After all the articles and more articles and more articles and more articles and finally today's Gawker article, Amanda Palmer does the right thing and announces on her blog that she's paying every musician on stage, including the ones who didn't get paid during this tour retroactively, and oh by the way has been for three days neener neener neener and oh hey, my album is doing really well!
To which we say, bra-fucking-vo Amanda Fucking Palmer. Your fucked your own public brand hard, but it's never too late to start attempting to mend fences.
That was kind of our whole point to begin with.
I do want to clarify one thing: In your post you keep talking about everyone being the 'media.' They aren't. They're social media. There is a difference. Leaving comments on your blog post-- most of them anonymous-- is not akin to reporting on a story, or writing an article. One is an individual opinion; the other comes from a media source that interviews other sources and then writes a piece with a POV. In our case we're covering the issues that concern the ad world, and have been since Dabitch started Adland back in 1996: Four years before The Dresden Dolls played their first gig.
And while it may have been fine to have been crowd sourcing musicians for free beer and hugs in the pre-kickstarter days, your kickstarter page was a public and transparent offering. So if some people who took note disagreed vehemently with your crowd sourcing and swayed you to use your windfall to give back, even if it took a few weeks to make it happen, you took the lumps (some fair, some really not) and did so.
To paraphrase an album title from Lou Reed , growing up in public is hard.
For those who want to read Amanda Palmer's apologia and subsequent victory lap in solving what she calls a "kerfuffle," and celebration of her album receiving shit loads of attention in the process be our guests.
But we here at Adland think it's more important to give the unpaid musicians their due. In addition to help give more exposure and discuss the 'kerfuffle,' and make suggestions on how to solve the Amanda Palmer As A Personal Brand problem, the musicians were the entire raison d'être for these articles anyway.
But enough about Amanda Fucking Palmer. Let's hear her talk about the people who got compensation for what they're really worth. Here's her congratulations to the musicians whose names we can now support (with free beer or Benjamins, but hopefully more of the latter.)
i’d like to offer a giant especially-given-the-circumstances round of applause to all the musicians who have rocked out with us thus far:
David Fishkin, Kirk Knuffke, Sam Kulik, “Moist” Paula Henderson, Toshi Chun (and his sister, Keiko, for telling him we were looking), Austin in atlanta whose last name we don’t know because you showed up so incredibly spontaneously, Ashley Shab-an-kereh, Hannah Krieger (and special thanks to Alexandra Scott for sending us EVERYONE in new orleans!), Catherine Piacente, Justin Sabe, Jessie England, Alec Spiegelman & Kelly Roberge of Ronald Reagan (Boston’s Premiere 80s Pop Saxophone Duo!), Jerry Ochoa & Jo Bird & Debra Brown & Margaret Lejeuneall (all members of Two Star Symphony who have an incredible show coming up in houston this friday where they’re going to be attached to heart monitors and play along to the beat of their own hearts, YES!!!!!!), David Bloom & Finnegan Shanahan & Josh Henderson & Dylan Mattingly & Mariam Parhizkar who played with us at bard and are all members of contemporaneous.org, Daniel De Jesus, Brian Fitzgerald, Timba Harris, Alex Weill, Francesco in DC, Maggie Dziekonski, Natalie Spehar & Nick Montopoli (both members of classicalrevolutiondc.org) Tim Martin, Elliot Anderson, Laura Hubbard, Omar Luiz-Lopez, Sam Craft, Jack Craff and Mary Petro. (…and if you’ve played with us and we missed you or your last name, tell us in the comments! there’s a ton of you!!)
Hey, Amanda: do you think your legions of fans who called us stupid, bullshit, negative, complainers, haters and more in our comments will also apologize, too?
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Well, after any labor dispute there is usually lingering bitterness. I know I've said things I've regretted (although I've avoided any sexist language).
As with most of her escapades, she has turned it into self promotion ("we're at number 10!"). Well, that's more of an apology than the disabled community got.
And Katy Perry.
And people offended by her "ironic donation to the KKK" comments...
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PermalinkI'm glad you brought that up- the labor dispute angle. The inherent irony all along to me is that people will support the Occupy Wall Street movement, and yet seem to give someone a pass who, if she owned a bank, would have also been vilified. More importantly, labor disputes from days of yore used to be between say, factory owners and disgruntled employees. It's weird when the same practice happens between musicians. Or so I used to think.
What I mean to say isn't that she is part of the 1%, but that there is a dividing line created by ego. That of the "me me me," rock star who deserves not only the credit and accolades but the cash, and on the other hand "those kind loving hearted people who, god bless 'em, volunteered their time to help our l'il old me, that i'm gong to help out in this economy," are being exploited.
That's great she's decided to help them out, but it also smacks as suggesting she's only doing it because there was a lot of pressure from Very Important People, or worse, that the economy sucks and not because she believes the people behind her should be paid on a regular basis.
Again though, the whole time this argument has never been about us vs them or rich vs poor or success vs non successful. It's been about doing what's right. Period. And we believe if you're on stage, you should get paid. Perhaps it's in shooting commercials with SAG and AFTRA. Where even someone on camera in a non-speaking role gets a cut of the pie. But we think it's right.
And the constant argument over the past week was "they knew they wouldn't make money, she never said they would," and our constant push back was always "and why is that right? and why shouldn't she have offered to pay?" Replace her with a sweat shop for a second. can you imagine someone saying "they knew they wouldn't make a lot of money working at foxconn, or for Nike; it was their choice they didn't have to. The truth is, they do have to. In the latter because working in a factory is a better alternative to starving, and in the former, because making music is something they want to make a living doing.
If a musician genuinely wants to work for free, they can. And no one is suggesting they be forced to take money. Even that argument is a joke because when in the history of music has a musician been forced to take money? It just shows how bereft "freehadists" are in their arguments. But hey-- If being a supporter of musicians rights makes us bad here at adland, we're okay with that.
Thanks for your comments; they are much appreciated.
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PermalinkI'll assume that AnonyousCoward up top here is referencing "A few words on some previous words" posted on disabled feminists. Amanda tweeted around that time these three tweets: "setting aside 846 emails and removing the disabled feminists from her mental periphery, @amandapalmer sat down to plan her next record.", @heyitsjacy don't get me wrong. I love the anonymous love. its the anonymous hate I could do without. and "pain is inevitable. suffering is optional." which it seems some bloggers involved in the discussion took as if it was personally directed at them. I don't know. I would simply like to add that the .Sig file "pain is inevitable. suffering is optional" isn't uncommon, and I have personally used that one-liner joke in my collection of over 2000 one-liner ASCII .sig files since the mid nineties, so it's not an original Amanda Palmer quote, at all. I know that much. You'll get over one million results returned if you google it in quotation marks.
As for the Katy Perry and KKK stuff, I have no idea what you are talking about.
Carry on.
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PermalinkTo be honest, it was the Trihordist that twigged me to that when he wrote that Palmer was being disingenuous by claiming that the protesters were stifling her creative choices.
I'm amazed by people who would allegedly support Occupy spouting incredibly conservative attitudes. People were writing "no one should tell her how to run her business!" and "no one needs to say yes!" people need some serious education on basic economics, let alone labor rights. Someone called be a "free market capitalist" because I thought "worth=money." Well, until art can be traded fr food artists who play for love will have to settle for money.
I think it's an example of how the Internet can be used well. If Palmer can crowdsource talent the why can't workers crowdsource their actions? I'm not in any union but I knew this was a bad thing and tried to say so as much as I could. but t was people like Amy Vaillancourt-Sals who really did the work.
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PermalinkThe Katy Perry thing was a skit for an anti-Proposition 8 benefit in which, satirizing Perry's faux bisexuality by pretending to anally rape a Perry lookalike with a strap on dildo. Yeah....
The KKK thing was from a tweet about lady Gaga's "ironic" product placement in which Palmer tweeted that "ironic would be taking the endorsements and donating the money to the KKK," which, again, yeah...
What bothers me is that in each case it was not so much mea culpa as "you just don't get me." this seems like a pattern with her.
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PermalinkAaaah. Thanks for the clarification, was impossible to google that. until now.
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PermalinkInteresting.
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