EFH Project 1: The Best Band You’ve Never Heard Of
Goal: To create a convincing enough facade using Myspace and random artifacts to convince a casual observer that an obscure local band has played at Austin City Limits Music Festival and gone on tour. In reality, the band does not exist and the shows never took place, but significant evidence exists to suggest that it does.
Theory: This project grew out of my fascination with indie culture and music obscurity. I don’t claim to have much “indie cred,” but from what I’ve gathered, the common wisdom is this: popular things are not cool/good, things that are obscure are not popular, therefore obscure things are more cool/better than mainstream things.
The result of this assumption is that hipsters and indie fans who want to look cool and in the know are constantly trying to assert their “indie cred,” defined by Urban Dictionary as
Indie cred has a lot to do with the independent rock movement. The more rad bands you know and have seen in concert, the cooler you are.
If you add in a healthy dose of elitism to the mix, you can see how Indie Cred leads to wanting to know more bands that no one else has heard of in order to be cooler than them. Indie Cred also operates under the assumption that Indie is not merely non-mainstream, but indeed the opposite of mainstream, and thus notoriety and accessibility are eschewed for obscurity and inscrutableness.
The result is that the obscurity of the music you listen to and attend is a badge of honor for those who value their Indie Cred. Quite simply, the less well known your pet band is, the farther ahead of the curve you are. Of course, when expressed theoretically the absurdity of this situation becomes obvious; the most obscure band would be one who hasn’t recorded any music yet, and therefore no one has heard them ever. Does a band that no one has seen or heard still count as a band? Who decides these things?
In the last few years, Myspace.com has become a popular site for both brand new bands and more established artists to make connections with their audience and other performers, and introduce new ears to their music. Myspace created a special profile format for musicians that allows the artist or band to list tour dates, add music tracks, and add information about their genre and influences in addition to the blog, messaging, and friend services included in a regular account.
Now a Myspace music account is a given for any band worth its salt, but their is no way to stop anybody from signing up for one (in fact I think I have one somewhere for myself, with a few awful songs on it). Anyone can sign up for an account and claim to be a musician, and since obscurity is the coin of the realm when it comes to Indie music, no one can argue that the band is false just because they haven’t heard of them before. Through Myspace, it is possible to make what looks like a band and acts like a band, but does not actually perform or produce any music.
The live music scene of Austin serves as a sort of real life analog for the situation on Myspace Music. Dubbed as the “live music capital of the world,” Austin is home to countless musicians and bands of varying degree of quality and popularity. While indie cred/obscurity is less of a bragging point for the band itself, the sheer number of bands in town multiplied by the number of live venues in town make it probable that any given night you could encounter a band you’d never seen before. The idea that a band could exist in town without you being aware of it is not remarkable, it’s given. Thus, like on myspace, in Austin a “fake” band could hide behind the sheer ubiquitousness of the music scene without its “fakeness” being discovered.
The question then is: using the venues of myspace music and the live music “scene” of Austin, how much could a band accomplish without actually existing?
Method: The first step was to assemble the band. I am lucky enough to work with several gentlemen who embody aspects of the Austin indie rock “look” in different ways, and they were instantly willing to pretend to be in a band. Using a random band name generator, I made a short list of probable names and put them to the members for a vote. “Bump Concept” and “Harvest of Nun” got vetoed in favor of the name “Skinny Factory,” and the rest is history; that is, if you like your history entirely fabricated and preposterous (and who doesn’t?)
Ted aka “Malik Vasquez.”
Ted is an Austin native and is, unbelievably enough, a competitive air guitar champion in real life. The bravado and presence required for the air guitar circuits made Ted my first choice for the front man. Who better to lead a fake band than a man who plays a fake guitar–FOR KEEPS? Ted picked out the name of his new alter ego himself, the perplexing “Malik Vasquez.” We’ve decided that Malik is from Morocco, born of Spanish parents, and finds himself in Austin where his father attended college at UT. According to the website, Malik plays “Lead guitar, vocals, keytar, harmonica, Jameson.”
Julio aka “Vladek Dragos.”
Test audiences respond positively to Julio, who actually is a bassist in a real band here in town. He lent none of his talent, but all of his looks. True story: I purposely did not tell him beforehand that i would photographing him because I knew he would wear something appropriate without being told. We decided to cast Julio as the mysterious Romanian member of the trio, responsible for “Backup vocals, rhythm guitar, obscure bass, sitar, cigarettes.”
Ben aka “Kurt Jaegger.”
With his lanky stature and glasses, Ben typifies the Austin Indie music look in my mind. Cool but not glitzy, weird but intellectual. Although I pegged Ben to be the keyboard player in Skinny Factory, he requested that he also be labeled as a bass player, leading to their being two kinds of bass in the band. Kurt is credited as “Keyboard, soul bass, backup vocals, loose women.”
Second Step: Create an image. I told the band members to come to work dressed to impressed (except for Julio, who I wanted to capture in his natural dress). I borrowed my manager’s (fellow Actlabber Em) sweet camera and headed out to the alley next our store to take some gritty, authentic downtown Austin shots. All I told the members was to act disinterested and too cool to look at me. We then used the back hallway and staircase at work to get some kind of weird shots. All in all it was enough to create an “image” for Skinny Factory.
Primarily I needed two images: a profile image for the myspace page, and a cool image for a flyer. Thanks to the magic of gimp, I got both:
Profile Pic: Heavy on Adjust Brightness
Faux Xerox Magic
I’m not sure what guided my selection and manipulation of these images, but I have a feeling that they came out authentic looking enough for the task. I printed out a number of the flyers and had the guys tape them up downtown, while I put a few on campus. I don’t know if it attracted any traffic to the myspace page or not, but perhaps people saw them.
Finally, there is the myspace page itself. At the time of this writing, SKinny Factory has 35 friends. This is a combination of friends of mine who i told to join because it was my project, friends of mine I told to join who do not know it’s a project, other bands who auto add everyone, and a handful of people and other bands who are total strangers to me. These strangers are the ones I was hoping for, the few who took the bait and didn’t think twice about Skinny Factory being a legitimate presence. I kept up a blog for a while about the band’s adventures on the road, but I lost track of that. They are currently stranded somewhere between Oklahoma and Kansas.
On October 15 I got an email from webcartoonist Kris Straub. Straub lives in the Dallas area and is the creator of three currently running comics, one of which happens to focus on a fictional band from Austin. I had emailed him a few questions about his comics and conventions and in the process told him about the band project. I got an email out of the blue saying “Skinny Factory has been canonized in FChords.” This was the comic for that day:
From left to right you can clearly make out Malik, Vlad and Kurt as portrayed in the band promo material. In one move, Straub made his fictional band appear to be more rooted in the Austin music scene and also fooled all his readers that day into thinking Skinny Factory was a real band. He even linked to the myspace page! What a guy.
Conclusion:
In the end the project didn’t quite reached my full ambitions, but it was fun for me and the guys involved. For me the highlight was definitely the Kris Straub reference, but the creative process behind the band name and identity was a lot of fun as well. I’m not sure if I have any further plans for the band or if they’ve gone as far as they can go, only ti-i-i-me can tell. Finally, if you have a myspace account, be sure to friend Skinny Factory. It’s what the cool kids are doing.
December 10th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Hi I was browsing Internet searching for musician artists and your blog regarding Project 1 came my way. Very interesting! You really do know your thing! I\’m gonna bookmark you and come back in a few to see your new posting! Looking forward to! Cheers!
March 29th, 2009 at 5:12 am
Super-Duper site! I am loving it!! Will come back again – taking you feeds also, Thanks.