An article posted as part of the Interveiw Issue of buzz Magazine last Friday sent ripples through the local music community over the weekend. The initial article was an email interview with Brian Olek, a local electronic musician who initially chose to remain anonymous but later revealed his identity in a second interview. You can read the initial interview here and the follow-up, which was done at Mike N Molly’s following the 92s’ show and incorporating the voices of local booker Isaac Arms and others here.
Why were these interviews so controversial? Well, Olek said things like…
“The Internet gives bands this huge advantage to share their music for free on their own, but most of them focus on getting their salad tossed by some immediate peers or promoters, or unreasonably local terms of success. It should be a crime to allow many of these bands continue to live under a falsely constructed sense of promise, let alone congratulate or trick them into getting vinyl pressed or touring down to SXSW, when the reality is that they aren’t very good and basically nobody but their friends and family wants to see them. Some of the most successful artists of all time have been the result of harsh criticisms, and it’s sad to see groups that legitimately don’t know that they’re bad. Playing bad shows is one thing, but when bands that aren’t very good try to get me to buy their bad music through a bunk label, I wince.”
Check out the interviews and formulate your own opinon, but as the Music Editor here at SP I feel obligated to give you mine: This interview should never have been posted. In what I’m assuming buzz thought would be a gutsy journalistic move, they’ve given a voice to a cave troll-personality who never should have been able to speak on the subject. While Olek may be a local musician in the respect that he lives in Urbana and makes music, he has no business saying things like this about local music as an outsider of any scene here, making insiders look like the ignorant ones. Making and criticizing local music here and I’m sure in other smaller communities is a highly nuanced task, and to simpify it to the level he has is not a purpouseful critique. C’mon, buzz, the line between criticism and bullying isn’t very fine.