The Value Menu
It’s hard to watch a young boy or girl cry over a stuffed animal. To feel their pain. At that age, the universe is small. The amount of items in their life that hold value fit inside of a toy chest. The stuffed animal doesn’t hold any worldly value, as it’s easily replaceable and relatively inexpensive, but the value the child attributes to it is where the pain resides in losing it.
As adults, I don’t believe we’re any different. I stood in line at the post office yesterday, observing the man in front of me in his gigantic sunglasses and tracksuit as he loudly grumbled into his phone in Armenian. I stared at his Balenciaga t-shirt. It had a little logo near the left breast that almost looked like a politician’s campaign logo. It looked cheap and silly to me. And because of that, I had to know what the shirt cost.
Luckily, googling “Balenciaga t-shirt” was all it took to reveal the $675 price tag on this very basic black t-shirt. The details were there too—100% cotton, made in Bangladesh. In other words, this is the adult equivalent to a stuffed animal. It has no actual value, but we give it value and price it accordingly.
I spend a lot of time thinking about this concept and how it pertains to music. You can listen to whatever you want for one monthly fee, or buy songs or albums which are all priced the same. The Stones, SZA, your neighbor’s pop punk band that just put out an EP that you have to hear about every time you run into him. They’re all priced equally. We don’t have monetary differentiation in value the way you would with designer clothes. It’s part of the artist’s job to create that value around what they do. To fuel each single release with as much perceived value as possible. To make every album a religious event.
I think about all of this because I have this album that I spent more time, sweat, and tears on than any body of work I ever have in my life. It was shelved because the project imploded, so now it lives on a hard drive. I shared a song from it last week, and I’m sharing another today. And it’s funny to think that I may be devaluing it by only sharing it here, among a small group of people, with no fanfare and no hype.
At the same time, it feels good. There are people here, aware of this record’s existence, who’ve asked for it at various times, and I appreciate that very much. The value to those people is more real than anything I could manufacture.
Throughout this year, I’m going to continue to share songs from this album until there are none left to give. “Layers of the Years” would’ve been the album opener.
enjoy.