These days, the track brings in about $1,200 monthly, sufficient to pay his lease, Casey instructed me, with what appeared like a Lebowskian shrug. “I have other songs that I want to put up,” he stated. “But I kind of don’t want to sell out.”
I requested if he knew concerning the Toilet Bowl Cleaners, and he stated he’d heard just a few of their songs. “I’m not making this up,” he stated. “There’s this other guy, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee. His idea was to customize every poop song. So there’s a Steven Poop song, a Bob Poop song, a Mary Poop song. He’s got hundreds!”
I instructed him that each bands have been in truth the identical individual.
“Well, OK,” he stated, as if realizing the total extent of what he was up towards. “I like mine better, but I’m biased,” he stated, lastly. “You can tell he knows how to write songs, but I think he’s just been going for volume.”
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 at all times new names.
“This can be kind 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. In the silence of the room, I may simply hear the smooth 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 persona arguing: one, the intense, heartfelt artist, the opposite a greasy file government demanding ever extra poop songs. Of course, the scene can solely be a fantasy, and may solely have Farley enjoying each characters, as a result of the greasy file government belongs to a misplaced world — one during which drastically fewer individuals 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 dwelling. Farley represents each the perfect and worst of the incentives and alternatives which have taken this world’s place. Certainly, there are few creators working at present 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.