To Touch the Stars: a 10 year retrospective on taking filk mainstream

[egoldberg]

This is the full copy of a retrospective on To Touch the Stars: A Musical Celebration of Space Exploration, which will be excerpted in Gary McGath's upcoming ebook on filk history.In 1997, I formed Prometheus Music. My goal was to take filk to a professional level, at a time in which filk albums were rarely as professionally produced as today. I

Comments

[egoldberg]

Hey Gary - love ya - but I think your comment perfectly captures a filk sensibility and the blind spot filkers have, that we had to learn about firsthand.

You can call professional producers who've learned how to make really polished products that sell by the hundreds of thousands "idiots" or "phonies" -- I would say these are people who have learned a complex skill set to an extent no filker ever has, and have a valid and interesting point of view, of which I got page after page during this project.

Trying to make an album of space exploration songs for a mainstream customer base was never a mistake in my mind. How else would you use music to inspire people about space exploration, other than by producing music that those people actually want to listen to?

The only mistake was the belief we could do it using filk songs, rather than better understanding and appreciating the differences and going with songs that actually would resonate with the larger space-interested audience (and probably a more sonically complex and interesting production than any of us had the skill set to take on at that time). And I'm not sure that we were really interested in taking on that album, either.

One can slam the preferences of the vast, vast majority of people to pay to consume music -- but I still find it more interesting to learn how to accommodate them and make the products they care about.

[hitchhiker]

sadly, i agree that the professionally-recording filk community on the whole is lacking that critical evolutionary pressure to produce the last bit of polish needed to go larger-scale. the "put together back to back" comment was particularly telling; i cannot think of a single filk album i actually like to listen through end to end any more. this includes cds like "cold iron" and "a dancing world" that i would at one point not just listen through, but have on repeat; nowadays i prefer to pick out and listen to individual songs as the mood takes me, and i find that if i try to listen to the entire album as a whole it begins to subtly grate on me.

[madfilkentist]

If we're talking about an album to promote space exploration, then everything falls into place much better; but then we're talking about marketing, with music being just a means. A superbly written song might well be "yowser-awful" for that purpose, and mindless pop might be exactly what's needed.

I simply don't care about the musical preferences of the vast, vast majority. But if they use name-calling or sales figures to claim the superiority of their music, I'll mock them.