After brushing up on my My Bloody Valentine trivia last month and watching Becoming Led Zeppelin and Midas Man, I had an epiphany—if you want good art, you have to pay for it. Not you, the consumer (although, ideally, you're paying for it in a way that's not Spotify). The people with money need to pay for it—the Patron Class.
For a little context on the title, we gotta go back a few hundred years—the Renaissance. Often lauded as the explosion of art and culture that lifted Europe out of the dark ages and started the domino fall toward modernity. Usually, historians and annoying people focus on the art itself and spiral into boring and inaccurate "great men of history" discussions about the quality of the art and skill of the artist. While—yes—there were definitive technical improvements over the low bar set by medieval art (personally, I love the giant killer snails and weird-looking horses, but yes, fine, technically not super accurate to real life), the Renaissance as a movement is almost entirely the result of rich assholes shoveling metric fuck-tons of money into projects to diss their economic and political rivals.
Again, this isn't to say these works of art (and architecture, poetry, etc.) aren't jaw-dropping. That's not what I'm arguing. What I'm arguing is how this shit came into being on such a grand scale. Money. Michaelangelo, Leonardo, and the other Ninja Turtles are not precious little geniuses who garnered a grassroots following that they monetized through shrewd business savvy and merchandise sales into a living. No, they were handed a check for a bazillion old-timey dollars from Frederico Ferdifucktard to build a statue that insinuates that their business rival, Giovanni de Ballsack, is a sodomite. Please don't look any of these names up and @ me. I did no research for this piece and am behind the submission deadline. This is based on vibes and fuzzy memories from college alone.
What I’m also arguing is that the concept of grand, trendsetting art in general, as the result of some isolated inspiration from some genius, is also complete bullshit. There are little geniuses everywhere making great art, but if there's no one to financially support or promote them, they'll often die in obscurity or, worse, waste away in some farm, battlefield, factory, or office building.
I'm mainly arguing that any of our favorite musicians are even on our record shelf because some patron (for whatever reason) believed in them and footed the bill until the money started rolling in.
Now, the counterargument to this is that it leads to predatory relationships between artists and management. The ones everyone knows about are Elvis and Colonel Tom. David Bowie was famously trapped in a very lopsided contract with Tony Defries. Fair. If you let someone pay your way early on, you'll owe them later. But again, so what? We don’t know who Elvis is without Colonel Tom. I am an unabashed David Bowie fan and will talk at ends about how he is unique and essential as an artist, but I seriously doubt that I'd have any idea who he was if Tony Defries didn’t invest in the product early on (the product being Bowie himself).
Some folks were luckier. Peter Grant, awful human that he was, made sure Led Zeppelin kept all the wealth their labor created. The Beatles do not exist without Brian Epstein. These would still be fantastic groups with great songs and great performances, but you’d only know about either of them if you happened to catch a show at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. I remember reading about how even before the Beatles met Epstein, they were getting £100 a week in Hamburg, worth nearly 3-fucking-grand today. Where are the clubs paying artists 3k a week for residencies now? That's where you'll find the next Beatles.
One of my favorite anecdotes about some true Renaissance patronage is David Gilmour's introduction to Pink Floyd in 1967. Apparently, the band's manager set David up in a spare room at his own fucking house and gave him a salary of £30 a week. Adjusted for inflation, that's £700 a week today. That's more than I make. Probably more than you make, too. Imagine all the hits you could write if you were given a place to live and a monthly salary of nearly $3K.
I've told the Lady Gaga story in these pages several times. Free rent in Manhattan for a year while hustling in the music business. My Bloody Valentine is just bleeding Creation Records dry to pay rent. Billie Eilish definitely owns a house or two now, but when she first broke in 2019, she was still living rent-free with her parents. She was also 17, which is a normal age to be doing that, but still.
"Real" punk rockers like to complain about Sex Pistols being a boy band, but without Malcolm McLaren's patronage, the Sex Pistols don't exist, and thus, the shitty bands said "real" punk rockers pretend to like, don't exist either. Also, a fun fact: while McLaren definitely gets credit for creating and branding the band, Nora Forster footed the bill. If you don't know who she is, look her up...a fascinating figure in the London rock scene from the ‘60s onward. She started dating Johnny Rotten early in the band’s career and financed the whole thing. That's right, Sex Pistols stayed afloat because of a Sugar Mama...and McLaren's clothing shop called "Sex." Hot.
The Velvet Underground’s game-changing 1967 album (the one with the banana) is the experimental masterpiece that it is because Andy Warhol basically gave the band a blank check on condition that they let Nico join the band. You don’t take those stylistic chances when you’re scraping together tips you saved for studio time and hope to get a return on investments with a hit song.
Greatness is not data-driven, it is vibe-driven. Get at it, rich people. In the worst-case scenario, you threw away a bunch of money on a failed pet project. But what else are you doing with your money? Investing in the stock market? Boring.
