Today, the music brings in about $1,200 per thirty days, sufficient to pay his lease, Casey instructed me, with what seemed like a Lebowskian shrug. “I’ve different songs that I need to put up,” he stated. “However I form of don’t need to promote out.”
I requested if he knew concerning the Bathroom Bowl Cleaners, and he stated he’d heard just a few of their songs. “I’m not making this up,” he stated. “There’s this different man, I don’t know when you’ve heard of him, the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee. His thought was to customise each poop music. So there’s a Steven Poop music, a Bob Poop music, a Mary Poop music. He’s acquired a whole bunch!”
I instructed him that each bands had been in reality the identical particular person.
“Nicely, OK,” he stated, as if realizing the complete extent of what he was up in opposition to. “I like mine higher, however I’m biased,” he stated, lastly. “You may inform he is aware of easy methods to write songs, however I believe 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 at all times new names.
“This may be form of painful,” he warned, switching on his keyboard and firing up his laptop computer. He donned headphones, consulted an inventory of names and set to work. Within the silence of the room, I might simply hear the comfortable 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 wherein Farley imagines the 2 sides of his persona arguing: one, the intense, heartfelt artist, the opposite a greasy report government demanding ever extra poop songs. In fact, the scene can solely be a fantasy, and might solely have Farley enjoying each characters, as a result of the greasy report government belongs to a misplaced world — one wherein drastically fewer folks had an opportunity to provide artwork and the work was typically corrupted by company gatekeepers, however wherein there was additionally a clearly marked highway to an viewers and a dwelling. Farley represents each the perfect and worst of the incentives and alternatives which have taken this world’s place. Definitely, there are few creators working at present 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.