Last week when I logged onto Facebook to catch up on political Willy Wonka pictures and my friends’ general bellyaching about the weather, the words “musical prodigy” and “Kickstarter” jumped out at me. Being a sucker for a good oxymoron and already having mixed feelings about Kickstarter, the website that many artists, but mainly sad-ass, aging musicians, have increasingly used to raise funds from fans for creative projects, I investigated further.
This time, the sad-ass, aging musician is some guy called Reggie and the Full Effect. I had never listened to the band growing up, but I remembered seeing the band’s T-shirts on girls who looked like they could yank their pensive Winona Ryder expressions off of their translucent faces with one tug of their lip ring. After I factored in that the band (which is a solo project of emo auteur and former Get Up Kid James Dewees) had been around 15 years ago and now had a Kickstarter campaign going, it was pretty easy to deduce that Reggie was dipping into the reserves of his fan base to resurrect his career. No big deal.
Then I read the pitch. After finding himself living in Hollywood as a down on his luck musician well into his 30s, Reggie started writing new songs about how he just couldn’t relate to the kids these days and before he knew it, he had a new record. However, with no real explanation or record label given, it was going to cost $50,000 to record, and he was asking for his fans to foot the bill. Fifty-thousand fucking dollars. Ten years ago, Reggie recorded an LP for $1300 called Under the Tray, which actually charted well on Billboard. The album was released by Interscope backed Vagrant Records, an indie label launched mainly off of the success of the Get Up Kids that went on to release many other successful food court emo records in the early aughts. Apparently now aware that kids eventually grow up and out of the mall (Unless they land a plum job at Hot Topic) and after alluding to a possibly unpleasant break-up from Vagrant in an interview last year, here was some guy a decade later now asking his fans for the equivalent of a teachers salary.
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