, Saving Face, play. They were a lot of fun. She and the lead singer had a great stage chemistry. We met through Diaryland before I moved to Madison, all those many years ago. We hung out once at a Barnes & Nobel and talked about being aspiring artists and being hipsters and her coming tour. We also talked about her fixation on Ayn Rand. What little I know of Rand’s worldview seems to square with the total-personal-responsibility ethic of Earn-It-Yourself, but that’s not a bad ethic for an artist. Especially in the brutally competitive music world.

After we met, she went on tour and then she moved to California. I don’t remember much about the conversation, but she was the first cool person I met in Madison. She was probably the only person I met in Madison who was cool in quite that way. So, of course, she left. I could not empathize more.

I’d like to end by quoting the second-to-last paragraph of the manifesto for you, but I think it’s better if you get there on your own (so here it is again). That’s the moment when she really goes off and it’s the one that might have you come out thinking, “Hell’s yeah! I can make my own world, too!”