When I was a kid and first learning about 'the scene', doing things on my own wasn't a stylistic or sociopolitical choice; I wasn't making a statement about the commercialization of art or the privatization of space or anything like that. I had to do stuff on my own because my friends didn't understand or support my interests and no one would help me make anything real. I grew up trapped and isolated in a beautiful suburb where there weren't any venues or labels or record stores or anything like that for me to connect with. When I first started getting real with guitar and writing my own songs back in like 7th grade, it was a simple matter of necessity to self-record them onto cassette using my little stereo in my bedroom, and hope maybe some of my friends would eventually listen to it if I made them a copy. What other choice did I have? At the time a CD burner was something you had to have installed onto your PC and it was more than my parents were willing to invest. I just figured out whatever way I could to make my shit something tangible.
For a long time, "doing it yourself" really was a singular activity in my mind, not some 'we-built-this-as-a-group' communitarian bullshit; that's all well and good but no one ever wanted to include me in their reindeer games and I used to actually resent movements like that. It always felt like the start of some little alternative corporation to me. I felt like, if I didn't do everything completely on my own, I was giving this piece of me, the only piece of me that I love at such a recognizable level, to someone else for them to smash into their form. For years I didn't even want to fuck around with finding other band members to play my music with because I was so afraid I would lose what was so deeply mine. I still sometimes feel odd having other people record us play, like there is an impulse still within me telling me to just get everything onto my little portable demo-maker so I can control everything and not let anyone into my little corner of the world.
Shit, I've been single for like 6 years, that's how "do-it-yourself" I am.
(Sorry I couldn't help myself.)
Still, I have very conflicted feelings about what "DIY" means and the importance it has in the long-run. It all depends on application. If you're like me, and all DIY functionally means for you is booking shows, releasing music, and making merch, well then you're just mirroring mainstream consumer society on a smaller level and declaring it righteous.What about the tools of music themselves, are they so "DIY"? Your name-brand guitar? Your cymbals, your speakers, your fucking pedals?? Even you whiz-kids who DO know how to rig up your own gear, where do your materials come from? Do you manufacture wire out of your garage or what?
What about means of proliferation? The Postal Service is an arm of the U.S. government and other delivery services are corporately owned. The Internet is the easiest tool these days for an individual to send messages into the world, while still retaining the sheen of independence from the constant high-level bludgeoning we're all subject to. It allows the user the ability to control and mandate your intake and output, after generations of being spoon-fed from major media outlets without many viable alternatives. If you have something to say, if you have a piece of music or writing or porn that you want to share with the world, there's no middleman holding you back anymore! Record labels are more novelty vestiges than the crucial gatekeepers they once were. Today, kids like me who don't have any friends can just set up a Bandcamp or a SoundCloud or whatever and instantly reach the world. DIY is easier than ever!
But despite the seemingly ubiquitous nature of the Internet nowadays thanks to all your SmartPhone shenanigans (kids these days...), it is still a tightly controlled commercial product. To access the Internet at my home I have to pay money to Verizon and the signal goes through some router we bought from some company to my Toshiba laptop, on which I use Microsoft's software to open a Mozilla browser and log-in to my Google and Facebook accounts. That's like 7 huge-ass corporations before I've even checked my daily messages. No matter the 'revolutionary' connectivity, the possibilities and creativity it affords, the very act of using the Internet is corporate as fuck (unless you're some crazy hacker, in which you have a whole 'nother set of problems). ISPs are corporate as fuck. Computer manufacturers are corporate as FUCK (and real bad about environmental stuffs too -- see: rare earth materials). Google and every other major site people use to find anything on the Internet, all that shit is corporate as fuck. It keeps us under surveillance to be constantly expressing ourselves via the interwebs, it builds our advertiser profiles and creates unwitting content for outside sources, for them to make pay-per-click profit from. In a way, the Internet is the most non-DIY thing possible because it takes our independent creations and Borg's them into extremely fertile marketing data, while giving us consumers the idea that we are actually independent producers.
Once again, never mind the sincerity of our intentions or the quality of our creations, the tools of our craft pull the pin on our claims of from-the-self legitimacy.
What I'm saying is there's an inherent limit to how much you can ever truly "do by yourself." Especially when the unspoken goal of many DIY efforts is the supposed de-commoditization of culture, a lot of our behaviors when not participating in our various cultures contradict that basic goal. If you're going to Del Taco after shows or chilling on a Starbucks cup all night at the venue, if you are a regular consumer of cigarettes or alcohol, much of the self-righteousness garnered from self-releasing your screaming and whining onto 50 cassette tapes goes right out the window. Sure, our 'art' is free from corporate control but is that really the biggest part of our lives?
No.It might seem like that sometimes, what with all the time we collectively waste on our various creative endeavors, but you will actually die without food. The merits of your DIY label or whatever are severely compromised by your insistence on eating processed factory food from chain supermarkets. The basic thing that keeps you alive, you're not making the same effort to de-corporatize that as you are to de-corporatize your hobby. The same people who make a big deal about getting their news and culture from 'alternative' sources, are not always so determined to get their food from farmer's markets or their clothes from thrift stores.
I'm not trying to claim to be than higher-than-thou regarding any of this, either; the reason I am so keen on pointing out these discrepancies between what is being preached and what is being practiced by much of the "DIY" world is because I myself am indicative of so many of those problems. Sure, I self-record my own music and I give it out for free (I rarely
pay for music, I don't expect others to pay for mine) and I book all my
own performances and all that jazz, but on a deeper level that shit
disappears. That's just my "art." That's just my self-obsession being
selfish. I don't grow my own food, I don't have a working bike, I'm on the Internet all the fucking time and I have almost no practical skills to speak of. Supermarkets keep me alive. I go to big festivals in the summertime. I am a consumer.
Perhaps thats why, in the end, the Minor Threat model of doing "DIY" music is still so appealing to me, still something I cling to and feel awkwardly defensive of. Despite all the existential smack I just spouted, I understand. We can't control the fucking cosmos here, we're just doing what we can. That's really the key. Understanding the ways - although limited - that you can actually take matters into your own hands, and then not letting those things go. Making something out of these meager means we have.
That's really the inherent value of "doing it yourself": you know that you were able to put your 2 cents into this million-dollar world without having somebody else say, 'I did that for them.' We are never going to realize certain utopias, we are all consumers, but that small act of understanding yourself and giving it to the world...It's all we can do sometimes.
During my third year of college at UC Irvine, Ian MacKaye came to the campus and did a question-and-answer session for almost 3 hours in a room of DeathCab-looking OC college kids. I was way in the back in standing space but he did see my raised hand about halfway through and complimented my homemade Faith T-shirt.
My question was regarding the Internet dilemma I've already written about in this very piece. "How can anything on the Internet ever be DIY?"
Most of the other questions were about Fugazi reuniting or stupid shit like that so he was giving very curt, pissed off responses, but he went on for like 20 minutes about this issue. That was several years ago and I was a bit in awe that Ian MacKaye was looking me in the face answering my question for such an extended period of time, but I remember this: "I didn't pave those roads, but where the fuck else am I going to drive?"
At some point we all lose control over who we are in this society, the avenues in which we contribute to our own silent servitude. It's just a matter of understanding yourself and taking that small corner of the world that you can find and not giving it up.
Rock n roll will never die.
tight
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