(dual post at Myspace)
So artists get three subcategories to label themselves and/or their work.
For a while, I had A’Cappella/Comedy/Indie as my category, which is utter bullshit and very weakly describes me or what I do.
Now, most people who find me, or discover me on this site can pretty much figure out what I do. I just simply cannot understand why it’s so hard to add SPOKEN WORD and/or PERFORMANCE POETRY and/or I’d even settle for SLAM POETRY, as options on the categories menu.
Man, I am so dissappointed. I know the spoken word genre (in all its forms and subcatgories) is relatively small, but EMO, SHOEGAZE(!?), SCREAMO, and a host of other sub-sub-sub-subcategories in music are available as category options.
And why? you may ask. Spoken word (in all its forms and subcatgories) made the music industry a total of $63.87 last year, while EMO, SHOEGAZE(wtf), and SCREAMO made it $127.32. That $63.87 was for a books-on-tape-on-CD reading of the Holy Bible as read by Don Knotts. “Jack begat Janet.” I’d begat Janet…
Yeah.
I’ve queried the office full of hipsters and suits, represented by a guy named “Tom” (a guy named Tom handles all of the tech-work and email for upwards of 50,000,000 profiles, 24/7, and has time to leave the house on the weekend) to please add SPOKEN WORD and/or PERFORMANCE POETRY to their category listings. I believe there to be quite a few artists around who’d appreciate it if those of you on Myspace would send them a note asking the same thing.
Don’t email “Tom.” Fuck that guy/character/mascot/picture. Just click on the CONTACT MYSPACE link at the bottom of any of their pages.
Don’t get me wrong, Myspace is pretty handy in terms of what I get out of it for free, I just think that it’s still so limited. Obviously it must cater to the consumers who will draw in money to the advertisers, so people/poets like me are left out a bit. I am well aware of how small a slice my “genre” has compared to the rest of the pie, but damn, people…SHOEGAZE?
*********
Word to the nerd.
EDIT 2/22/06 12:30pm: Addendum.
I am Comedy/Indie/other.
That’s the saddest part. Most of us up there have to pick “other.”
Can you imagine a major label (never going to happen) going to Myspace to find an artist to add to their roster, saying, “We really need to start pushing the “Other” market.
If any one of your selected categories on Myspace is “other,” get rid of it. It’s a catch-all. It’s the corporate way of saying, “Thanks, but we’re not interested.” Fuck that.
Here’s my new category:
Mighty Mike McGee
Comedy / Death Metal / Experimental
“His experiments in humorous death metal have inspired people to live.”
Man, Other really pisses me off.
This entry was written by , posted on 23 February, 2006 at 4:36 AM, filed under Personal Updates and tagged artist labels, myspace, poetry, spoken word. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
I have requested the same for the last year and a half… as well as asked for more poets to be featured when you fist log in to the site… but all for not
***tears**
All right,
do you have a phone number for this asshole? Yo know WHY spoken word made $63? (and are those real or made up numbers?) — because we all HAD to list under comedy/indie/blah blah blah..
let mama work her magic.
MySpace indeed sucks ass. Very handy for networking, but that’s about it. LJ has it all over that shit.
Congrats on IWPS!
E-mailed MySpace. Also sent you a backchannel e-mail conencting you with someone else I’ve discussed this with.
Smile!
Wow, $63 whole dollars? At this rate, in about 8,000 years we’ll all earn our shiny penny.
E-mailing them now.
I feel your pain on this one, my friend.
Tom is, btw, one of the two founders of MySpace. It’s like Brad’s LJ.
It’s really because their demographic–the angstful teenager–is into shit like emo/screamo/shoegaze (the last of which I’d never heard of) right now. Not so much profit…but interest levels.
I still agree, if that wasn’t clear. They could add spoken word/performance poetry easily, and probably should. It’s a tough call from their perspective, though, in terms of admin’ing a website. I guess I can kind of see both sides: the artist side, and the technical administration side.
dude, don’t you be bad mouthin shoegaze like like that!!!
I agree with the D. Shoegaze rocks. Somberly, and of course, introspectively and stuff.
I was just a lost child void of happiness and meaning and one day i found meaning. The parables of life and time eternal is found in SHOEGAZE! I am just a mere gaze in the power of Shoe.
THANK YOu
i agree that slam should be a genre choice, but at the same time, there’ll be 345987978 more kids at a galaxie 500 show than at a poetry slam, gua-ran-teed.
we also used to call shoegaze boys “wallwalkers” because they’re the kids who walk real close to the wall in school, head down, books clutched. AWWWWW
-my boyfriend’s cat is named “kevin shields of my bloody valentine“
I actually kinda like shoegaze. Hum’s a decent band.
Anyway, enjoy this: MYSPACE: THE MOVIE!
Or the link might work:
MYSPACE: THE MOVIE take 2.
Re: THANK YOu
Most of the poor white kids I went to high school with eventually became L.A shoegaze boys in our senior year. Like what do you have to be moppy and scared about? were in Fucking Pacific Palisades!!!
seriously
go Pali Dolphins!!!!!!
BTW — I’m lobbying particularly for “spoken word,” which can carry a lot more weight and cover a lot more ground than “slam” or “poetry.”
Re: seriously
I loved my little Topanga pot heads and the fact that all of the sports teams were filled by us blackies that they bused in. do you remember the huge scandal that was on the news around 2000 about the underground newspaper coming out of Pali high that caused a walkout?
claim to fame: the guy from black-eyed peas
hahah, no…i’m from detroit/chicago….i only have hearsay about “you crazy west-coasters” (i’m friends w/ eitan kadosh who went to Pali so i knew about the Dolphins accidentally)….what, was the newspaper too “urban”?
Re: claim to fame: the guy from black-eyed peas
I had no idea eitan went to pali. FUCK!!!
not too urban, in it we basically talked shit about teachers. IT caused a huge uproar. We were the 1st thing on the news for a week. Every talk show covered us for 2 weeks. The bitch Larry Elder wanted us to go to jail to teach us a lesson. 3 kids got expulsion. one kid was accepted to Brown and was then non-admitted. A student walkout happened. 50 LAPD cops in riot gear surrounded the school in case shit happened. Detectives interviewed us several times in a 2 week span. My article was titled the angry black man, I denied it was me, they tried to accuse me but they wouldnt touch my black ass with an Alabama tree. The funny thing is, the article that caused everything (accused a teacher of being a former porn star) was by me and no one knew. The bitch ended up suing LAUSD 2 years later and got a $4 mil settlement.
My pen ruined lives and shook cities by the age of 17.
really,
talk to leonard cohen about getting his penny.
OK,
no more “other”
maybe I’ll say screamo…and umm…indie
thanks..
you are so SMRT
Keep truckin’, dude.
Re: All right,
It’s 888-EAT-CACA.
Spoken word is so far away from making it’s own niche in any sales market. At least one that gets the attention of the higher ups in the music industry.
Just about any poet/spoken word artist that has “made it” has done so through music of some sort.
It’s so much easier to file your work under “hip hop.”
And yet
I get 21,000+ hits a MONTH on livepoets. I wrote a very polite letter to that effect to the cust. service section (the one that gets read, not just an FAQ), and nothing yet.
LJ is far superior in terms of quality and communication. But there are features on Myspace that LJ could use.
The one thing LJ has over Myspace is the relative lack of shitty looking pages. I get so annoyed with long loading pages full of images, music and videos. If my page ever gets bloated with “How cool am I that I have this animated .GIF of some woman flashing her boobs over and over?,” I give you permission to call me names.
*********
Thanks, man. It was a shitload of fun.
Thanks, dude.
Word.
Because you’re dope.
Part of the $580,000,000 Rupert Murdoch and Friends spent to purchase Myspace went to “Tom.” I know he’s a real guy, but he’s probably on an island right now, somewhere in the south Pacific, planning another “Myspace Party.”
Tom’s a Berkeley grad, and well, his student loans were paid off in one check.
Tom/Rupert/Intermix Media, Inc. doesn’t care who’s on Myspace, only that ARE on the site.
Me bitching about EMO/SHOEGAZE(whatever)/SCREAMO vs. SPOKEN WORD means about as much to those guys as does me caring about which of the two cockroaches in my kitchen is going to win that Lay’s Kettle Cooked Mesquite BBQ Potato Chip I dropped.
Yeah, SHOEGAZE. Never heard of it either, but I’m sure it’s just another name for another sub-genre. SPOKEN WORD is an art in itself. Sometimes a shitty one at that, but a genre nonetheless.
It comes down to adding a simple line or two of code that makes SPOKEN WORD a selectable choice. It would take one person to do it.
Fuck, “Tom” could do it himself from his island.
Shoegaze is probably the greatest genre of music ever, but if Carson Daly hasn’t said it out loud, then it doesn’t officially exist.
Does Hum (which makes some dope tunes) have the balls to label themselves SHOEGAZE?
Funny and true.
Funny because it’s true.
Most certainly, but I see spoken word as the umbrella of public speaking.
Speeches, slam poetry, stand up comedy, addresses, commentary, and even editorial segments on the news could fall under SPOKEN WORD.
George W. Bush is a spoken word artist. Artiste. I wouldn’t score him too high in slam, but he’s pretty funny.
It is true – Leonard Cohen (uber-badass) is a far better poet than accountant.
sending an email now.
rock on.
hey now that I am thinking… do you know of any venues that go on in San Diego… been trying to see what is going on for when I get out there… you know of anything?
I don’t know. Should I call them?