The Drek Wars
I wanted to briefly rant about a serious crisis in the media world: an unconsidered result of the proliferation of DIY drek. Podcasts! Videocasts! Video comments! Independent, low budget digital movies! Band self-produced albums! All of these are potentially good things: I heralded them as much as anyone else, and am in fact a product of the media production boom that began in the late 90s with the availability of consumer applications such as Photoshop and Premiere, and hardware such as DV cameras, dedicated digital recording hard drives, and the like. Suddenly you didn’t need a $100,000 budget to record an album. However, I didn’t initially see the danger in all of these things: the tools do not, in themselves, provide the capability.
The well-intentioned beginners can be forgiven, they should in fact probably be condoned for their bravery. Experimenting in a new medium is scary. You face the expectation of greatness, when really you should just be tinkering and tossing your results in the closet for the first five to ten years. The Internet has become that closet however, and we are beset on all sides by so much crap that it can be hard to find the good stuff. (Also, we all have to start out here. Those who stick it out for long enough, with enough determination, ultimately get somewhere.)
But even that isn’t my actual gripe, the railroad spike in my side, the ipecac in my stomach. I don’t need to wade through mountains of user created crap on YouTube because I don’t go wading in the morass to begin with. This explosion pushed everything a step further: clients and employers think that – rather than hire a professional designer, or sound producer – just have one of your employees do it. It’s easy, right? Just a couple clicks in Photoshop. Podcast? Just plug in a mic and hit record. Why take on all that excess cost? The fact is: there are probably only six or seven ingredients in that dinner you had at that expensive 3 star restaurant. Put those ingredients in the wrong hands, and you get inedible mush. Have the crack addicted hobo on the corner wire your house, and expect a house fire.
Yet everywhere I turn I see clients and employers cutting corners by either overloading a single professional with the tasks of three people- it doesn’t matter if the person has the skills to do all those tasks, they simply don’t have the focus to pull them all off well- or worse, pawning off the work of media professionals on already overburdened employees who don’t have the background. I nearly got myself out of the freelance design industry a couple years ago for this reason, along with the fact that design clients have notoriously bad taste. (My all time favorite remains the mattress company that wanted me to develop a series of animations of flames dancing on top of images of their mattresses because their prices were “ON FIRE.” I tried to explain to them that juxtaposing the images of fire and mattresses was an abysmal idea, not to mention the fact that animated fire GIFs almost destroyed teh Internets in the 90s. I firmly believe that some sliver of the $50/hour rate that goes along with design services is a buffer against the potential of gastrointestinal damage that results from simply gritting your teeth, saying “at least he’s paying me,” and turning your carefully considered color scheme into taupe, orange, and pink.)
Having mentioned this, I’m not entirely certain there is a simple solution. We’re on a river that only flows one way, (DMT visions notwithstanding), and in many cases the immediate bottom line matters a lot more to a business than the long term gains, especially if they are qualitative rather than quantitative. Quality? This is America. Who cares about quality, I want it cheap and I want it now!
This is likely one of those instances where a cliche serves best: you get what you pay for.
James performs in industrial rock concerts, bitches incessantly on his blog, skulks about in dark recording studios, and writes dystopian graphic novels and novels for a generation of disenfranchised drug addicts. He has become something of a mainstay in independent and fringe media, though rumors of being a key member of a harem of feral lesbians are slightly exaggerated. Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning is his second novel, and is available now on Amazon.com.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Not surprising. Sure it’s great anyone can do this but no one seems to ask if they should. And given that the driving factor for any business is profits, they’ll continue to cut costs to keep their overhead despite the continuing decline in consumer purchases and decent product/customer service. They’ll do what they keep doing. And we’ll see the results of their labor/butchery in the coming years.
You never needed that much money to record an album, there’s always been cheap ways, always will be.
Pardon, a “professional sounding album.”
The overhead of tape and incredibly expensive ‘professional grade’ equipment (not to mention drugs) may be gone now, but a producer still does – and should – cost a pretty penny. Part of my ultimately point, here. The advances with the gear created an illusion that put a lot of professionals out of a job.
I used to wax poetic about my romantic fondness for the old days of pirate radio, and how I would like to do pirate broadcasts still. When I mention that a friend of mine always chimes in “you should do podcasts.”
He just doesn’t get it.
“The advances with the gear created an illusion that put a lot of professionals out of a job.”
And the buggy whip industry has never recovered, either. Big fucking deal, dude, times change. The personal computer revolution put a hell of a lot of BOFH’s out of jobs too, but I don’t see marauding gangs of disenfranchised COBOL programmers camping on the White House lawn. Upgrade your skills and your product to what the market will bear AND what will make you happy, or get out of the way. It’s sad that skilled, talented professionals are squeezed out of the marketplace, but I have a cliche for you, too: the law of supply and demand.
If your bitch is that your taste and quality is too high for your customer, you’re selling your shit to the wrong customers. There is always a market for top-quality everything, but you’re not going to find it at Crazy Habib’s Mattress Warehouse and Hookah Bar. Come on, now.
I guess I don’t get the point at all. DIY-ers have been around for a while and so have their corporate emulators. DEVO exemplifies this point in their music quite well. What makes any of this different from the analog revolution?
As far as I know cheap, available recording equipment has been available at your local thrift stores since the 80s and during the 80s MTV was intentionally making their videos look like they were made with this cheap recording equipment.
I’m sure that before the 80s plenty of rich, professional and spoiled record / television producers left their out-dated equipment abandoned in alley-ways before that… and before that negros were making guitars out of cigar-boxes and the corporate executives wanted to know how to emulate that cheap DIY feel as well…
Anyway. I guess I’m just a big dummy with no point that sees no point to this article written by another big fummy. Let the pointless arguments collide, viva la internet.
Hmm, it seems this one hit a nerve.
For starters, I don’t have the same faith you seem to have in free market capitalism. The market shoots for a middle ground between shoddy quality / price-point / and what the market will bear (what’s the number of times your computer can break down before you say fuck it and never buy that brand again, etc.)
Be that as it may, though I did use an example from my own experience (because I thought it was funny), I’m commenting more on a trend that I’m seeing around me, and which effects many people I know and come in contact with – at jobs all over the pay scale, mind you – rather than airing out a singularly personal gripe. I have friends who are point blank being asked to produce ‘professional’ podcasts for the companies they work for, with no prior experience (2 just this week), I’ve seen literally thousands of want ads on monster / hotjobs / etc. which ask for a single employee to be hired at around 50k a year to do upwards of 3 people’s jobs. (“We want someone who knows backend programming, must be a master of design for web and print, must be experienced with flash and coldfusion, be able to edit and write copy, edit video for web streaming, and work upwards of 60 hours a week.” For 50k? Really?)
These are in some ways separate trends but they are aligned through the same misconception that I touch on in this article.
Finally, it’s a brief blog article based on anecdotal evidence. There’s no way all the psychological and market variables at play here could possibly be given fair play. Though I do appreciate someone willing to say more than the obligatory “yeah, right on!” comment.
That last comment was directed to Mer.
To Phodecidus- you’re right. You are missing the point.
James,
The headline really grabbed my eye and I’m with you 100% but i felt the writeup digressed into a “Designer Whinge on lame clients”, that said you bring up a very valid point that I agree with totally.
Unfortunately, DIY culture, it seems, to thrive when its a controlled environment and a limited number of people are involved. Its happened before a million times.
In the early days of Hardcore, bands like the Big Boys preached “Go start your own band” and lo and behold when enough people with little experience playing music did you had a lot of crappy shows and the energy that made the scene so exciting drained away.
Same thing happened with Zines Explosion, Indie Rock, and most recently Street Art.
At one point Street Art was an honest expression and outlet for artists. Now since its become “the next big thing” it’s become a way for graphic designers to get noticed and puts an “edge” on their resume.
Such is the cycle I guess but thanks for calling it out its nice to hear others with a similar viewpoint.
“As far as I know cheap, available recording equipment has been available at your local thrift stores since the 80s ”
Well. . . true enough, but most people didn’t know that, nor did they know that you could self-release your own albums or books, and so only the most committed kept at it until either a publisher or record company offered them a deal, OR they figured out how to self publish/self-release. It acted as a filter, to strain out a lot of the “cranks” and “crackpots” (as we sometimes refer to them in the music industry). If you could look at a pile of lame self-released LPs from the 70′s and 80′s you’d maybe understand it– for every proto-genius “Shaggs” LP there are hundreds of crappy lounge-singer/folk-singer/gospel singer LPs. For every self-released punk-classic there are hundreds of thrash-by-numbers hardcore 7-inches that all ended up sounding like the same band, or maybe different bands playing the same song (scroll through myspace hip-hop artists to get a feel for it). Now that phenomenon has been multiplied by 1000 or more on the internet.
PLUS to actually go to a thrift store and buy the equipment and use it required some work. NOW everybody already HAS the equipment (a computer), and realizes “Hey! let’s get creative” when they aren’t particularly creative in the first place. Thus the internet is filled with millions of pages of mediocre content, it’s as if suddenly you can see everybody’s personal diaries and hear everybody singing in the shower. A few are good, a few are so terrible as to be entertaining for all the wrong reasons, but most are simply bland and pointless.
Sometimes I wonder if the extreme quantity of indie rock bands is actually KEEPING some musicians from playing, under the idea that all the mediocre bands are making the whole idea of music “un-hip” and scaring off talented people.
My thoughts exactly. (abelincolnjr- the ‘designer whine on lame clients’ part was really just me telling a funny anecdote vaguely on the subject at hand. I guess this is the part where tone doesn’t always carry through text.)
As I said earlier, this is too broad a topic to really come at with any sort of definitive answer. It merely seems like a topic worth raising on a forum such as alterati, (since we feature so many “DIY digital artists”), in the hopes that it spawns some discussion on the subject… which it seems to have.
Do you think this continuous increase in digital media and media saturation will lead more tech-savvy youngsters towards the out-dated technology of our predecessors?
I’m talking about lower and middle class kids returning to analog tape, Web 1.0, snail-mail, etc. I mean we already have conceptual-artists creating their pieces out of discarded iPods… and more and more iPods are being thrown away everyday.
I have to admit youth-culture has always had an affinity for ‘retro’ but what makes this up-coming generation interesting the wealth of forgotten technology available to us. Of course the internet will become part of the archaic revival someday.
Embrace the crap, welcome it with open arms. That’s what you call “job security” — god bless the fucking idiots, they make our marginal livings possible.
I remember when the first affordable cassette 4-tracks came out in the mid-80′s (the Tascam Porta One was the standard, and I still have mine somewhere). There was a tendency I noticed, both with myself and my friends who had 4-tracks to think the first thing you made was GREAT. You are so impressed with this recording of music that is YOU coming out the speakers, “WOW, that’s ME. . . it’s incredible!” I began to call it “4-track syndrome”, some of my friends would lay down just two tracks and be done, and think “that’s it, it’s done and it’s really really good.” Of course, if you played those tracks for someone else they would be totally unimpressed. “It’s OK I guess. . . “