That’s right. Make it available for anyone to download free.
In a career that has spanned more than a quarter-century, and
featured such hits as "Hello, It’s Me" and "I
Saw the Light," Rundgren has sold a lot of records. But he’s
never been quite comfortable with it. At various points, it
appears as if he intentionally submarined his own imminent rock
stardom by following a commer- cialy successful project with
something patently experimental.
"As far as my art goes, I’m trying to structure my life
so that I can give it away," Rundgren says. "I don’t
feel comfortable charging people for it. I have pretenses to
being a fine artist. The record industry is becoming too
ridiculous. It has completely destroyed the concept of music as
art. You don’t qualify as a musician unless you sell records.
Everyone who makes a record thinks, ‘This has got to sell.’
What is that doing to their art? They wouldn’t do certain
things unless it sold. I don’t want that kind of paint on my
personal expression." "I can produce records for money
and have other means of income, but I want to make records just
to make them. At this point, it is possible for me not to depend
on record sales any longer. I want to deliver to anyone who’s
interested."
Rundgren, a musician who has long danced on the leading edge of
technology, embraced interactive music in the ’90s.
"I am the poster boy for interactivity," he says with a
laugh. (He has even given himself a nom-de-disque: TR-i, for
" Rundgren Interactive.")
In 1993, he was the first pop music artist to create and release
an interactive CD-ROM. Titled No World Order, it allowed the user/listener
to manipulate and deconstruct via computer the various sounds,
textures and sequences throughout the disc.
At the same time Rundgren wrote and recorded the music, he and
assisting programmers were developing a test bed for the new
technology.
"My goal in No World Order was to probe the concept of
interactive music," he explains. "It required me to
think about the music in certain ways. The music had to be cut up
so that it could be moved around. ‘We have to keep these
transitions clean. I can’t put lyrics that overlap where the
cuts might be.’ After that, my objective was to get back to
something more musical."
To that end, he released The Individualist last fall. A departure
from the techno-ized, sometimes cold flavor of No World Order,
the disc is something of a return to the pop melodies associated
with his earlier work, although the tracks are largely
synthesizer-driven. Instead of making it a fully interactive disc,
he opted for CD-plus, a software format that works in
conventional compact disc players, but when plugged into a CD-ROM
offers additional graphic elements.
"This one’s about music," Rundgren says. "I
had to be able to service the traditional buying audience, but if
you happen to have a computer and a ROM drive, you can put it in
there and enhance the experience to some degree. There is some
degree of interactivity. It adds another vector."
Rundgren is not a ’net hog. There’s simply not enough
time. In fact, you could easily nickname him Backslash:
songwriter/producer/vocalist/instrumentalist/programmer/ graphic
artist/consultant/poster boy. Rundgren does use the ’net for
specific purposes, but to co-opt a line from Apocalypse Now,
" don’t surf."
"I get in every once in awhile when I have something
specific to look for," he says. "But I don’t spend
time there for personal enjoyment. Then I would be forced to stop
trying to put meaning into things. Everything that happens to me
is pregnant with meaning. I look at the Web as this kind of giant
public domain CD-ROM, kind of like shareware but with a browser.
A lot of the stuff on there is hack work that people just threw
together. Some of them crash your machine. It’s not well-supported
or maintained. You may occasionally come upon extraordinary
unsung works of one kind or another, but at this point the
frantic commercialization of the Web is something of a
disincentive to cruise. It’s like a strip mall. There’s
all these hot buttons. It’s like riding along a Dallas
highway where there’s nothing but fucking billboards. It’s
hard to find substantive content. And it’s obscured by
blizzards of links, which attaches crap to crap."
Despite his misgivings, Rundgren sees potential value in the
Internet. He signed on with CompuServe to create a new
interactive music forum.
," Rundgren explains. "You’ll use ’net
protocol to get into our application. The flat world browsing
thing will be for the strip mall crowd. We’re setting up
something more like a Neiman Marcus. It will be a place unto
itself. If we do that, we can make sure the resources are
provided. Our whole paradigm is that everyone loves the ’net,
but the problem is the Web is based on print, a page format
paradigm. Everything looks like a magazine or a catalogue,
despite all the attempts to add plug-ins. The impression is you
get this hydra-headed monster being burdened beyond its original
design. It’s like putting wings on a dog."
"In general, the Web is a good way of finding what’s
out there, but not a good way of presenting what’s out there,"
he says. "You’ll be able to find us on the Web, you can
FTP to us. We will create a visceral experience that you would
expect out of local resources like CD-ROMs or television. People
talk themselves into being intrigued by postage stamp-sized
QuickTime movies.
I just don’t buy that. I don’t enjoy it.
I want something to fill the whole screen, have nice sound, good
quality music, an immersive experience.
And it will not be a sales- oriented thing."