Today, the tune brings in about $1,200 per 30 days, sufficient to pay his lease, Casey instructed me, with what appeared like a Lebowskian shrug. “I’ve different songs that I need to put up,” he mentioned. “However I sort of don’t need to promote out.”
I requested if he knew concerning the Rest room Bowl Cleaners, and he mentioned he’d heard a number of of their songs. “I’m not making this up,” he mentioned. “There’s this different man, I don’t know should you’ve heard of him, the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee. His concept was to customise each poop tune. So there’s a Steven Poop tune, a Bob Poop tune, a Mary Poop tune. He’s received tons of!”
I instructed him that each bands have been in reality 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 methods to write songs, however I believe he’s simply been going for quantity.”
In actual fact, 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 after 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 sort of painful,” he warned, switching on his keyboard and firing up his laptop computer. He donned headphones, consulted a listing of names and started working. Within the silence of the room, I may simply hear the delicate 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 document govt demanding ever extra poop songs. In fact, the scene can solely be a fantasy, and may solely have Farley taking part in each characters, as a result of the greasy document govt belongs to a misplaced world — one by which drastically fewer individuals had an opportunity to supply artwork and the work was typically corrupted by company gatekeepers, however by which there was additionally a clearly marked street to an viewers and a residing. Farley represents each the most effective and worst of the incentives and alternatives which have taken this world’s place. Actually, there are few creators working as we speak 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.
