Lately, the tune brings in about $1,200 monthly, sufficient to pay his lease, Casey instructed me, with what gave the impression of 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 in regards to the Bathroom Bowl Cleaners, and he mentioned he’d heard just a few of their songs. “I’m not making this up,” he mentioned. “There’s this different man, I don’t know for those who’ve heard of him, the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee. His thought was to customise each poop tune. So there’s a Steven Poop tune, a Bob Poop tune, a Mary Poop tune. He’s acquired a whole bunch!”
I instructed him that each bands had been the truth is the identical particular person.
“Effectively, 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 may inform he is aware of how one can write songs, however I feel he’s simply been going for quantity.”
In reality, I knew in regards to 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 all the time 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 might simply hear the mushy 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 during which Farley imagines the 2 sides of his persona arguing: one, the intense, heartfelt artist, the opposite a greasy report govt 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 govt belongs to a misplaced world — one during which drastically fewer folks had an opportunity to supply artwork and the work was usually corrupted by company gatekeepers, however during which there was additionally a clearly marked highway 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 immediately 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.
