Freeloading by Chris Ruen

Author:Chris Ruen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC052000, LAW050000, BUS000000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2013-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Somebody Fed Jesus

As the major label system appeared to be unraveling through the 2000s, and self-satisfied blog commenters counted down the days until the antiquated industry’s final collapse, one phenomenon seemed awfully out of place. Despite all the bad vibes and fatalism associated with the “old” music industry, indie artists continued signing record deals with major labels. Artists like Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, Modest Mouse, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Iron & Wine, and TV On The Radio took their turn in pivoting away from independent labels and digital DIY opportunity, toward the traditional, corporate, major label universe that, in many people’s minds, the Internet was supposedly doing away with. What was happening? What calculus was at play when bands that one wouldn’t expect to embrace major label culture did just that?

I was admittedly a bit star struck when Kyp Malone walked into the Greenpoint Coffee House during one of my first shifts behind the bar. Kyp played guitar and sang in the Brooklyn-based TV On The Radio, a band that dominated the indie realm through the mid-2000s after critics fell head-over-heels for their debut Young Liars EP, released on Touch and Go records in 2003. After their first full-length album, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, was released in 2004, the band switched labels, from the beacons of independence at Touch and Go to Interscope Records, a major label home for artists such as Nine Inch Nails, Eminem, and Lady Gaga. The band’s first major label release, Return to Cookie Mountain, was an artistic triumph, featuring guest vocals from David Bowie and earning them a 2006 Album of the Year designation from SPIN Magazine. Their acclaim snowballed with the release of Dear Science in 2008. That album garnered nearly unanimous approval as being the best album of the year from Rolling Stone, SPIN Magazine, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, and MTV, among many others. By the 2011 release of their fifth studio album, Nine Types of Light, they had performed on The Tonight Show, The Late Show With David Letterman, Later With Jools Holland, The Colbert Report, and Saturday Night Live.

TV On The Radio’s music was alternately angry and amorous; squalling and soulful; pretty and punk; atonal and accessible. They defined what it meant to be a progressive, pioneering, post-millennial rock band. Anyone who paid attention to contemporary music culture during this period saw the images of TV On The Radio via countless blog posts and magazine features. Kyp’s image, in particular, became symbolic of Brooklyn’s music scene. As a black musician, he stood out amongst his mostly white indie peers and fans, indie predominantly being the province of white suburbia’s anxious children. Kyp cut a powerful, lion-like visage thanks to an incredibly thick beard and puffed-out afro, as if the hair was gobbling up his face from the perimeter on in. Kyp looked unique—certifiable catnip for image obsessed magazine and website editors.

Though I’d been somewhat brainwashed by the reproduction of Kyp’s image to see him as more than a regular person, over time I stopped seeing him as a walking magazine cover or rock star.

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