http://www.news-journalonline.com/article/20120919/COLUMNS/120919666?Title=From-Kickstarter-to-Billboard-charts-Palmer-s-Theatre-an-indie-success
The new Billboard charts are out, and there were some surprises. The top six albums, led by Dave Matthew Band's “Away From the World,” are all debuts, only the second time that's ever happened in Billboard's history. Oh, and indie artist Amanda Palmer and her Grand Theft Orchestra popped up at #10 with her new album “Theatre is Evil.”
Which was produced without a label. And it was entirely funded by fans through a Kickstarter campaign that sought $100,000 and ultimately raised a million-point-two. And it has relied mostly on word of mouth and fan-based online promotion.
Don't look now, music industry, but the times they are a'changin'...
What's not surprising? That Amanda Palmer was behind it.
Everyone has one woman -- friend, sister, old roommate, ex-girlfriend -- who swirls back into your normal, orderly life every few years like a multicolored tornado and completely disrupts your way of thinking -- again -- before leaving you with tinsel on the ground, blood-red lipstick on your neck and a bewildered smile. For a few hundred thousand people, that's Amanda Palmer.
Formerly of the Dresden Dolls, formerly a human statue, often a surprise ninja ukulele-playing street performer and very regularly publicly naked in body and soul, Amanda Palmer has clearly decided her life is Art and she wants everyone at the exhibit. She makes music. She makes art books. She writes messages to fans across her torso and posts them to her website. She throws spontaneous street parties and streams them online. She regularly engages her audience on her site and on Twitter and everywhere else she finds them, and she greets all of them with the enthusiasm you'd usually reserve for the spouse you thought lost at sea.
In return, her audience supports her and her creations out of love and devotion and appreciation for the work and possibly just to see what she'll do next.
I'm an Amanda Palmer fan myself (disclosure: I contributed to the Kickstarter campaign) but I'm more a fan of the person and the phenomenon than I am of the music. “Good but not my style,” is how I've described most of her previous works (with an exception for the raucous “Ukulele Anthem,” which is just fun). But I enjoyed all of “Theatre is Evil,” and three of the songs have been in constant rotation in my car and my head since the CD arrived last week.
If asked to describe “Theatre is Evil” I probably wouldn't, because I'm not good at that sort of thing. I can tell you I heard a strong '80s influence, full of synthesizer and repetitive chords and familiar refrains (and a few '80s sitcom theme song lyrics), as if the Eurythmics and the Cars decided to team up and become the Cure.
The songs that stuck with me are “Not the Killing Type,” a creepily insightful look into the head of a peaceful woman who nevertheless fantasies about killing her lover to get a reaction (“I don't mean kill someone for real / but I can say it in a song”), “Want It Back,” a bouncy, addictive song about (I think) a woman holding on to a man's heart against his wishes -- incidentally, a song with a great and extremely NSFW stop-action music video -- and “Melody Dean,” a song that sounds like all the infectious giddiness of '80s pop smashed together into one frenetic piece.
But there are also songs such as “The Bed Song,” a haunting work that follows a couple as they progress from a sleeping bag to a beat-up futon to a bed in their own home, but with the same stagnant relationship throughout. And there's “Do It With a Rock Star,” which speaks to the desperation of celebrity. All of her songs have people in them, with real emotions and concerns and worries, and even if I may never listen to some of them more than once I'll bet hard cash that someone out there will take each and every one of the songs on “Theatre is Evil” and make it a personal anthem.
In fact, I can describe her music. It's defiant. Is that a recognized genre? Defiant-Pop? From the way she barks out her lyrics, to the tone each song takes, to the way she brings in her friends and her fans and makes them part of her art, Palmer is defiant in everything she does.
She's even defiant in her business practices. “Theatre is Evil” is available on CD and vinyl in the usual online stores and in Best Buy, and at indie stores, and at her own site amandapalmer.net. But she's also offering it as a Pay What You Want (which can be free) digital download.
“if you're broke – take it,” she writes on her site. “if you love it, come back and kick in later when you have the money. if you're rich, think about who you might be karmically covering if you really love this record.”
Not all of her crowdfunding attempts have been without criticism. Palmer came under fire last week after she posted a request on her site for local musicians to play “for beer and hugs” at her tour stops, a request that probably wouldn't have been an issue before her Kickstarter campaign made her (temporarily) a millionaire. But she'd already posted a breakdown of where that money went -- Kickstarter contributions are more like different levels of preorders; she has to pay for all the advance CDs and art books and personal visits that contributors paid for -- and so far all of the artists who responded to her call have had nothing but glowing praise for the experience and the attention they've received.
Palmer's arrival on the Billboard charts, powered entirely by herself and her fans, is a powerful sign that success in the music industry can happen without the actual music industry. When the news of the #10 position hit today, a fan named @phaezen posted on Twitter: “Independent artists around the globe are applauding and taking note. I wonder (if) the industry will?”
Palmer's response? “guess what? DOESNT MATTER.”
