These days, the music brings in about $1,200 per thirty days, sufficient to pay his hire, Casey advised 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 a few in 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 advised him that each bands have been if truth be told the similar particular person.
“Well, OK,” he stated, as though understanding the total extent of what he used to be up towards. “I like mine better, but I’m biased,” he stated, after all. “You can tell he knows how to write songs, but I think he’s just been going for volume.”
In truth, I knew concerning the suite of songs that mix Farley’s two maximum a hit genres — names and poop — as a result of he used to be operating on a new set of them after I visited him. He estimated that he had already finished about 3,000, however there have been all the time new names.
“This can be kind of painful,” he warned, switching on his keyboard and firing up his computer. He donned headphones, consulted a listing of names and started working. In the silence of the room, I may simply pay attention the comfortable 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 may be a myth series wherein Farley imagines the 2 facets of his character arguing: one, the intense, heartfelt artist, the opposite a greasy document government challenging ever extra poop songs. Of path, the scene can most effective be a myth, and will most effective have Farley enjoying each characters, since the greasy document government belongs to a misplaced global — one wherein tremendously fewer folks had a probability to provide artwork and the paintings used to be ceaselessly corrupted via company gatekeepers, however wherein there used to be additionally a obviously marked highway to an target audience and a dwelling. Farley represents each the most efficient and worst of the incentives and alternatives that experience taken this global’s position. Certainly, there are few creators operating these days in any medium who would now not acknowledge the nervousness he embodies: that their paintings now lives or dies via 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 paintings — and via extension they — will merely disappear. Which is to mention that whilst the enjoy of observing Farley paintings used to be now not unpainful, as promised, neither used to be it completely unfamiliar.