"Bandcamp Friday"

 

Today, Friday, December 2, is another "Bandcamp Friday." This means that if you purchase something digital or otherwise on Bandcamp today, the artist receives 93% of that money, while 7% goes to "processing fees and charges." When it is not "Bandcamp Friday," Bandamp takes a 15% cut off the top. I imagine that what this means for 98% of musicians who put shit up on Bandcamp is that listeners might go to an artist's page and stream portions of a couple of songs for free and then not buy anything. That's what I do sometimes – unless I have some available income to spend and the artist is not rich and famous and is, additionally, important to me personally. Then, it feels good and supportive to send 10 bones to an artist. And like most financial experiences in the life of an artist who has not penetrated mass culture, the money earned translates into burrito money, coffee money, train fare, money for guitar strings, notebooks, pens.

That's OK for me. How could I complain? At 55 years old, I have lived longer than so many artists I've known. And through chance, privilege, sacrifice and (I imagine) through a flurry of synchronistic (spirit world?) factors of which I am not even aware, I have had the time and energy to create things throughout my life. Creating occurs in dialogue with all of, well, creation, with your fellow living artists/writers/historians/thinkers, with those who have come before you, with the unseen world and in dialogue with yourself. Who are you? What is your voice in relation to that of the crow on the wire in the alley behind your house, in relation to the sun rising over the Atlantic & glimpsed from a cloud ringed mountaintop in Madeira, where your ancestors lived for 500 years?

You walk around grateful for and dialoguing with the chance mixture of weird gases that conspired to birth life on the planet -- resulting in waddling penguins and diving-swimming otters who seem eternally happy. You walk around grateful for and dialoguing with Thelonious Sphere Monk and the decades of sacrifice and study he pursued that permitted him to develop a piano language to which you can listen for all of your life.