The Plastic Bastards Guide to Becoming Completely Irrelevant
Success is complicated. Irrelevance is much easier, and we’d know, because we’ve spent decades carefully avoiding every opportunity to become commercially useful. Consider this our advice for new bands.
If you’re a young band just starting out and you have an existential dread that someday people might actually know who you are, relax. There are proven methods for preventing this sort of thing, and we’ve personally tested most of them. Follow these steps closely and you’ll be perfectly irrelevant.
1. Start a band.
Anyone can start a band. All you need is a couple of people, some equipment, and an unshakable belief that the world needs to hear what you’re about to do. The world doesn’t, but that isn’t important yet.
Don’t bother with a business plan. Plans lead to goals, goals lead to disappointment, and we’re trying to save you some time here.
2. Develop an elaborate multimedia stage show years before anybody knows what the hell to call it. Completely fail to capitalize on this.
Being ahead of your time sounds like a compliment. It isn’t. The trick is to come up with something interesting before anyone has the slightest idea what to do with it.
In 1990, The Plastic Bastards started building prerecorded video directly into our live show. Not video playing behind the band, either. The people on the screen talked to the people onstage and vice versa, and the performance moved back and forth between the two. There were many sight gags to be had. Years later this kind of thing would pick up impressive names like “multimedia performance,” “interactive video,” and “immersive live experience,” all of which make it sound considerably more expensive. In 1990, the technical term was “What the actual fuck.”
That’s ideal. If people immediately understand what you’re doing, you run the risk of developing an audience. This is bad.
The second half of this step matters just as much. If anyone important ever does notice you, do nothing about it. Don’t follow up, don’t return the call, and don’t build on it. Let the moment pass quietly, the way nature intended. Eventually somebody else will come along, do something vaguely similar, and get the credit, and you’ll get to enjoy the deep satisfaction of saying “We were doing that years ago.” Nobody likes that person, which keeps you nicely obscure.
3. Ignore whatever genre is currently popular.
People like genres because genres tell them where to put things. Record stores used to have actual sections: rock, punk, industrial, electronic, alternative, experimental, and whatever the hell they were calling things that week. It’s much harder to sell something when nobody knows which shelf it goes on.
Fortunately, not giving a fuck is the answer. If something sounded interesting, funny, ugly, catchy, obnoxious, stupid, disturbing, or impossible to explain, there was a decent chance we’d do it. Marketing professionals do not recommend this approach. Approach it. Embrace it. This is the direction you must take.
The same goes for your image. A proper band should have one, preferably something a publicist can explain in a single sentence. We went with music, video, theater, visual art, absurdity, satire, bad behavior, good intentions, questionable decisions, and whatever clothes we happened to be wearing at the time. As a result, the simple question “What kind of band are you?” has never been easy to answer. The safest reply is still “Yes.”
4. When something you do becomes fashionable, immediately do something else.
Occasionally, despite your best efforts, the rest of the world will catch up. Something you’ve been doing for years, and are still doing, will suddenly turn up everywhere, and people will start asking whether you’ve heard of it. This is a dangerous moment. For a brief window, you might actually seem relevant.
Don’t panic. Just stop doing it and move on to something nobody wants yet. If a trend is happening right now, you’re already too late. If it’s going to happen ten years from now, excellent. Do it now. Nobody will want it. Being fashionably late is for amateurs. Being unfashionably early is an art. And artists usually starve.
5. Periodically disappear.
Momentum is dangerous. Momentum can lead to recognition. Recognition can lead to expectations. Expectations can lead to work.
So every so often, vanish. Don’t announce a farewell tour, don’t break up dramatically, and don’t issue a press release. Just stop. Then, after an inappropriate amount of time has passed, you’ll be ready for Step 7.
6. Maintain a website. Allow it to die repeatedly.
This used to be considered important. We put The Plastic Bastards online around 2007, and the site has been through several versions since. Some were built in plain HTML. One particularly elegant version leaned heavily on CSS and adjusted itself to different screen sizes long before that was normal. (Nobody cared. So far, so good.)
Then we moved to WordPress, and the site gained an exciting new feature: something was always broken. A theme would update. A plugin would stop working. Another plugin would pick a fight with the first one. Things that had worked perfectly for years would suddenly develop a large void where their work ethic should be. Eventually it got so broken that even we couldn’t get into it, so it went down like Old Yeller. Again. Months later, we built another one. At this point our website has come back from the dead so many times that resurrection is less a miracle than a maintenance schedule. However, for maximum obscurity, do not adhere to that maintenance schedule regularly.
It also helps to trust technology in general. Over the years, musicians have been encouraged to hand their work over to tape, DAT, floppy disks, hard drives, CD-Rs, web servers, social networks, streaming platforms, cloud storage, and a long line of companies promising they’ll definitely exist forever. Every new format shows up with the same message: “Everything will be easier now.” Ten years later you’re digging through a drawer, holding an unidentified cable that connects to a machine nobody makes anymore. That’s how musical archaeology begins.
Which brings us to this blog. It runs on WordPress. We’ll keep you posted.
7. Return from obscurity without explaining where you were.
Never wait for public demand. Public demand is unreliable. Just reappear, casually, as though nothing happened. Don’t explain and don’t apologize. If someone asks where you’ve been, look mildly puzzled, as if you’d only stepped out for a minute.
This confuses everyone. More importantly, it keeps anyone from forming reasonable expectations about your behavior, your reliability and your consistency.
8. Release more material.
Now that you’re back, you’ll need something to show for it. Make another record. Restore an old recording. Find a photograph you forgot existed. Discover a song on a hard drive you haven’t plugged in since the last century. Create something completely unnecessary, put it online, and stare at it proudly.
Congratulations. You’ve once again defeated the music industry by refusing to notice that the game ended several years ago.
9. Discover that there are now several entirely different ways for nobody to hear it.
Releasing music used to be hard. You had to record something, manufacture physical copies, convince a distributor to carry them, somehow get them into stores, and then persuade another human being to pay for one. Now you can release music worldwide almost instantly. That’s progress. Your song can be available in Chicago, London, Tokyo, Sydney, Berlin, and just about every other inhabited part of the planet at the same moment, and nobody in any of those places has to know it exists. All you have to do is not try very hard.
If you are still worried that you might actually achieve something, it’s worth remembering what you’re up against. In the old days, you were competing with whatever happened to be in the local record store. Today you’re competing with the entire recorded history of music. Would someone like to hear your new song? Maybe. But they could also listen to David Bowie. Again. Problem solved.
10. Repeat until historically significant or dead.
Those are really the only two options left. Something strange happens if you stay irrelevant long enough, though: irrelevance turns into a survival strategy. Trends come and go. Record labels collapse. Formats become obsolete. Websites die. Social networks show up, dominate civilization for six years, become unbearable, and get replaced by another social network that immediately starts becoming unbearable. Meanwhile, somewhere in the background, you are still there. Not continuously, since that would be excessive, but persistently. There’s a difference.
And even death might not be enough. There will still be unreleased recordings, old photographs, forgotten video, half-finished projects, and backup drives. Someday somebody will find a box marked “IMPORTANT / DO NOT THROW AWAY” and immediately regret opening it.
So there you have it.