The good news is that someone who wasn't a big name band with an established fanbase (Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails) has figured out the trick to making money off music outside of the major label system.
The bad news is that it was Amanda Palmer.
I got into The Dresden Dolls all because some girl I worked with told me about some silly song she heard called, she thought, "Coin-Operated Boy", and thought that I might like it mainly because I'm weird. I fell in love with their debut album immediately: it was full of well-written pop songs but performed under the guise of a semi-goth/semi-punk Ben Folds Five by-way-of Christian Death sort of mood. The songs were angry, beautiful, bitter, and sometimes mildly inspirational, but most of all: they were just damn good songs.
Their second album was much the same, though even more pop, even more eighties-inspired. The third album, composed of outtakes from the second, was even better, with more frantic and off-the-wall songs that really stroked my inner weirdo, but at about this time something odd was beginning to happen.
Amanda Palmer became Amanda "Fucking" Palmer, which was cute at first until I realized it was precisely the same thing I did when I was 13: I wasn't Stuyvesant Parker, I was Stuyvesant Fucking Parker, because I was hardcore at 13. I was extreme, chugging Mountain Dew by the canful, listening to Nine Inch Nails and Skinny Puppy and thinking I was hot shit dressing all in black and wearing nail polish. To people any other age but mine, they could look at the "Fucking" I put in between my names and they could easily see that I was an immature moronic piece of crap.
Then she started writing blogs and discovered that The Dresden Dolls had inspired a whole mass of spooky girls to become psuedo-Victorian semi-piratey semi-goths to eat up every word she could utter. Her solo album didn't make much of a splash among anyone but this precocious group of adolescents, and I figure this is at about the time Amanda Palmer realized that she didn't really need to bother writing proper songs anymore. She certainly didn't need some drummer around stealing any of the limelight from her.
I saw her play a show for her solo album and it was great, until she got to a "new song" which was the song "Australia" you can find on this album. The problem with this song is that it sucks. It's slow, it doesn't go anywhere, and it's needlessly melodramatic. It's ridiculous. What makes it even more ridiculous is that on this album it's bookended by the kind of insane screaming you'd expect at the end of the last song of a Michael Jackson concert.
The album opens with the same hysterical, over-the-top cheering that someone would purposefully put on their live album in order to mock themselves, like a reference to Max Fisher in Rushmore walking in slow-mo to take a bow and overdubbed over it all is the same sound you find on this album: people utterly losing their shit for no apparent reason. It seems like Amanda Palmer purposefully left this sound in all across the record for no reason other than to remind you of how adoring her fans are. Yes, we get it Amanda Palmer, your shows are full of Amanda Palmer fans---probably because no one else would bother to go anymore.
After the hysterics subside, Palmer breaks into a rendition of the 1930's song "Makin' Whoopie" which is met with silence until she hits the words "Makin' Whoopie" at which point the entire crowd bursts into laughter and cheers---it's pretty clear no one in the audience had ever heard this song before Amanda Palmer blessed it with her live version.
The rest of the album is largely pointless self-centered balladry. Aforementioned "Australia" is all about her imagining her epic conquests now that she's single. "New Zealand" is her apologizing to New Zealand about putting on a bad show. "On an Unknown Beach" is some bullshit she didn't even write but sounds like she did because it's self-indulgent. "Vegemite" is all about how her lover eats vegemite and she can't stand it.
It says a lot that two of the least shitty songs on this album aren't even by her: "Bad Wine and Lemon Cake" is by The Jane Austen Argument, and "A Formidable Marinade" is by a guy named Mikelangelo who sings in a deep voice with an accent that is not his own---the same kind of false theatrical BS that makes Palmer herself hard to tolerate at times.
But what says even more about the album is that the best song on it is the laughably ridiculous "Map of Tasmania" in which Palmer raps about pubic hair. I guess it's fair to say only 1/3rd of the song is about pubic hair. The rest of the song is some sort of "We are the power" bullshit centered around the line: "They don't know that we are the media". She's even printed buttons that say "We are the Media" because no one needs taglines to stand behind more than Amanda Palmer fans I guess.
Truth is, Amanda Palmer isn't even in the media. Neither are her fans. I don't think people who are outside of the little world Palmer is creating for herself care at all about any of this. The worst thing about all this is that I can only imagine how many teenage girls are going to listen to Palmer rap "I say grow that shit like a jungle" and "Let it fly in the open wind" and then decide that they, too, are going to posture as feminists by never shaving again.
I weep openly for any boyfriends these poor, misguided girls might have.
Amanda Palmer should instead rap about the truth: shaving your pubic hair is an act properly partaken of by both sexes. No one wants a bunch of pubic hair in their mouth when going down on their significant other. No one wants a dense mat of hair that slowly builds in sweat and smelliness over the course of the day. No one enjoys mopping the juices of sex out of their pubic hair. It has nothing to do with stealing away female sexuality. I certainly don't think there is any pride for the taking in declaring yourself above simple hygiene---we cut the hair on our heads to appease our audiences, why not the hair between our legs?
With this album, and her incessant self-gratifying blogs, pointless video 'tributes' to Labyrinth (which served no purpose other than showing off how absolutely quirky and 'adorable' she is), email newsletters and $5000 "I'll play at your house but only if you have 50 or less people there" packages, Amanda Palmer has exposed herself as the narcissistic drama student she hid for a couple years under great pop songwriting.
It's true, it's great that she's figured out how to take the money of her fans and probably live off of it (needlessly now that she has the ultimate goth-princess trophy husband), but it's unfortunate that she's turned her back on everyone who, like me, enjoyed her music because of her music. Amanda Palmer is no longer selling music to people who like music, she's dropping nuggets of crap for her poor exploited-yet-adoring fans to buy from her.