Vulture recently published an interview with Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast. When I first read the clickbaiting title – “Michelle Zauner’s Success Nearly Destroyed Her” – my initial thought was that “man, I wish that for change I could feel ravaged by my victories rather than my shortcomings”. I’ve endured suffering, but I can’t recall a time I’ve been suffering from success. But Zauner is an artist whose work I admire and one who has definitely been on a steady trajectory of increasing acclaim and popularity since launching Japanese Breakfast initially as a side-project in the early 2010s. So I began reading the interview with curiosity, and several of Zauner’s comments sparked some thoughts on the realities of being an indie star in today’s music industry.
Michelle Zauner cut her musical teeth as a member of indie rock group Post Post at the beginning of the 2010s before gaining some small-level notoriety in cult Philadelphia emo act Little Big League. Her reputation as a musician continued to rise with Japanese Breakfast’s critically acclaimed records Psychopomp (2016) and Soft Sounds From Another Planet (2017). 2021 then saw the release of the album Jubilee and Zauner’s bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart two months later. The album and book together boosted Zauner’s fandom beyond that of niche indie music nerds. Japanese Breakfast would receive more mainstream attention via performances on late night talk shows and garnered two Grammy nominations.
On the surface, it seemed like Japanese Breakfast and Zauner had “made it” as far as indie success goes. Zauner had put in the time, having come from “a DIY background where I’ve been playing music since I was 16 years old, booking shows, promoting myself, touring the country in vans, sleeping on floors, carrying my amp down rickety stairs.” This lifestyle is a far cry from the Grammy stage, yet is the reality for the overwhelming majority of those making music in indie scenes. Unless you’re rich, DIY touring requires balancing a day job with one’s musical pursuits, which gets more difficult as one spends more time on the road. The day job must be flexible enough to allow for breaks in work long enough to book tours, and it must allow one to make ends meet in cohort with the narrow profit margins that exist for upstart – mid-size acts touring and selling records and merch. There are also the costs that go into getting a tour on the road (gas, food, equipment, possibly support staff), producing physical merch, and recording, mixing, and mastering music that sounds up to snuff for artist and listener/consumer. This behind the scenes work takes time and costs additional money if you are paying anyone to help you do it (graphic designers, recording engineers, producers, etc.).
Even after crossing the threshold of achieving financial viability through artistic work, the grind continued for Zauner. It might have even accelerated with the perceived necessity to say yes to any and all opportunities in order to keep the boat afloat financially to avoid sinking back down into greater financial uncertainty and a tighter budget. This would begin to take a toll on the songwriter.
Zauner: “So as soon as I was able to begin financially supporting myself by playing music and not having to work at a restaurant on the side, I was like, I’ve won the lottery — I need to just run as fast as I can and do everything and be grateful. I have to keep going at this clip.
When we first went on tour after the pandemic, we were doing six days on for six weeks. And it was crazy. I mean, I said yes to every single interview. I said yes to every single show because I never made money doing that before. And then I started getting crazy stage fright and health problems.”
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Interviewer: “Did you still feel the financial pressure of touring at the time?”
Zauner: “The book afforded me financial security in a way that made me question it: Do I need to go so hard? But it’s tough because there are ten people who are in the band and crew who I feel a responsibility of taking care of.”
Interviewer: “It seems like touring is only getting more expensive, too.”
Zauner: “It’s a huge risk. The money that you put up front before you make anything is really scary. And especially touring during COVID, it was like, This bus costs, like, $1,500 a day. If I get sick, I have people’s salaries and a bus to pay for during the seven-to-ten-day recovery time it takes for me to get back to playing. You just become so obsessed with your health and body, but it’s hard to take care of it when you’re sleeping in a bus and you can’t cook for yourself.”
Even with the relative comforts that come with being able to reach the level of doing tours on a bus instead of a van, money continues to be a source of stress and one that negatively affects personal wellbeing. Your financial situation and personal health are also tied up in the obligations you have to those who are helping you with the tour. I know I would also feel an intense sense of pressure due to that. The stakes are higher. It’s a career, but it’s not a secure one.
The act of making music and performing is in itself something fulfilling on the level of creative expression. It is a labour of love but things begin to change when someone begins to do it as a career. It must then also serve something else – a fanbase, a market, a record label potentially. There is something outside of the artist that benefits from the performance. As one is more ensnared within the demands of the music industry, those alien forces and their external hunger further divorce the artistic worker from their output and what internal fulfillment may come with.
In discussing the alienation experienced as part of the labour process within capitalism, Marx wrote that:
“The worker becomes poorer the richer is his production, the more it increases in power and scope. The worker becomes a commodity that is all the cheaper the more commodities he creates… The worker puts his life into the object and this means that it no longer belongs to him but to the object. So, the greater this activity, the more the worker is without an object. What the product of his labour is, that he is not. So the greater this product the less he is himself.” (1)
As the music maker develops the skills capable to make music as they would like to make it, this realization of one’s creative goals is an intoxicatingly powerful and liberating feeling that contrasts sharply with spaces and instances where such pursuits of creation are denied. To cope with and/or escape alienation in capitalism, making art becomes one option. It may seem as if the way to maximize escape is to become a full-time artist. But unless your living expenses are covered by a donor or the state, you will have to sell your art. Your music must become a commodity to be bought and sold.
Turning music into private property, however, makes it economically rational, and alienable regarding its labour. Tsing explains that “[i]n capitalist logics of commodification, things are torn from their lifeworlds to become objects of exchange” (2). These things include the objects produced by workers and the workers themselves. The window in which music has been a career option has been quite small, and one lacking in good jobs. Neff, Wissinger, and Zukin note how within cultural industries, the structure of work is built upon workers being motivated by the promise of one Big Job being right around the corner (3). Such is the case for the music industry in particular. Krueger explains that a “passion for creating and sharing music is what draws most musicians into the profession and keeps them there despite the long odds of achieving commercial success or fame…From an economic standpoint, this inner drive creates a ready supply of musicians who are willing to sacrifice higher income and steadier work in order to practice their art” (4).
With revenues streams for artists drying up with the rise of streaming, and a broken touring and performing circuit less profitable due to rising travel costs, to say being a musician is precarious work is an understatement. The music industry has placed the risk of creative work onto musicians (Lingo and Tepper, 344), capitalizing on the knowledge that musicianship is so central to identity, offers benefits beyond compensation, and is an escape from more alienating forms of work. It almost seems that by artists choosing to devote their time and energy into music as an activity serving the social utility of bringing the masses together for leisure, play, and dance, the culture arm of capitalism is enacting a form of punishment by making the potential for these connections can occur increasingly more difficult in that it is not only not economically viable, but also can take an intense mental and emotional toll on musicians, as seems evident by Zauner’s comments.
One of the most telling moments of the interview is when Zauner mentions how being a musician isn’t as fun as it used to be:
Zauner: I would like to have fun again. It used to be so fun for me.
Interviewer: And it isn’t at all anymore?
Zauner: I mean, even when it is difficult, there are times when the adrenaline kicks in and it’s fun. It’s just all of the moments leading up to it. It’s just physically demanding and difficult, but I think that I’ve learned about some boundaries that will make it easier for me to be able to meet those demands. I don’t think I knew what those were beforehand, because when I was younger, I was just able to do it. I also went through some growing pains on this last record around becoming a bigger band: not being able to just be a young person drinking and sounding like shit and instead realizing that there’s a certain responsibility that comes with playing larger rooms and charging higher ticket prices. You have to approach it with a certain professionalism.
The music industry has tried as hard as possible to turn the play associated with music into work. But in the industry’s inability to make music, as an object, completely alienated from the musician, who, even with poor compensation, are the figures present in the music*, the intrinsic reward remains for music-makers. Because the intrinsic motivation and identity affirmation of music are so present for many artists, they often persist without extrinsic rewards. This can be true for the career musician who finds increasingly more barriers and obstacles to maintaining a living, but adapts and does what they can within their limitations. This is also for the many musicians for whom music is a hobby and who don’t expect, or have no plans of maximizing, an income or gaining a large audience. That music continues to be created, performed, and released, particularly by those likely aware that they don’t stand to gain anything financially, whether it is the many musicians with an audience not large enough to generate a substantial amount of royalties or sales revenue, or people intentionally releasing music for free, such as hip hop artists releasing mixtapes as free downloads on online platforms like Datpiff in the pre-streaming late 00s – early 2010s, these artists may view their music or at least certain releases not as commodities to sell, but something to share with any existing or potential audience that exists. In a way similar to playing music for/with family and friends, or like compiling a playlist or mix CD for a friend, perhaps music at its core is more appropriately thought of as a gift. Tsing notes how the “gift-versus-commodity distinction can stand in for the absence or presence of alienation, the quality necessary to turn things into capitalist assets” (5). Black notes how
“playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that’s why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is)” (6).
Unfortunately for those like Zauner, there needs to be results that stem from the experience. The results are of economic necessity for herself, the band, and the live music industrial complex. If “making it” as an indie musician is not fun and still not without the freedom from financial precarity – then what is the end game here? It’s really just an indictment of how busted the music industry continues to be. Clearly there needs to be more support for the arts, but support for arts also has to move away from grant based programs. What is really needed is affordable public housing, rent controls, universal health care, strong unions and collective bargaining across all sectors, and perhaps even the socialization of arts venues and ticket vendors.
Without the social safety net, and therefore with increased necessity to make greater hours of artistic work profitable to cover the cost of living if one isn’t bourgeois, those who pursue art are punished by market capitalism for attempting to escape, circumvent, transcend the alienating conditions of labour under capitalism. This punishment takes the form of the poverty, financial precarity, and mental stress felt by those in the gig economy. When considering that the gig economy does not just consist of performing artists, as other forms of contracted/precarious employment that are a central feature of neoliberal capitalism, it’s apparent that the financial difficulties for independent musicians are just part of a much larger system of exploitation.
In sum, I don’t think it’s right to say that Zauner’s success is what is destroying her. Capitalism destroys all workers to varying degrees in varying ways. Sure, she may be winning the game more so than most other musicians, but it’s high time that we accelerate the struggle towards socialism if we really want to support indie musicians and everyone in general.
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*AI’s role in allowing capitalism to further appropriate the labour and circumvent the compensation necessitated by representation in music is a whole other can of worms. AI’s biggest proponents and users are those with the most contempt for artistic workers and workers in general. I recommend reading Gareth Watkins’ article “AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism” for a deeper dive on this front.
Works Cited
(1) – Marx, K. (1977). Alienated labour. In McLellan, D. (Ed.). Karl Marx: selected writings. Oxford University Press. (p. 78)
(2) – Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press. (p. 151)
(3) – Neff, G., Wissinger, E., & Zukin, S. (2005). Entrepreneurial labor among cultural producers: “Cool” jobs in “hot” industries. Social semiotics, 15(3), 307-334. (p. 319)
(4) – cited in Zhen, Y. (2022). Career challenges facing musicians in the United States. Journal of Cultural Economics, 46(3), 519-540. (p. 527)
(5) – Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press. (p. 123)
(6) – Black, B. (1991). The abolition of work. Retrieved from:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work (p. 3)