Friday, October 26, 2012
Music Feeling Lots of Feelings: A CMJ Postmortem with Carson Cox of Merchandise
Posted by Lauren Beck on Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 12:45 PM
Page 2 of 5
Carson Cox: To me it’s just another tool. I mean, I don’t think the attention is bad. I do think a lot of it is shortsighted. A lot of it is overly simplified. Especially when you talk about Brooklyn. You can live there and be a totally self-sufficient band. Where we’re from, you can’t really do that. The kind of infrastructure that you can live off of in Tampa, Florida is if you played Jimmy Buffett covers at a bar. You can’t live off of post-punk.
I’m almost a little more excited for things to calm down. We’re basically going to be inactive for a couple of months. We’re working on a music video, and we’re not going to be touring. I’m interested to see how things go. We have a fanbase that is pretty diehard. Those are the people that I want to waste most my time for as opposed to people who [treat the record] like it’s a new toy that will throw it away. [laughs] There are people that appreciate what we do whether we’re hot or not, so I feel like the attention may complicate it slightly, but, I mean, we’re still the master of our own destiny when it comes to what we do. Intelligent music listeners will always be with us if they choose to be, but as far as us catering towards this, like, finicky, picky crowd—this temporary crowd who just wants to listen to whatever’s new and aren’t really interested in the expression behind it—we’re not into that. I feel like we’re still in the same place [even if] things are different. I can’t pretend they’re not.
I feel like our focus is more on things outside of the music. I was an actor before I became a musician. Dave [guitarist] is a writer. I work on all our visual stuff. Our videos are really important to us; our artifacts are very important. I’m kinda more leaning towards art or visual art or fashion or something other than the music industry because I don’t feel like it’s that cool to be part of the music industry and be a full-time band when you’re given access to a lot of different things. [I] don’t just want to focus on, you know, what’s the biggest show we can play? What’s the most money we can get for our record? For me, there’s a whole lot more to expression than that. I don’t like the way a lot of bands operate or maintain themselves. It just annoys me. It just seems like a one-trick pony if you’re just a band. You could do a lot, especially in the position that we’re in right now where a bunch of people would like to be involved in what we’re doing. We will do a lot if we can.
The L: Have people been approaching you with ideas for collaborative projects?
The next LP is a sort of collaboration. We’re hoping it will be done in February. We have Shawn Reed from Night-People—it’s coming out on Night-People—doing all the artwork. We give him the music, and he brings the visual and his aesthetic to it. We’re working on a few more video collaborations and that sort of thing; a few more things in print that will probably be done by the time we hit the road. For the next formal LP, we’ll do everything, but everything up until then will be collaboration-based and fun.
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