'The Abortion of Cool'

I've Finally Put Something Out

Self-Publishing always gets this look down people's noses. It's a condescending, smug, patronising look that makes you shrink back into your hole. Somehow if you can convince a publisher or a label your stuff ought to be in print and get them to take financial risks, then your material is somehow more worthy than if you took your own risks.

I don't know that self-published stuff is always so bad, even considering McGonigal's poetry and whatever else that's been vanity-published. What iCompositions has revealed to me is that plenty of people have material lying around - it's actually hard to get to the market place. This is true in books, music, films, videos; I've spent most of my working career in the production end, I should know.

I've met publishers who were more interested in shagging their cute blonde editors than actually *gulp* reading my manuscript; and I've met label guys who are just so high on coke, their sentences are unintelligible; and I've met studio executives who had the courage and conviction of a sparrow; and I have workd for a guy who used to produce and direct market his own stuff to the market he thought was there. The lessons are there if you choose to look at it.

I sort of think that the validation given by the intermediary corporation is nice on the one hand, but it also means they get their snouts into the trough of your creativity. It's the old, "what's the label done for us?" question that has plagued vexed, tormented and humiliated musicians for a long time. Why can't the musician shoulder his/her own risks and get a product out? The ambivalence about all this has actually paralysed me from actually doing something with the pile of music I've produced.

And so we come to the internet age where making one copy of a CD is somehow viable, provided you do your own work. Anyway, seeing that I won't be looking for that record deal, then it seems obvious I ought to at least try this thing out; and seeing that I've never been sure how many of you out there might want an album by me, I've held off on going down this path, but I'm finally at a point where I feel it's worth investigating this path.

'The Abortion of Cool' is now available from lulu.com.
Do yourself a favor and buy it! :)