THE VAMPIRES ARE WINNING: A DISPATCH FROM THE RUINS OF INDEPENDENT MUSIC

Features

6 Aug

There are days when the music business merely smells rotten, and then there are days when the floor collapses and you discover the whole carnival has been built over a slaughterhouse.

This is one of those days.

In one corner of the country, the staff of BrooklynVegan, Alternative Press, Revolver and Goldmine have been fed into the corporate woodchipper—decades of accumulated knowledge, taste and cultural memory exterminated in a single afternoon by people who probably describe music as “content” and human beings as “headcount.” In another corner, Brick by Brick, San Diego’s beloved 400-capacity temple of heavy music, has announced the final two shows at its longtime Bay Park home.

These are not unrelated events. They are two ends of the same ecosystem being hacked away by the same blunt forces: the places where music happens and the places that tell us why it matters.

BrooklynVegan was founded in 2004, back when a music website could still possess a point of view instead of behaving like a search-engine parasite assembled by unpaid interns. Alternative Press has been covering underground music since 1985. Revolver became an institution for hard rock and metal. Goldmine has served record collectors since the Ford administration. All four survived collapsing ad markets, social-media vandalism, streaming economics and the public’s apparently bottomless appetite for free journalism.

What they could not survive was ownership.

Their parent company, Veeps—founded by Benji and Joel Madden and now part of Live Nation—has reportedly laid off nearly everyone. Emails bounce. Storied, impassioned careers vanish. Whole editorial cultures are deleted with the sterile efficiency of a drone strike. Nobody responsible has to walk through the newsroom, look another human being in the eye and explain why decades of work are suddenly worth less than the next quarterly earnings report.

This is how music journalism dies now: not with a bad review, a libel suit or a coked-out editor hurling a typewriter through a window, but with a calendar invitation from Human Resources.

And then there is Brick by Brick.

For generations of San Diego metalheads, the squat little room on Buenos Avenue was not merely a venue. It was the place where the machinery connected. Touring bands met local bands. Lifers met newcomers. People who had spent the week feeling like freaks, misfits and office-bound impostors walked through those doors and found 399 other members of the same tribe.

The room had no interest in glamour. It had a low stage, a wide floor and precisely the right amount of grime. It smelled like beer, sweat and swagger. In other words, it was perfect.

Dio played there. Bruce Dickinson played there. Megadeth, Sepultura, Cannibal Corpse, Behemoth, Mayhem, Carcass, Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, Cattle Decapitation—the list reads like somebody rifled through a metalhead’s record collection while high on military-grade stimulants. But the real importance of Brick by Brick was never the famous names. It was the unknown band playing first. It was the kid watching from the rail, thinking, I could do this. It was seeing an extreme-metal act from halfway around the world close enough to count the veins in the singer’s forehead.

Brick by Brick occupied that critical territory between the neighborhood dive and the corporate concert hall: big enough to attract serious touring bands from Europe’s dark, pulsating alleys, and small enough to recognise the same sweat-drenched, exhilarated faces at every show. Rooms like that are laboratories. Bands develop inside them. Scenes gather around them. Lifelong friendships begin beside their filthy bathrooms.

Now the Buenos Avenue chapter ends after two final shows on August 12 and 13. The owners have left open the possibility that Brick by Brick could return somewhere else, and we should cling to that hope like a drunk clinging to the final lamppost before dawn. But no replacement space has been secured. The building may have been sold and could ultimately be redeveloped, although the condominium rumors remain unconfirmed.

Naturally, condos hover over the story like vultures.

Perhaps one day a handsome new residential complex will stand where walls once shook beneath Neurosis, Clutch and Dark Funeral. There may be brushed-steel appliances, tasteful communal firepits and a fitness center nobody uses. The marketing brochure will call the neighborhood “vibrant,” having helped eradicate one of the things that made it vibrant in the first place.

This is the great cultural swindle of our age. Corporations acquire the publications that document independent music, strip them for parts and fire the people who give them credibility. Developers consume the rooms where independent music lives and replace them with structures priced beyond the reach of the musicians. Then the entertainment conglomerates sell us a bloodless simulation of the culture they helped destroy—sponsored, surveilled, dynamically priced and available for an additional service fee.

The bastards want the revenue of rebellion without suffering the inconvenience of rebels.

And what disappears cannot be measured solely in jobs, ticket sales or square footage. We lose institutional memory. We lose writers willing to spend three weeks obsessing over a band that an algorithm has not yet approved. We lose editors who understand that an audience can be cultivated rather than harvested. We lose stages where young bands can fail loudly, get better and return six months later to the noisy assent of the horn-throwing masses.

We lose the connective tissue.

That is why today feels so bleak. BrooklynVegan and its sister publications and Brick by Brick performed different functions, but they served the same sacred purpose. One helped you discover the band. The other gave you somewhere to stand while that band blew your skull apart.

Independent music will survive, because desperate people will always find battered guitars, dark rooms and new ways to frighten their parents. But survival is not the same as health. Every shuttered club and gutted publication narrows the road. Every lost editor, photographer, promoter, bartender and sound engineer takes something irreplaceable with them.

So mourn the jobs. Mourn the bylines, the archives and the knowledge scattered to the wind. Mourn the room on Buenos Avenue and every beautiful, deafening night we assumed would be followed by another.

Then buy a ticket. Subscribe to something. Pay for the t-shirt. Support the local promoter. Read the writer whose name appears beneath the headline. Show up early enough to see the opening band.

Because the vampires are real, they are ravenous, and they already own the ticketing platform.