"I thought I'd be wasting my time to go to commercial record companies and make demos for them, because don't forget, I was doing what I was doing and nobody understood what I was doing"
About this Quote
Fahey is describing a particular kind of artistic loneliness: not the romantic, suffering-genius version, but the practical frustration of making work that the market literally lacks the vocabulary to process. The line moves in two beats. First, a cold cost-benefit calculation - “wasting my time” - that strips away any fantasy about being “discovered.” Then the kicker: “nobody understood what I was doing.” It’s not a complaint about taste. It’s an indictment of infrastructure.
In the 1960s and 70s, commercial labels were built to recognize categories that already sold: folk as protest, blues as tradition, rock as youth commodity. Fahey’s “American Primitive” guitar didn’t fit cleanly into any of those bins. He pulled from blues and rural fingerpicking, but also from modern composition and long-form, inward-looking instrumental pieces. The result sounded old and alien at the same time. A demo only works if the listener has a mental shelf ready for it; Fahey is saying the shelf didn’t exist.
The repetition - “what I was doing... what I was doing” - carries a stubborn self-validation. He’s not asking permission; he’s reporting a mismatch between an idiosyncratic vision and an industry optimized for quick recognition. The subtext is entrepreneurial, too: if the gatekeepers can’t decode you, you build your own gate. Fahey did, effectively, through self-release and the creation of a scene that later listeners would finally know how to hear.
In the 1960s and 70s, commercial labels were built to recognize categories that already sold: folk as protest, blues as tradition, rock as youth commodity. Fahey’s “American Primitive” guitar didn’t fit cleanly into any of those bins. He pulled from blues and rural fingerpicking, but also from modern composition and long-form, inward-looking instrumental pieces. The result sounded old and alien at the same time. A demo only works if the listener has a mental shelf ready for it; Fahey is saying the shelf didn’t exist.
The repetition - “what I was doing... what I was doing” - carries a stubborn self-validation. He’s not asking permission; he’s reporting a mismatch between an idiosyncratic vision and an industry optimized for quick recognition. The subtext is entrepreneurial, too: if the gatekeepers can’t decode you, you build your own gate. Fahey did, effectively, through self-release and the creation of a scene that later listeners would finally know how to hear.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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