We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Buck Down. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Buck below.
Buck, appreciate you joining us today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?
Generally speaking, yes. Possibly even ecstatic.
I think everyone’s goal is not to spend their days somewhere where they’d rather not be with people they wouldn’t necessarily choose to spend them with. That’s probably the benchmark if you want to know if you are in the right job or not. Life goes by a little faster every year, and no one is getting any of this time back. The closest thing any of us can come to immortality is just being content at the moment we are in – which is neigh impossible if you spend a third of your day wishing your hours away until it’s time to clock out.
Having said that – there are some downsides to commodifying something you love, and it has taken time to draw a set of boundaries to balance my love of what I do vs. the fact that it’s become something I HAVE to do.
I suppose the only jealousy I’ve ever had of wage / hourly workers is that there is a clear delineation between when work starts and ends. Being a professional artist means you are basically on call 24/7, and it can get very easy to get trapped at work, sometimes for days, if not weeks on end. A great skill to learn is to realize when you are in a peak performance space and when you aren’t. Not all ideals are equal, and when you don’t have good ones – maybe that’s the time to go out and mow the grass or take some time away from the project for a while.
Rested minds are sharp minds. Make hay while the sun shines.
Buck, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
The easiest way to learn my backstory is probably on the bio page of my website (https://www.buckdown.net/biography), but suffice it to say I’ve been in the professional arts world now for about 35 years, functioning as either a writer, recording artist, or graphic designer=, sometimes all three at once. It takes an astonishing amount of work to keep yourself out of a real job.
In more recent years – I have been veering away from being a traveling performer to giving myself over almost completely to the recording arts. I’ve built myself a decent studio and finally have enough space to produce larger projects (the last two things I’ve worked on were cast recordings for theatrical works) after several years of having a studio so tiny it could have fit in the back of a van
The initial purpose of the studio was to get myself completely in control of the means of production of my own music, which has become the only way to make the numbers work in a world where the streaming model has strip-mined a lot of the money out of music that makes it possible to hire other people and facilities. The big upside is I can work when I am the most inspired to do so and can spend a lot more time experimenting without having to constantly check the clock.
All the time I’ve spent recording myself has gotten my chops good enough to where I’ve become good enough to produce other folks’ records at a pretty high level, which has become one of my favorite things to do.
What I am passionate about is helping artists become fully independent.. So much of the worst parts of music (as well as almost any art) always draw back to becoming beholden to whoever is paying for the production, many of whom will end up with an undue, if not deleterious influence on when, how, and what gets made or allowed to see the light of day. Most of the time, that’s when something stops being actual art and just becomes “content”. Using that word alone tells you everything you need to know about the intrinsic value they see in it.
For the last couple of years- I’ve managed to either put out an album a year or at least a single every month, a clip that would have been IMPOSSIBLE when I was still on a record label. Independence is good for art. In fact – I just released a new single a few days ago – you can hear it at https://buckaedown.bandcamp.com/track/end-stage-capitalism-is-hella-tight.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)
When they first emerged, i was cautiously optimistic – as I saw the potential to solve one of the biggest problems with the devaluation of music now that it had become almost completely non-corporeal. The idea of having things on a blockchain meant that an artist could potentially reclaim value to something getting copied over and over again in a lossless way and actually make money off of non-physical art.
The problem was that it was inextricably linked to cryptocurrency – which, as time has gone on, has proven to be little more than a multi-level marketing scheme. To make matters worse – somehow, crypto found a way to be even worse for the environment than creating landfill, not to mention crypto’s biggest apologists (ie: the ones that have inexplicably made a whole personality out of it) are themselves often garbage people.
In 2021 – I made a record called ALT-ADENA (https://www.buckdown.net/alt-adena) that was originally slated to be an NFT, but in the process of making it – I got turned off on the concept for the reasons listed above. That record ultimately became something I released on a reusable USB drive that was built into the body of a cassette tape that the end user could then repurpose into their own mixtape that they could give someone (I even included template files on the drive so that someone could make their own original packaging inserts.).
I could be lured back to the concept if there was a way to tie the blockchain to a more conventional digital money platform like Venmo or Paypal. But I’ll take a hard pass on having my art used as bait on the hook for the equivalent of Amway products for tech bros.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
I think we are slowly nosing closer to it with the advent of ethical direct distribution platforms like Bandcamp, Medium, Substack, etc. Places where artists can set their own pricing structures while the platform takes a more reasonable cut (ie: 15% or so) and pays on EVERY download.
The last obstacle to clear is how many social media platforms’ algorithms deprioritize posts with external links to platforms like the ones above unless you pay them. There’s become an entire art dedicated to outwitting this phenomenon. I’ve come up with a few clever workarounds to keep something like, say, Facebook from burying posts when I have new material out, but it is always evolving as the platform bots get smarter.
The main thing is that everyone loves someone who is attempting to make a go at being an artist. Even if you don’t actually take the time to listen, read or buy their work – the VERY LEAST you can do is just hit “like” or “share” when you see their posts promoting it. It literally takes a fraction of a second to help increase visibility on a thing they probably worked weeks, if not months on for, at best, starvation wages, if any at all.
Every new single I put out usually represents something like 40 – 80 hours of dedicated, extremely skilled labor to create, and while I certainly don’t expect that it’s going to be to EVERYONE’S taste, I’d like to think that the small favor of just helping push it along to someone who might dig it wasn’t too much to ask, especially when the process of doing so requires less time and dexterity than it takes to operate a cigarette lighter.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buck_ae_down/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/buck.down
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ae_down
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR-rr381-19TMT_-G_z1TyQ
- Other: Bandcamp: (the most ethical music distribution platform ever made): https://buckaedown.bandcamp.com
Image Credits
Stephen Linsley, Joseph Cultice