\n<\/p>\n
These days, the song brings in about $1,200 per month, enough to pay his rent, Casey told me, with what sounded like a Lebowskian shrug. \u201cI have other songs that I want to put up,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I kind of don\u2019t want to sell out.\u201d<\/p>\n
I asked if he knew about the Toilet Bowl Cleaners, and he said he\u2019d heard a few of their songs. \u201cI\u2019m not making this up,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s this other guy, I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve heard of him, the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee. His idea was to customize every poop song. So there\u2019s a Steven Poop song, a Bob Poop song, a Mary Poop song. He\u2019s got hundreds!\u201d<\/p>\n
I told him that both bands were in fact the same person.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, OK,\u201d he said, as if realizing the full extent of what he was up against. \u201cI like mine better, but I\u2019m biased,\u201d he said, finally. \u201cYou can tell he knows how to write songs, but I think he\u2019s just been going for volume.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, I knew about the suite of songs that combine Farley\u2019s two most successful genres \u2014 names and poop \u2014 because he was working on a new set of them when I visited him. He estimated that he had already completed about 3,000, but there were always new names.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis can be kind of painful,\u201d he warned, switching on his keyboard and firing up his laptop. He donned headphones, consulted a list of names and got to work. In the silence of the room, I could just hear the soft click of the keyboard and his vocals:<\/p>\n
Jamilah, p-p-p-poop\/Jamilah poop poop poop.<\/em><\/p>\n In \u201cLocal Legends,\u201d which is something like Farley\u2019s \u201cAll That Jazz,\u201d there is a fantasy sequence in which Farley imagines the two sides of his personality arguing: one, the serious, heartfelt artist, the other a greasy record executive demanding ever 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 \u2014 one in which drastically fewer people had a chance to produce art and the work was often corrupted by corporate gatekeepers, but in which there was also a clearly marked road to an audience and a living. Farley represents both the best and worst of the incentives and opportunities that have taken this world\u2019s place. Certainly, there are few creators working today in any medium who would not recognize the anxiety he embodies: that their work now lives or dies by the vagaries of opaque algorithms serving a bottomless menu of options to an increasingly distracted public. And that if they don\u2019t bow to the demands of these new realities, their work \u2014 and by extension they \u2014 will simply disappear. Which is to say that while the experience of watching Farley work was not unpainful, as promised, neither was it totally unfamiliar.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n