The high cost of living and the dwindling returns on recording and touring have made simply keeping your head above water dicey for artists as the economy tanks. “If you’re not getting tour support from a label, it’s really tough,” says Leo. “We’ve managed to make a go at it as full-time musicians for a few years now, largely due to the sheer amount that we’re on the road. I’m pretty sure we’re not going to be able to do that for the next year. People get jobs, people lose jobs, people find other jobs. I guess it’s time to find another job.”

Candi Ce Lawer/retna

JELLO BIAFRA, the former Dead Kennedys frontman who has run his own Alternative Tentacles label since 1979, contends that the current economic crisis really began at least ten years ago, and he’s been struggling to deal with it ever since. “If I wasn’t putting money into Alternative Tentacles right now, we’d be gone,” he says. “Every label is battening down its hatches. The ones who aren’t that interested or who are only interested because they thought they could make money are getting out. People have to decide whether they’re lifers or not. How much does it mean to them to put out music, help other artists, or even make their own music?”

Josh Rosenfeld, cofounder of the Seattle indie label Barsuk (home to early recordings by Death Cab for Cutie and Rilo Kiley),

has similar concerns. “It seems very possible that three or four years from now, a lot of bands, record labels, small management companies, clubs, and record stores will be out of business,” he says. “That’s sad in a way, but maybe not totally unhealthy. There’s a very high noise-to-signal ratio. It makes it more difficult for people who are really great. From a survival-of-the-fit-test perspective, it would probably be a good thing if there were just fewer players out there.”

While Rosenfeld is confident Barsuk’s customers won’t disappear, other indie labels find themselves particularly vulnerable because of their reliance on credit lines that banks have grown stingy with in the wake of the economic crisis. “Cash flow for an indie is difficult at best,” says Paul Barretta, a former MTV finance exec who currently runs Talent

Clearing House, which handles business-related issues for several independent labels. “When you take away or lower a line of credit they’ve been counting on, there can be things that were planned for six months from now that just can’t happen—like producing or marketing a decent record. That’s a major problem, because you’re cutting into revenues you were expecting eight to 12 months from now.”

Major labels tend to be less reliant on credit, but everyone agrees that budgets at every label—for recording, marketing, and tour support—will be tightened even further than they already have been. While a decade ago, such contraction may have spelled a noticeable change in the sound of the actual music being produced, recording technology has become so cheap these days that, as Goldberg puts it, “sounds that used to take weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars in expensive studios to get, any 12-year-

old can get in five minutes on a computer.” But prolonged economic hardship may eventually be reflected in the music anyway. “Bad times sometimes create good art and vice versa,” he says. “The blues came out of enormous suffering and ended up being one of the most powerful musical genres in history.”

The same point could certainly be made about hip-hop, as well as punk, post-punk, and hardcore in the late ’70s and early ’80s, even if it’s a bit of an oversimplification. “One likes to make statements like ‘It was the bleak, industrial landscape of Manchester that forged the sound of Joy Division,’” Leo intones in a mock-serious voice-over. “There’s probably a certain amount of that that’s true. In America, as politics and economics swing, some people will react to it and make recession music—recession punk. I’m sure it’ll be dealt with in people’s songs.”

Biafra is hopeful that the tough times will spur more artists to put economic and social-justice issues in their crosshairs. “It makes it all the more important for every artist to use their voice to fight the banks and our corporate government any way they can,” he says, “with lyrical content, visual packaging, and bulletins or blogs on their websites and MySpace pages.”

But perhaps more important than an upsurge of sociopolitical fist-pumping among artists is the increased possibility of finding an audience primed to hear that sort of thing. “There’s something about audiences being more receptive to it in these times,” says Leo. “Immediately after

“Though people don’t have money,
they still need to be amused. Maybe
they’ll come to a show.” —Reggie Youngblood

September 11, there was a surprising number of people coming out of the woodwork to praise the political nature of my work. Then over the course of the past seven years, that really dipped. It seems now with the population really sick of the war in Iraq and starting to see this economic downturn, people are interested again.”

The election of Barack Obama has cast many of these grim facts in a new light, however. Justin Sane, singer-guitarist for the politico-punk outfit Anti-Flag, notes that after years of reflexive anti-Bush sentiment, both artists and fans are suddenly facing at least four years with “their guy” in charge. “With Obama, so many people feel optimistic,” he says. “Even though things are actually in a very bad state economically, you’re going to see that optimism come out in people’s music. Instead of seeing people lashing out at the government, you’ll just hear people writing songs about trying to live through hard times.”

Whatever galvanizing aesthetic force widespread financial misery might ultimately have, not many would seriously contend that we should actually be welcoming it. Genuine creativity doesn’t need a Great Depression to flourish; in fact, as Biafra points out, economic hardship more frequently snuffs it out.

“Some of the most important art and music ever made is when people first leave home and are too young to know better,” he says. “My father told me, ‘Get a degree and a real job and maybe you can do this as a hobby.’ I thought, ‘Fuck that.’ I saved money from doing laundry in a nursing home and came to San Francisco. The rest is history.”

But with the job market thinning, savings dwindling, wages stagnant, the cost of living soaring, and the music industry reeling, just getting out of your parents’ house is a far greater challenge than it ever was. “It’s taken a huge toll on the vibrancy of the underground,” Biafra continues. “People like me from out of town who’d show up as naive teenagers in San Francisco chasing a dream just can’t afford it anymore.”