He did learn his craft, do a lot of gigging, and had an album professionally recorded and mastered. And a little traditional marketing. Then, though, lack of progress and the leap to the fakery.
There’s a traditional spectrum of things that happen with an act getting successful:
Learning the craft
Performance
Recording
Fan Interaction
Marketing and PR
Guerilla marketing
Outright shenanigans
The industry does a lot of the heavy lifting in the middle and the bottom here. You can’t straightforwardly DIY it. The internet isn’t a way to leapfrog gatekeepers anymore: Justin Bieber was discovered on YouTube 11 years ago. So “Outright Shenanigans” it is.
There’s something a bit off. The isolated and almost asocial personality. The degree of talent, support and luck you need to hike from that place to fame is astronomical. He’s spent so long imagining what he’ll look like when he’s famous he’s incapable of seeing himself clearly now.
Though he paid for good recording work, everything else about the marketing and the Threatin persona itself never gets past “3D Text on a varsity photo” level. It’s not crude in the Pen+Pixel style (Big Bear Doin Thangs) or incompetent, but it has a slick safe nothingness to it that’s hard to define. The “David Brent” cover of If You Don’t Know Me By Now really nailed this vibe, surrounding the more obvious grossness of the character.
Premium mediocre is the hardest thing to fake, it is the ne plus ultra of consumer culture.
Yeah like wise the elements of the tour that seem to have been structured to prevent attendance are a little weird.
Like I said Threaten appears to have insisted he/his “people” would handle ticket sales. And kept telling everyone things were sold out. Which means that given few to no tickets were sold, it was next to impossible to sell any of them. Everyone else with the ability to shift tickets was under the impression there weren’t any left.
Most likely they assumed the internets would sell the tickets, and kept insisting things were sold to save face.
But given how odd this thing has been it’s possible that playing to empty rooms was what they wanted.
Dutch beatband Q’65 handled their similar botched trip a lot better:
In 1966 they went to London to play, where they didn’t get any permits, they only gave some interviews before returning. They faked crossing back over to the Netherlands by an inflatable boat (which they only used for landing in Scheveningen, close to The Hague, their hometown) to be received by a very welcoming crowd of 30.000 people (despite any substantial success).
(btw, their record Revolution is a great garage rock/psychedelic rock album, with some real stompers).
After reading the BBC article it seems doubtful that Eanes actually wanted to become a respected musician. He just wanted to be famous. And, since we are here…guess what? Like the sign on his wall sez, If you are reading this, you are part of the illusion.
How about a fool and a marginally competent con artist.
So the current situation is part of the plan. What is the next step? What’s the audience? Who can identify with it, put a piece of themselves into it?
The only one I could imagine is some sort of ironic hate-audience (cf. Blood on the Dance Floor) but you need a core of obsessed truefans for that. And tumblr. Bad timing.
As an artist on Spotify you can compare yourself with other artists. I looked him up. He’s at least getting some streams out of this. A few hundred a day with peaks above thousand if a new article lands.
Nothing major, but it would be interesting if it results in some listeners sticking to him or if it returns to a few drive by listeners when this blows over.
Annoying to see he has so much more streams than my band with this fake nonsense.
