Today, the song brings in about $1,200 a month, enough to pay the rent, Casey told me, with what sounded like a Lebowskian shrug. “I have other songs I want to play,” she said. “But I don’t want to sell out.”
I asked him if he knew Toilet Bowl Cleaners and he said he had heard some of their songs. “I’m not making this up,” she said. “There’s another guy, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, the strange man who sings about poop, vomit and pee. His idea was to personalize each poop song. So there’s a Steven Poop song, a Bob Poop song, a Mary Poop song. He has hundreds!
I told him that both bands were actually the same person.
“Well, okay,” he said, as if realizing the magnitude of what he was facing. “I like mine better, but I’m biased,” she finally said. “You can tell he knows how to write songs, but I think he’s just been looking for volume.”
In fact, I knew the set of songs that combine Farley’s two most successful genres (names and poop) because he was working on a new set when I visited. He estimated that he had already completed about 3,000, but there were always new names.
“This might be a little painful,” he warned, turning on his keyboard and turning on his laptop. She put on a headset, consulted a list of names, and got to work. In the silence of the room, she could barely hear the soft click of the keyboard and his voice:
Jamilah, ppp-poop/Jamilah poop poop poop.
In “Local Legends,” which is kind of like Farley’s “All That Jazz,” there is a fantasy sequence in which Farley imagines the two sides of his personality arguing: one, the serious and sincere artist, the other, an executive. greasy record label that always demands more poop songs. Of course, the scene can only be a fantasy, and can only have Farley playing both characters, because the greasy record executive belongs to a lost world, one in which drastically fewer people had the opportunity to produce art and the work at hand. often corrupted by corporate gatekeepers, but where there was also a clearly marked path to an audience and a life. Farley represents both the best and the worst of the incentives and opportunities that have taken their place in this world. Certainly, there are few creators working in any medium today who wouldn’t recognize the anxiety he embodies: that his work now lives or dies by the whims of opaque algorithms that offer a bottomless menu of options to an increasingly distracted public. . And that if they do not submit to the demands of these new realities, his (and by extension their) work will simply disappear. That is to say, while the experience of watching Farley work was not without pain, as I promised, it was not totally unfamiliar either.
