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great time!" You should totally talk to Dean. Dean freely admits that the label doesn't have to support itself, so market considerations don't have to come into it. I mean, they do on some level. He's not going to put out more No-Neck Blues Band records just for the hell of it.
I think the difference between indie bands 10 15 years ago and now is that most bands don't have aspirations to mass success.

S: Beat Happening probably never had aspirations of mass success.

J: Yeah, but everybody believed that whether or not they wanted to be like that mainstream or not, they wanted to be the mainstream.
Yeah they thought this music deserved to reach a lot of people. And bands now don't necessarily think, I don't know, it's amazing to me that as many bands as did thought, "we're going to try to affect culture in a mass way." And major labels are still the only way to do that. They have access to the market. Though it's gotten to the point where even labels are complaining about things like access to radio. And that's a first. That is something kind of new.

*

S: What about television? Do you watch television?
I watch an unfortunate amount of television.

J: How do you find the time?

S: Jennifer doesn't watch television.

J: No, I do.

S: But you don't have shows that you watch, you watch PBS all of the time.

J: Yes, I do have shows - Scientific American Frontier, American Experience! I love those shows.
We watch a pretty unfortunate amount of television in our house. We have too much TV.

S: Did you watch the Boomtown marathon the other day?
No, that's a line that we simply have not crossed. But we own DVDs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

S: I'd like to state for the record that my knee-jerk reaction to the idea of Buffy being a terrible series was so wrong and my life is so much better ever since I've been watching it.
That was another thing I blew, because the show came on when I was in a pretty devout anti-geek period in my life. This plays into the thing we were talking about earlier about mass significnace. I was at work at the Department of Justice, a very mainstream place, and two colleagues of mine were talking about the end of season two, and Buffy killilng Angel, and they were visibly upset. And these were people who were not otherwise nerds in any way, shape or form. They were totally into this show. And then Drema got into it, and it wasn't until about a year later, when Tom Carson was like, you've got to take a look at this because this thing is just genius.

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