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These days, the music brings in about $1,200 per thirty days, sufficient to pay his lease, Casey advised me, with what gave the impression of a Lebowskian shrug. “I’ve different songs that I wish to put up,” he mentioned. “But I sort of don’t wish to promote out.”
I requested if he knew concerning the Toilet Bowl Cleaners, and he mentioned he’d heard a couple of of their songs. “I’m not making this up,” he mentioned. “There’s this different man, I don’t know when you’ve heard of him, the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee. His concept was to customise each poop music. So there’s a Steven Poop music, a Bob Poop music, a Mary Poop music. He’s obtained a whole bunch!”
I advised him that each bands had been actually the identical particular person.
“Well, OK,” he mentioned, as if realizing the total extent of what he was up towards. “I like mine higher, however I’m biased,” he mentioned, lastly. “You can inform he is aware of easy methods to write songs, however I believe he’s simply been going for quantity.”
In reality, 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 all the time new names.
“This could be sort of painful,” he warned, switching on his keyboard and firing up his laptop computer. He donned headphones, consulted an inventory of names and started working. In 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 “Local 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 character arguing: one, the intense, heartfelt artist, the opposite a greasy document govt demanding ever extra poop songs. Of course, the scene can solely be a fantasy, and might solely have Farley taking part in each characters, as a result of the greasy document 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 street to an viewers and a residing. Farley represents each the very best and worst of the incentives and alternatives which have taken this world’s place. Certainly, there are few creators working at this time 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.
