Do it Yourself...On Your Own Dime.

It's not all candy canes and coke naps, kids. Sometimes you gotta make the hard decisions. Like when your sister gets pregnant at bible camp, so you have to hire a couple of skinheads to kick her in the stomach. Then you come to and it turns out that it wasn't your sister at all, you never had a sister. So now you're living in a tent downtown and trying to avoid the skinheads who are looking for the $50 worth of Tijuana Tarragon you promised them. Of all the fucking times to have an acid flashback...

What was I talking about?? Oh yeah, Steve Albini. He's right about absolutely everything, ever. Major label record companies? Suck. Digital recording? Fucking sucks. Radio? You better believe that sucks! Think you want to have a career as a professional rock musician? Well Uncle Steve sez NO. You gotta make lo-fi records of wiping your ass with your guitar for two guys in the basement of a pizzaria in Queens for the rest of your life to be a real artist. So says the genius behind Rapeman.

Here's some numbers for you soft-brained lemmings to crunch:

So you've got a band that just got signed to a major label and the record company gives them a $10,000 advance. Great! But not so fast there, Grim Rail Rukk. You're going to have to make a record for them eventually. Let's say $3,000 to get the Lloyd London special: hire some guy in Sherman Oaks who has a room full of nice looking analog equipment but just runs everything from a $79 4-track mixer into a shitty laptop with ProTools on it. Anyway, now you've got to tour to support the album so you need to hire a bus. $2,000. Parking fees, fuzzy dice, gas, and hospital bills from that time your bass player tried to crush up and snort a Mento. $5,000. But wait, you've got to eat something to remain conscious. $1,000 for vegan soy muffins and Pabst Blue Ribbon (for street cred). Shit, you need to wear some clothes or you'll get arrested! $1,000 each to buy a new Abercrombie sweater vest and "junkie fit" skinny polo pants. Also, you don't have any fans and everyone hates you so you need to hire some hookers to come to all your shows so you can build a "buzz". $4,000. Finally, your daily drug supply is going to cost you at least $140,000. Fuck, now you're $245,000 in the hole and trying to auction off your internal organs on eBay to shifty Asian buyers. Great job, scumfuck.

Now, I've always been all about doing it yourself. I wrote the book on it. LITERALLY. It's called "Booking that World Tour...On Your Own Dime!" It's printed on 100% recycled shitty zines and it's available for $89.99 from the trunk of the abandoned car I'm living out of this week. My plan calls for the swiping of your parents' credit cards, but Albini's plan is even simpler: take a shit-ton of drugs, buy some coke-bottle glasses, start a band called Big Black, and spend the rest of your natural life fiddling with sliders so that the bassist from Ass Hurt can be heard in the mix. Then after you've managed to never actually have any success at all whatsoever in the music industry, you can dole out advice to up and coming bands to "do it yerself, dickless" because you've been there....except that you haven't.