selfdefensefamily: They’re laughing at you. Vol....

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

They’re laughing at you. Vol. 1.

We were asked yesterday how we feel about the idea of an “original lineup”. I answered, briefly, and said I’d touch on the topic in more depth when I got the chance. Well, I’ve got 30min so here we go.

Many of my friends play music. But a few of my friends are also properly part of the music industry. They make money off the people who play the music rather than playing it themselves. We could get all Workers of the World, Unite! on that topic but let’s keep our focus here. The friends who play music offer me human insights; the friends who work in music show me how a machine works.

That machine loves original lineups. Reunions, even better.

Straight from the horse’s (a successful booking agent’s) mouth: “I fucking love an ‘original lineup’ tour. All the people who want to feel connected to something come out for the first time in years. Ticket sales go up and they don’t need an album to support to make them relevant.”

Original lineup is a marketing term. It’s a way of providing you old product —dead stock— while making you believe it’s more worthwhile than the latest innovation. The public can believe they’re witnessing something “genuine”, a quality they can’t pin down themselves but know it when a music blog tells them.

Musicians don’t want original lineups. There’s a reason they no longer play with each other. Legitimate musicians want to play with the people that push them and make them better. They’re not interested in sentimentality or a misplaced nostalgia. The people who invest themselves in original lineups are typically those attempting to reconnect with or, more sadly, relive their past. It’s for the workaday dude who hasn’t been able to “keep up” with music but gets a thrill when he thinks about the good ol’ days. No musician should work to satisfy that dude.

If you have a hankering to play with someone you’ve played with before, don’t deny it. Do it and have fun. But pretending that you were “at your best” with the old lineup is delusional. Believing you’re seeing a band “at their best” with an old lineup is delusional. A man can’t stand in the same river twice; there is no capturing the “rawness” of the original effort. It’s just something you’re being sold.