For Immediate Release: This Band Sucks

This cat is of sick of writing press releases.

PR people must be the unhappiest people in the entire world. They might not be aware of their misery – perhaps it lies under their skin, bubbling like a hepatitis-infected creek waiting to overflow onto the banks of the psyche, burning the mind and sense of self-worth to a crisp once the person realizes that they have spent their entire life promoting other people’s shit. For all of the crap that your grandpa gives bands today for not being creative, even the Nickelbacks and Blue Octobers of the music world are making an attempt to be creative. Think of what it must be like to be Nickelback’s publicist, on the other hand. Is there any doubt that guy chows through painkillers like 50 Cent drops bad metaphors (or this writer, for example!!!)?

In my hands I have a list of some recent PR statments I’ve gotten through my contacts in the journalism world (or, what I’ve found by rooting through the untouched arts & entertainment comp box at my college newspaper). I’ve used them to put together a list of How-Tos for the PR world, so that you can understand what makes a good and bad press release. Of course, they are all bad. But some are less bad than others. Think, perhaps, of the guy who was able to spin Radiohead’s pay-your-own-price model for In Rainbows – taking more profit than they actually would releasing their CD through a major label – as a purely benevolent decision for the fans. He is the Stephen Baldwin to the Nickelback publicist’s Daniel Baldwin.

How to Scrape the Festering Critical Barrel

So Pitchfork and Stereogum didn’t review your record, Rolling Stone returned the unopened press copy, and as of recent you were still storing unsold CD-Rs in your mom’s station wagon. The lack of critical attention might be embarassing, but screw it, you need to find someone who has no choice but to review your record – someone who will listen to anything, who is hungry for free promo CDs, someone who wants to break a scoop. What you need is an independent blog (or, your best friend)! Sending your record to an amateur critic guarantees a generic yet positive review.

Check out this gem of a review of Phoenix on the Fault Line’s new CD from “Evil Needles” – a website I couldn’t even find online: “It might be hard to wrap your ears around an eight-piece indie band at first, but rather than complain you should look at it as something fresh and new.” Wow! Anything more than outside of a guitar-bass-drums-vox-maybe keys??? combo blows my mind! Commence endless farting. “Built on an alternative rock foundation with stout guitars and pronounced vocals,” snoooooore. This follows the press release’s own bewildering line of endorsement: “We have a unique version of horn infused rock.” Oh, you mean ska?

All unsigned bands please send your demos to jeremypaulgordon@gmail.com because I will review them ASAP.

How to Call More Attention to Yourself

Name your band after yourself. Nothing makes me more likely to pull a CD off the pile if I see a cool name on top of it. “The Jimi Hendrix Experience? John Coltrane? Cool!” Pluck. You need to make your name is cool, though. “Dave Matthews Band? Jack Johnson? What the hell is this?” I can’t think of a single time that this has proven me wrong, even though I’m not thinking very hard. Don’t remind me of Art Garfunkel (the former) and Paul Simon (the latter). Shhh.

The press release for the Benjy Davis Project splatters that name all over the page. Okay, so that’s to be expected – but at the top of this is a giant fifth page line that just reads BENJY DAVIS PROJECT. Underneath, a credits list: “Benjy Davis – lead vocals, acoustic and electric guitar.” Color me surprised! A little known fact is that Benjy Davis is really just a cover for the Project’s Wurlitzer player, Michael Galasso. Davis just has the pretty face – it’s the Wurtlizer player who’s behind everything. A further scanning of the press release shows that they just signed to the same label that used to carry Dave Matthews Band. Following in big footsteps, man.

How to Burn Down A Rain Forest and Look Good While Doing It

British rockers Razorlight have a press release with some pretty standard info: They’re starting this tour on April X, playing Letterman on April Y, and releasing their new record on April Z. That’s cool. It’s basically just a one and a half page primer of the band’s most recent history and a few accomplishments, such as chart success and radio play. There aren’t even any bad critical appraisals.

These two pages are then followed by eight pages of photos. They’re low resolution, black and white, and look like they were scanned in by the intern. This makes this otherwise inoffensive two-page press release into a ten-page monster of poorly focused fashion and egregious toner wasting. You can’t even tell how cute the guys in the band are with such crappy photos!! All you have is the vague idea that they might be cool-looking – if you could actually see their faces, not a washed-out outline – and the definite knowledge that a tree or two was razed just to let these wasteful photos sit on paper. When is Green Peace going to protest this kind of shit?

How to Shrewdly Re-Invent The Product For Your Audience

A few weeks ago, Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen dropped out of the skies and into our toilets. I wrote some words on the need for more blue dicks and why the adaptation was doomed to fail – you may remember. It was a cinematic event, or more likely, a semi-fiasco – it got tepid reviews from critics and was a box office disappointment, failing recoup a third of its production budget. There isn’t really a market for three-hour R-rated sex comedies. The movie was notable for one thing: The music, specifically when Nite-Owl fucks his girlfriend to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the music crescendoing on each of Patrick Wilson’s awkward grunts, and when Jimi Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower” lends itself to a totally b*tchin’ transition to the Owlmobile flying through Antartica.

If you’re the PR writer for the Watchmen OST – the orchestral pieces scored by Tyler Bates featuring track titles like “I’ll Tell You About Rorschach” and “My Daddy is a Rapist” – the music is the most important thing. The second line from the press release: “Highly Anticipated Mystery Adventure Film Watchmen Features New Music From My Chemical Romance.” That is brilliant, I think. Inevitably everyone will realize that the movie is just kind of a crappy version of the comic book (if they’re a dork) or a boring, cheesy action movie (if they don’t kind of like anime). But the MCR cover of “Desolation Row”? In 20 years, I would totally watch the movie for that. “A semi-literal translation of a comic book? No thanks? Wait, a pop-punk version of a Bob Dylan song? Fuck yes!”

Hilariously, the press release seems to be ignoring the almost one-for-one correlation of music critics and comic book fans. They thought it was a better shot to try to grab interest with the MCR reference. Psh, don’t think know this is a college campus? Emo is for art school.

How to Ensure Your Record Gets Reviewed

A lot of reviews I read draw upon an almost didactic knowledge of a band’s past – “From their lo-fi beginnings on Alt-Dog Records, the band’s current propulsive sound has lost the dramatic flair that former organist Johnny Creamdick brought until he was dismissed for stealing royalties in 2003.” Huh? The reality is that most reviewers, unless they are a big fan of the band they are writing about, either don’t know or don’t care about a band’s history. Most of their knowledge comes from the press release, which allows them to make up insight.

The PR for PJ Harvey and John Parish’s new collab, A Woman A Man Walked By, reads like a Tiger Beat style manifesto on the album’s immediate history. There’s a fanatic account of the album’s conception, where it was recorded, Harvey and Parish’s individual and collaborative history, facts about the supporting musicians, what Harvey and Parish think about the songs, and what the music actually means. I can’t believe record reviewers get paid for this stuff – I could basically function a 2,000 word review filled with mostly stock quotes from this press release. If I’m lazy and only in it for the cash, I do! Don’t give me insight, press release people. That would make me informed about everything, which would remove the interpretation from my judgment. Let me try to earn my money, man.

How to Let Your Reputation Precede You

I’ve been bumping the deluxe edition of Pearl Jam’s Ten all week along – alright, really just listening to the song that bears my name – and the austerity of the press release really strikes me. There’s three things you get from the press release: What’s on the deluxe edition, how the deluxe edition was created, and that Pearl Jam sold a fucking ton of records. This song is on here? And it was taking from these long lost tapes? And this record sold ten million copies? Well, that’s all I need. In my CD player it goes! The 8×11 photo of Eddie Vedder’s snarling devil face also helps.