I have a story to tell you, but first the history. A little while ago (a month?) my band that I love entered willingly into a battle of the bands, sponsored by Mazda, which offered the grand prize of opening for Sam Roberts. This battle titled the Mazda Muzik Tour (clearly targeted at the morons who find pleasure in fighting the man through spelling) was, apparently, aimed at discovering Canada’s best indie talent (keep this in mind). Grand! we said. What excitement! we offered. Not all of us are #1 Sam Roberts fans to be honest, but we respect the man and what he does, and we would have appreciated the exposure of our music that we care about to a greater audience. To use foreshadowing poorly: this all goes to shit.
As the story goes, my band needed to receive enough votes to be in the top five of our region even to be allowed to play for anyone. Excitedly we encouraged those we knew to vote for us and they—being the good persons they are—did enough to get us into the Big Gig (that title being my own). This was exciting for us, our friends, our family because it was a chance to be recognized. Now all we had to do was wow the audience with our creativity and skill, convincing them to vote in our favour. We prepared a set list and practiced before hand. We cared about this because it was recognition of our efforts, and it would be amazing to play a show with Sam Roberts. Luckily, once we arrived we realised that none of this mattered because we were unwilling to sell our souls—then things got worse.
At this show we suddenly realised we were being used as dancing monkeys to give Mazda “indie cred,” or something equally inane. The first sign was having to pose for a photo in front of a banner with Mazda Muzik Tour scrawled across it. Then it was the type of people we were seeing. Originally there just seemed to be a bunch of really friendly folks working this event for Mazda. They all wore shirts with “Tour Roadie” on the front which was lame, but they were older and so who can blame them. By the end of the evening everything stunk of insincerity and I hadn’t seen any attempt at appreciation of the art that is music. The people had sales pitches and were committed to throwing them around shamelessly.
I will pause here to explain something. I am a whole-hearted supporter of capitalism. I believe in free trade, and I am not offended by a company’s attempts to increase its profits. Here’s the issue though: the music suffers at an event like this. I would love it if companies were sincerely invested in finding talented, creative bands in order to give them exposure to a larger audience, indie or no. However, why would any company other than a record company invest sincerely in independent music?
Anyways, I understand that this may all seem like sore losing, but I assure you it is not. I wish the winners of our round and all the others the best of luck if they are looking for what Mazda is offering. I was just too bothered by the imbalance of product placement to art appreciation. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place though. That would be a fair comment. Should I expect anything more from a company selling cars? Was I fooling myself to hope that Mazda was truly looking for talented Canadian musicians? Probably. A company has to watch out for itself—but if that’s true than my band looking out for itself by avoiding events devoid of integrity is equally fair. We both set out to take advantage of one another, and luckily we both failed.
This is the first year for the Mazda Muzik Tour, and—God willing—it will be the last. I say that from the perspective of someone concerned with the survival of talented, committed and creative musicians. This is meant not as a slight to the winners or participants of this event, but wholly as an attack at the corruption of music by Mazda. They have high-jacked the concept of indie music to sell cars (beware of the term indie in the future as well—it’s a word that sells more and more by the day and means less and less), and they are willing to allow the musicians to suffer. There are other ways to get exposure, and I recommend up-and-coming bands find them.
March 12, 2008
2 comments:
Reading that worked really well with the piano music I was listening to off of the you tube box in the sidebar.
I appreciated your interest in my oyster diving, but I think I may have accidently deleted your comment..but as Bourdain says "carefully choosen words have the ability to warm even the coldest heart".
I myself attended the Mazda MuZaK tour and was also offended by their hijacking of indie culture, but impressed by their mid-sized sedans.
I bet I can spell music a lot of cool ways.
Myusik
Mushyq
Miyoosic
There are more.
Post a Comment