Today, the track brings in about $1,200 monthly, sufficient to pay his lease, Casey advised me, with what appeared like a Lebowskian shrug. “I’ve different songs that I need to put up,” he mentioned. “However I type of don’t need to promote out.”
I requested if he knew concerning the Bathroom Bowl Cleaners, and he mentioned he’d heard a couple of of their songs. “I’m not making this up,” he mentioned. “There’s this different man, I don’t know for those who’ve heard of him, the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee. His thought was to customise each poop track. So there’s a Steven Poop track, a Bob Poop track, a Mary Poop track. He’s bought tons of!”
I advised him that each bands had been actually the identical individual.
“Properly, OK,” he mentioned, as if realizing the complete extent of what he was up in opposition to. “I like mine higher, however I’m biased,” he mentioned, lastly. “You possibly can inform he is aware of the right way to write songs, however I feel he’s simply been going for quantity.”
In truth, I knew concerning the suite of songs that mix Farley’s two most profitable genres — names and poop — as a result of he was engaged on a brand new set of them once I visited him. He estimated that he had already accomplished about 3,000, however there have been all the time new names.
“This may be type of painful,” he warned, switching on his keyboard and firing up his laptop computer. He donned headphones, consulted a listing of names and set to work. Within the silence of the room, I may simply hear the tender click on of the keyboard and his vocals:
Jamilah, p-p-p-poop/Jamilah poop poop poop.
In “Native Legends,” which is one thing like Farley’s “All That Jazz,” there’s a fantasy sequence by which Farley imagines the 2 sides of his character arguing: one, the intense, heartfelt artist, the opposite a greasy report govt demanding ever extra poop songs. After all, the scene can solely be a fantasy, and may solely have Farley enjoying each characters, as a result of the greasy report govt belongs to a misplaced world — one by which drastically fewer individuals had an opportunity to provide artwork and the work was usually corrupted by company gatekeepers, however by which there was additionally a clearly marked street to an viewers and a dwelling. Farley represents each the very best and worst of the incentives and alternatives which have taken this world’s place. Definitely, there are few creators working right now in any medium who wouldn’t acknowledge the anxiousness he embodies: that their work now lives or dies by the vagaries of opaque algorithms serving a bottomless menu of choices to an more and more distracted public. And that in the event that they don’t bow to the calls for of those new realities, their work — and by extension they — will merely disappear. Which is to say that whereas the expertise of watching Farley work was not unpainful, as promised, neither was it completely unfamiliar.
