Who would buy a CD with nothing but 11 silent tracks on it?
Michelle Shocked, a disgraced folk singer, recently released an album consisting of exactly that.
Inaudible Women features 11 seemingly empty tracks named after journalists and music execs that Shocked feels have either played a hand in her downfall or are part of the corruption of the music business in general.
Shocked admitted that she got the idea from Vulfpeck, an LA-based funk-rock band. Vulfpeck recently released a 10-track silent album titled Sleepify . They released the album in order to try and raise money for a tour and wound up with over $20,000 in 2 months.
Michelle Shocked explained similar reasoning in a video posted to Vimeo . She insisted that the tracks aren’t empty; instead they are at such a high level that humans can’t hear them.
“I decided that I was going to make a high album — in fact, the highest album ever made, just so that my friends Spot and Rex can hear it, not audible to human ears,” Michelle Shocked said, referring to her two dogs. “And to raise money for my fall tour.”
Executives from Pandora, Google, YouTube and SiriusXM became titled tracks of nothingness. The last person on the CD is Chris Willman, a journalist that Michelle Shocked has been harassing since he wrote about her show in San Francisco last year.
During that show, Michelle Shocked went on an anti-gay rant to her fans, a terrible idea for a singer with a huge homosexual following.
“I live in fear that the world will be destroyed if gays are allowed to marry,” Michelle Shocked said during her rant. “You can go on Twitter and say, ‘Michelle Shocked says God hates fags.’”
After alienating her fan-base, Chris Willman wrote about the situation. Even though he did his best to report the facts and even attempted to make excuses for her, she still blamed him for her downfall. Michelle Shocked’s position was not that she had bungled her own career, but that Willman had destroyed her by reporting on her mistake; hence why he “earned” a spot on her silent-but-unbearably-preachy album.
Willman took to Facebook to comment on the track:
“Michelle Shocked has released a new ‘song’ named after me. No, I’m not making this up. For better or worse, the track ‘Chris Willman’ consists entirely of silence, just like the other 10 tracks on the album, the rest of which are named after people in the music community (mostly folks on the forefront of digital music and streaming) whom she considers the enemy. Even knowing it was silent, I just spent 99 cents on CDBaby to buy ‘Chris Willman.’ (It’s good, but it’s no ‘Mean.’)”
[Images courtesy of livinglegendsmusic.com, usatoday and Billboard]
