This was me every time someone didn't realise Twitter also has a 'mute' option.
Thanks to retweets and online gossip I finally decided to follow Kanye West on Twitter to keep up with his random outbursts of self-righteousness and general buffoonery. At some point during this period he started tweeting about being skint, more than skint actually, he says he is $53million in debt. That's a lot of money to owe, so maybe he is talking bollocks although I'm not sure what he was hoping to achieve. The peak of this tirade was a public plea to Mark Zuckerberg to give him one billion dollars in order to be able to create music and art.
It was a couple of days later that inspiration hit me, so thankfully Kanye West was still in the news. In the spirit of crowd funding I started putting it out there that I would record an album of Kanye West covers only using the kazoo, but only if I collected £100 via the PayPal button at the top of this very blog page. During the course of the week I tweeted about very little else, gaining a few supportive retweets (of which have all been deleted due to a much needed clean up having nearly reached the 3,200 tweets limit) but also losing several followers in the process. Although I don't do it publicly (most of the time) I always, thanks to an app that tells me who has unfollowed although it doesn't seem to pick up every single one, tweet the unfollower and ask for some feedback as to why. I very rarely tweet a lot at the same time, usually every couple of hours, so I am able to assume that the last tweet is the reason for the unfollowing. For example during my recent bout of Findus Crispy Pancake mentions I would tweet and say something like "not a fan of Findus Crispy Pancakes?" and the link to the app. All I can guess is that this week I managed to weed out either Kanye West fans, Kanye West haters, or kazoo haters, not one of them replied.
Of course the whole Kanye thing was a joke of sorts, but I would have made the album due to moral obligation if I had raised the paltry sum of £100, after all I wasn't asking that figure from each person so really all I needed was for 100 people to donate a pound, or 200 people to donate 50p, you get the idea. That money would have gone into the fund for making short films, sketches, podcasts documentaries and all sorts of entertaining stuff, all of which I would have given away for free, a gift in return for your gift. We are almost out of February and donations have been very thin on the ground just lately which is holding things up at my end. The Kanye money would have gone towards filming the pilot episode of Saturday Breakfast, something I realistically need £500 for in order to make a low budget pilot with people working for nothing but expenses which would have been used for a Kickstarter video to raise the money for a series of six episodes with a higher budget and wages for everyone. Everyone that is except for me because I am only concerned with entertaining and not bothered by riches. Although it would be cool to be able to draw a wage from the PayPal pot and work full time with you as my employer it isn't the be all and end all but I am not a man of extravagance so I wouldn't need loads to live on anyway, as long as I can pay the bills and buy dog food, cat food and cigarettes (one of those things is for my dog and another for the two cats, I am not on a fad diet) and go to gigs I am happy.
There was a serious point to be made at the heart of last week's relentless tweeting about Kanye West, and that was how crowd funding only works as a two-way enterprise. If everyone left a restaurant without paying then they would eventually close, you pay because it is an act of faith between you and the owner that you will give them money and they will give you food. Actors earn money because you pay to go to the theatre or cinema, or pay your TV Licence, or buy the stuff that is advertised on television and it is unrealistic to expect any of that for free. Maybe the world isn't ready for a kazoo interpretation of Kanye West songs on one album, but I would have used every one of those ten thousand pennies to make something far better. Please consider this next time you listen to The Sunday Alternative Podcast or watch an episode of The Random Saturday Sessions that you receive for free.
Ultimately though, every person who didn't donate (you're one of them reading this) missed out on turning my joke into an even better joke. Why? Because I don't actually know any Kanye West songs and would have had to have spent the entire weekend learning the tunes and then playing the kazoo up in my office, a sound that Mandi likened to having ducks held captive. How funny would that have been? A small donation is all it would have taken to royally fuck up my weekend in the name of art.
The Sunday Alternative Podcast #76 is available from here.
This week's episode of The Random Saturday Sessions stars Jimi Mack, watch it here.
