I heard from a few people who’d seen the band live.
Some sent me links to playlists at CBC Radio and Last.Fm, where the Plasterscene Replicas were categorized as “Obscure 80s.”
People tweeted me that they still had the band’s would-be breakthrough album Glow.
We all wondered:
What happened?
Why do some bands make it and others fail?
Can we blame the generalized pokiness of the Canadian “music industry”?
Not really; even talented bands that get tons of breaks implode nevertheless, all over the West — one-hit wonders and never-weres.
So how much of it is self-sabotage?
Like this stuff:
A pro photographer who shot this scene told me about taking publicity photos for free for one band — who then complained that the results looked… “too professional.”
That kind of thing — being so afraid of “selling out” that you never do anything.
But then, what if “self-sabotage” is actually a kind of sanity, the realization that your odds of making it are so infinitesimally low that you might as well forget it?
We were all still debating this stuff when I got another tweet…
