One of my favourite ongoing set of releases is the ”PRIVATE” series put out on the Raw Russian label. It’s a limited 7” series of outsider house tracks made by anonymous producers, and each release has been fantastic so far. The mysterious hidden identities of the artists make the records even more intriguing.
The choice to remain anonymous as a performer has always be an interesting one, and over and over again, music fans are transfixed by artists who stay in the shadows. The masked musicians. The artists with no or little press photos to speak of. The artists who disappear into the ether for years, only to emerge when cryptically announcing an upcoming release. Would the fascination with Burial or Boards of Canada be the same if they had been touring constantly or were now doing regular live-streams on Instagram? Perhaps not.
But in many cases, to be willingly unknown and reclusive is antithetical to trying to make it as a musician these days. Mystery is eyecatching, but high profile visibility will likely sell better.
Nowadays, there is a constant pressure for musicians to be public-facing with their work. Beyond the music creation, there is the promo gauntlet: marketing, interviews, having a regular social media presence. Engagement is everything, and you can sense an anxiety within it. The music industry eats up and spits out artists with accelerating speed. If you drift out of the light too long, you might be forgotten forever, or at least fall slightly out of vogue, if you ever were in it.
With the constant hustle and appearances, it is as if making a career out being a musician involves two job. One as the music maker and one as the performer playing the role of “the musician”: a face providing open access to all who might become invested in your story. Unless you are part of a select few, the return on time spent in the effort to be seen and heard is hard to come by. To get an audience to pay attention to you is one thing, but to get paid appropriately for your labour is even more of a pipe dream in the corporate streaming age.
If artists make a fuss about the lack of fair compensation, capitalists tell them to “work harder” and ignorant/unsympathetic jackasses tell them to “quit whining and get a real job.” Between the tour grind and navigating the interlaced tentacles of music capitalism, social media, and the rapidly evolving and often exploitative tech landscape, trying to be a full-time indie musician sounds fucking exhausting, man. It seems like much harder work than some “real jobs”, like entering numbers into a spreadsheet that no one’s ever going to read or standing with a group of people on a construction site as you take turns watching one person do something with a shovel or screwdriver.
I can’t blame artists for not wanting a “real job”, because most “real jobs” are incredibly undesirable. If you’re lucky enough to not be in the precarious gig economy, your stable full-time job likely involves you getting paid the lowest possible wage for something that you would rather not do for 40 hours every single week. Let’s not forget that many jobs exist purely for a capitalist to profit off of worker exploitation, rather than as a part of a collective effort to meet the pressing needs of our communities.
In a system where work isn’t meaningful or fulfilling, being a musician offers one of the few opportunities for a hobby, outlet, or a profession if you’re lucky, in which you are not alienated from what you do. Even that seems to be slipping further and further into precariousness as music capitalism runs roughshod over the working class artistry it would be nothing without.
The anonymous or spotlight-adverse artist, perhaps recognizes this, and chooses to opt out of playing the game that capital needs them to play. By not showing their face, not putting their music on streaming, or never touring, this artist is at odds with the always-hustling entrepreneurial mindset that neoliberalism wants to make mandatory for everyone.
The mindset is one that threatens that those who resist that they will be doomed to obscurity, poverty, and undesirability for forever. Staying anonymous may seem on the surface like a nihilistic “why even bother” response, but by rejecting customary expectations for musicians in the industry, the reclusive artist keeps capital from consuming the narratives it needs to continue sustaining itself.
One of the year’s breakout stars in indie rock is Parannoul, an anonymous musician based in South Korea. They uploaded their To See the Next Part of the Dream album to Bandcamp, but not to streaming, for a pay-what-you-want-no-minimum price. They have no social media accounts, but the album blew on RateYourMusic, with hype spilling over to the Indieheads and emo subreddits before publications like Stereogum and Pitchfork eventually covered the album.
The album is an awe-inspiring, raw, and emotionally cathartic collision of emo vulnerability and shoegaze noisiness, and it’s no surprise that that music this good would be able to find an audience without entering the streaming and self-promo economy. It will be interesting what Parannoul does next, but so far they have side-stepped, by intention or perhaps without, the grind that many other indie artists continue to go through.
I’d like to believe that Parannoul’s success is upsetting to music capitalism. Daniel Ek and his investors probably don’t have a clue that Parannoul exists (if you’re the type of dude to attempt to prove your music fandom by wearing a shirt with a guitar on it, your taste is probably shit and you aren’t in the know about what the underground is obsessing over) but I’d like to pretend that capitalists like Ek are pissed that they can’t exploit the labour of a musician with a now sizeable audience.
When you’re so out of touch with the arts scenes you’re appropriating that you somehow manage to look like more of a poseur than you would if you bought an Unknown Pleasures t-shirt at Urban Outfitters because it looked cool.
The success of artists like Parannoul works to delegitimize the myth that you MUST be on streaming to be relevant. I don’t know if it was an intentional decision to say “fuck you” to the bourgeoisie, but the dedicated following that the musician now has further proves what we knew along: musicians and fans don’t need money-hungry middlemen to build strong and supportive communities, whether online or offline.
While Parannoul’s success is only one case, and there are plenty of low profile musicians that remain obscure, equally invisible are many other artists who took all the steps to market themselves on all possible platforms. “Best” practices in the business be damned, because in the end, it is the music that shines through, and word of mouth that still is the greatest courier of fandom.
Not only does the anonymous artist demonstrate the ability to quit the game or never play it altogether, they provide a glimpse into a possible future in which all musicians could find supportive communities while rejecting music capitalism all together.