Friday, April 4, 2008

Seth Godin Teaches Dipshits How to Further Evil in the Music Industry

I had no idea who the fuck Seth Godin was until I started working at the bookstore. But, after having to pull his tomes and display them, I learned he is some big dick marketing guru. Of course, I'm going to have to invoke the whole Bill Hicks "If you're in marketing do us all a favor...kill yourself" axiom here. He recently posted on his blog (which he proudly boasts is the most read marketing blog around) a lecture he gave to corporate music industry dickpigs about how to save their sinking ship.
His main point was about marketing to what he calls "tribes." Yeah, his solution to the clusterfuck the record biz has gotten itself into is to ruin everything with an ounce of purity left. Look, I'm not gonna get up in arms about Warner Brothers trying to pimp out some new twat de jour by having her piggyback on Brittany Spears. That is expected. What I find more troubling is the commercialization of once vital subcultures that Godin is proposing.
Here's a telling quote, "The next thing is this idea that people care very much about who is sitting next to them at the concert. They care very much about the secret handshake. They care very much about the tribal identification. “Oh you like them, I like them”. FUCK. THAT. NOISE.
Even Deadheads would scoff at having yuppies infultrate their "tribe" so why wouldn't a more reasonable set of music fans? Take the last Flogging Molly show, for example. I've seen that band everytime they've played Houston and what used to be a wild, insane punk rock show has now devolved into drunken frat boy theatrics. Seriously, the biggest assholes at the show were carting their chicks away before Dave King ever said, "Aye." Or how about the Converge show at the Engine Room a few years back? A.K.A. the Night of 1,000 Fights. Fuck, try to go and see a Dropkick Murphys performance now and not witness a sea of popped collars and white caps. Marketing to the tribe isn't really what Godin is proposing. He is subvertley suggesting marketing the tribe to the outsiders. And NO ONE wants their scene infultrated by tourists and fashion victims who leach like vampires.
And fuck you, Seth, for the presupposition that just because I like Band A and Band B are in the same genre I dig both. I fucking adore Jawbreaker but 99% of bands that wear their name out on the press releases have more to do with My Chemical Romance. Once again, marketing will out.
So, shut the fuck up, Seth. Let the tribes alone and steer the record companies towards simply offering us a product, trusting our tastes, letting us make our own decisions about the quality, and then acting. I really hate being pandered to and that is all you are proposing.
Ya know, Hicks was right. Please kill yourself.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you. Seth Godin is a hypocrite.