Here’s an archival post about my decision to temporarily abandon my first album Super Brain (see here for the original track list and album page).
I finally released Super Brain late last year after an 8 year hiatus, during which I sired 2 boys, got fat then skinny again, and released a first album more in the punk than prog genre. Read more about my story here.
Anyway – this is amusing and a bit depressing to read. I still keep up the same vigor and hope as I did when I was 28, but its just sad to realize that 10 years on I still haven’t achieved my goal. Waaah.
(P.S. the album “Right Wing Fiend” mentioned below was renamed america’d before being released in 2010. Right Wing Fiend was a track on that album.)
I had an epiphany today that I think will give my wife much satisfaction. Since I have been giving her so much guff for not being aggressive enough marketing her massage business, she has been lying in wait for me to start waffling on my own grand marketing plan for this album – which is now really Super Brain. Same thing with Geoff – who I accused of doing the same thing.
The truth is, I am starting to think more like him, that is to say that I don’t think I have enough after-day-job time right now to devote it all to marketing this album and work on the next project. So I have to decide which it’ll be. Now, if I wanted to spend the next 10 years in seclusion working up a 15-CD boxed set like Prince, then there’s no dilemma. But, I don’t – I want to quit writing and recording and start marketing as soon as I have some truly breakthrough material to share.
- Next proposition: Super Brain is good – very good, I think – but not likely to attract much more than a cult group of weirdo fans.
- Next proposition: marketing a CD primarily via the Web is a largely untested and open-ended process.
- Next proposition: I have (the afforementioned) day job time-suck with which to contend, though this will probably always be there, so tough for me.
- Next proposition: my wife will probably be pregnant in the next six months, which will in turn set off the 9 month stop watch to get anything meaningful done with my musical hobby before I surrender unequivically to the ox yoke of soul-killing offce work, to support my little kiddies.
- Last proposition: most importantly, ‘Right Wing Fiend’ – my next album – is within striking distance of being totally composed, and will, I am certain, be a smash hit.
- THEREFORE: I should start on ‘Right Wing Fiend’ and leave the Super Brain to look after himself for the time being.
One might think that, since income from an intellectual work like an album is by definition passive, in that it doesn’t require intensive sales efforts for each single unit (unlike a fridge), I should just press the CDs and set up the website, just to have it on hand for the orders that trickle in. But in music marketing, promotion is such a crucial aspect that for a critical mass of ‘buzz’ to build around a release, one needs to start the battle with all guns blasting. And it won’t harm any future efforts for Super Brain to hold on promoting it for 6 months.
So with that argument out of the way, I eliminated the ‘Music for Instruments’ page of concert music, which I decided a while ago wasn’t going anywhere, and I officially changed the name of MishMosh to Super Brain, and updated the projected release date to September 6, 2003 – my 29th birthday. I’m also finishing up my 7th song for ‘Right Wing Fiend’ – its about Karen Finley, a popular figure in the fringe area of ‘Performance Art’ – a dour, pompous, bolshevist-tending, culturally vacuous discipline that strives to be as offensive and useless to society as possible while simultaneously sucking off the teats of taxpayer-funded pimp bodies like the NEA. In fact, in an astounding example of the ingrown nature of contemporary ‘fine’ arts, Finley has literally made her career for the past decade by publicly ‘processing’ her reaction to being denied NEA funding in 1990, though to be fair she also gets good mileage out of being a child abuse-surviving, single-parent, ultra-oppressed-feminist, butch-dike trollope. Those grant foundations love a good victim. Too bad she wasn’t born half hispanic, half black, half Iraqi, with a cleft palate and hermaphroditic appendage. Actually, I’m not sure about that bit about her being a dike.