The Rise and Fiverr of Fatty Carbuncle
How you can start a death metal band without doing any work
This piece originally ran in Stereogum’s The Black Market on February 2019. This is an annotated version.
I’ve always wanted to be in a death metal band. Problem: I am an untalented, antisocial loser. So, a question has long simmered in the dimmer regions of my dumb brain: Is it possible to form a decent death metal band without being able to play an instrument? Or sing, scream, or gurgle? Or, uh, do any of the things a legitimate band might require? In fact, what is the least amount of work I could do in order to live out my death metal fantasies? I created an account on the “freelance marketplace” Fiverr to find out.1
My plan was simple: I would buy “gigs” offered by sellers on Fiverr and try to middle-manage a cohesive death metal song into existence. To increase the stakes, I added some rules:
I would start on February 1 and finish on February 27. Surely, that would be enough time to get a song made. Please tell Jari Mäenpää not to read this.2
My budget would be $200.
I would supply the band name and lyrics. I would also give my employed metallers a general sense of direction. Otherwise, my only creative contribution would be clicking the order button.3
With the governing particulars set, it was time to become Bill Belichug (or…*shudders*…Jon Br00den?) and coach my way to death metal infamy. And, thanks to Aaron, the band already had a name. Black Marketers, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to…Fatty Carbuncle. Glory, glory, halleblurgah. It still brings a tear to my eye. The next step? Performing another metal rite of passage. Yep, this spud needed a logo. It was time to clear my first Fiverr hurdle.
Wait…ah hell, metalheads are on this platform, right?
I was relieved to find that the number of Fiverr sellers offering metal-centric services runs deeper than expected, particularly in the gruesome, indecipherable nametag department. Hailing from the brutal death metal hotbed of Indonesia, I tapped bekaelproject as my designer.4
I filled bekaelproject in on who I was and my future plans (something I did for all participants either before or at the beginning of orders). My instructions were to aim for Unleashed, replacing the cross with something oozier and appropriately carbuncular.5 In two days, my vague concept became a real logo…and…oh my god, it really needs to see a doctor. Wow, I’m going to get fired, Wyatt’s writing your intro next month.6 Given the medical textbook specificity of the anatomy nestled within the lettering, it’s…a little too hot for Stereogum. I’ve hidden the bits beneath a cutout of Thor’s head. (You can see the undesecrated, NSFW deal here. I hope it terrifies and irritates misogynists eternally.) Before Fiverr’s fees, this cost $20:
Countryman reisyaibrahim then worked on the cover art that would adorn Fatty Carbuncle’s debut. I sent along samples of recent beauties by Thanamagus, Sulaco, and Massive Retaliation, somehow bravely fighting off the temptation to include Attack Against Gnomes. Ready for something spooky? Reisyaibrahim drew me. This is legit what my driver’s license looks like:
“Forgive me for following you home, but you appear to have dropped this back in that dark parking garage.” Reisyaibrahim’s Portrait Of The Writer rang in at $30.7
Throughout Fatty Carbuncle’s gestation, the relative affordability of these gigs never failed to surprise me. But, for the freelancers behind them, simply getting paid for their fringe expertise is a different sort of calculus. “It is the same as session work,” Karl Casey wrote to me. The proprietor of White Bat Audio in Canada, Casey’s Fiverr gigs include “I Will Provide Horror Music For Video Games, Podcast And Film,” “I Will Write You A Thrash Metal Song,” and the one I ordered: “I Will Write You An Old School Death Metal Song.” “You’re hired to play/write a song and you get paid for your work. It beats being in 1,000 bands that earn you nothing and it keeps you writing consistently, so you are improving your skills while getting paid at the same time!”89
Casey has been playing guitar for 16 years. He has been composing for almost as long, releasing music with Vice Girl and his solo project Patient X. He chose Fiverr as a hub for session work because he “liked the simplicity of making a profile and people coming to [him] for orders.” And come they have. To that end, I was a little disappointed that Fatty Carbuncle wasn’t the weirdest thing someone has asked him to create, bested by, among other oddities, “a doom metal version of ‘Jingle Bells’.”
Still, my request of an opening Butcher ABC march followed by Incubus/Opprobrium death/thrash and Cause of Death buttchugs all HM-2’d to heck probably wasn’t the easiest commission. That’s…a lot for $55. Regardless, Casey forged a four-minute instrumental, one that I’ll be saving for the full song reveal. (Stop scrolling, you false!)10 I had death metal. Now I needed vocals.
Of course, unless I wanted to go full Slowly We Rot John Tardy, I also needed lyrics. With only 12 days left before my deadline, my options were limited to (a) using one of the metal lyric services on Fiverr, (b) loading Botnik Studios’s predictive text engine with every Nile song, or (c) driving an impenetrable inside joke into the goddamn ground. Which one do you think I chose?
Yeahhh. If you give Fatty Carbuncle’s lyrics a read later, you might catch Death Metal English references to the “intense blebination” of our monthly list-making process. (Translation: We write blurbs about heavy metal albums. Begone, outsider.) The rest? Well, one of our behind-the-scenes pastimes is marveling at the casual nihilism of People Magazine’s online crime blotter. Holy shit, this thing. It’s pure misery exploitation. The Black Market team has decided that it’s written by an AI programmed by cenobites. Here’s a horrifying example that’s actually…little more than a logroll for an in-house TV show. WE HAVE SO MANY EXCLUSIVE CLIPS TO SHOW YOU. A real person really died for that. Guh. The clickbait interests of mainstream America are far more depraved than any metal band could hope to be.11
With the lyrics in the can, this is where I figured the band would hit a bottleneck. I mean, asking a stranger to deliver deeply derpy lyrics that only make sense to three people was the least of my worries. (That’s actually…pretty metal, even when it’s not.) No, I needed to find someone who could perform suitably brutal vokills. As you no doubt know thanks to your normo friends trying to make fun of your Morbid Angel mixtape, a death metal roar is not a skill casual listeners tend to possess. Hell, despite my obsessiveness, I can’t even come close to imitating Chris Barnes without spraining my esophagus.12 Did Fiverr have an answer?
Laur Lindmäe is a singer from Estonia who caught the music bug early, starting out on guitar at age 7. “As a teenager I was in countless local bands, playing guitar, drums, or bass, and occasionally I was on backing vocals,” Lindmäe wrote. “At some point when all the bands died, I learned that I could do some Lemmy-like vocals.” He soon jumped to the front of Pharmer, a band he formed with his brother which has an EP on the horizon.
Over the years, Lindmäe’s vocal prowess continued to grow as he experimented with YouTube covers and sharpened his skills via Alex Terrible’s courses.13 During a lull in his professional life, he “stumbled upon Fiverr.” As there was no one offering decent metal vocals on the platform at the time, he signed up. “I’m glad I started it. I have a pretty good reputation. It would be a lot harder if I started doing this now. I have made a lot of friends all over the world thanks to Fiverr, and I am glad to be a part of so many long-lasting music projects.”
Obviously, like a lot of us freelancers, Lindmäe has said yes to some out-there gigs. “I remember doing a Lamb Of God — ‘Redneck’ cover for [someone’s] Christmas present. All of the lyrics were changed. The chorus went something like, ‘THIS IS A MOTHERF*ing INSULATION! The only gift you could ever need!’ [His] family decided to gift him insulation for his house and blast this track while presenting [him with] the gift.”14
And now he’s a Carbuncle. For $70, Laur Lindmäe gave our song a true voice, and his guitarist homie Olle Nõmm chipped in a solo to boot. Just like that, we finally had an honest-to-Deicide death metal song. And I still had $25 to play with. Hmmm….
In order to maximize the chances that someone might submit Fatty Carbuncle to Encyclopaedia Metallum (ahem),15 I wanted to expand the release from just a song into a single by adding an intro or outro. And why not have some fun, reaching beyond the typical skippable sample and maybe even outside the realm of metal itself? There are oodles of atypical-to-death-metal services floating around Fiverr offered by top-notch musicians, including…an ethereal recorder? For the love of god, don’t show that to any of the anime dungeon synth bands.
Anyway, I have long wanted to pair death metal with the kind of dissonance found in Penderecki’s Cello Concerto No. 1, because I am a nerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd. I ordered a 90-second composition from jennycranecello for $30. Yes, I blew my budget, but I did it for the kind of cello con carnage that appears on her Soundcloud. We agree, Weeping Sores: death metal needs more strings. And, you’ll be able to hear those brutiful cello lines *drum roll* next month. Yes, we couldn’t get it in before February 27, so consider it a treat if you want to duck back into the Bandcamp in a few weeks.16
Oh, a Bandcamp you say? Indeed, here’s the EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE of Fatty Carbuncle. Behold!
How’d we do? To see if it passed the smell test, I kinda, sorta lied and had my bud Chris Redar write up a bio blind with no knowledge of the concept:17
“The track ‘Prurient Emissions Of Pernicious Lubricious Enormity’ steers the wheel as close to the old-school death metal center line all the chumps seem to be into these days without driving off the cliff of boredom.”
Verdict: We had ourselves a spud. And you can have it too, if you want. I’ve set the free download to creative commons so you can drop it on mixes and comps as long as you credit the artists that had a hand in creating it. For the record, that would not be me.
Let’s talk about that.18 First, let me say that I have conflicting feelings about all of this. On the one hand, this is rad. It’s incredible that Fatty Carbuncle actually exists. I cannot express enough thanks for the time and effort of everyone involved. On the other, jeez, I can’t stop thinking about the downsides of the gig economy.
Am I the Threatin of the temp death metal world?19 No, wait, Threatin can actually play stuff. Let’s face it, I didn’t do a goddamn thing and the people who did barely got compensated for the effort they put in. While this is an iniquity as old as time, that a person/institution of means can take advantage of the often-involuntary availability of the less-privileged, its longevity doesn’t absolve it of its ickiness. That goes double for any platform that chooses to profit off of it.
In 2017, Fiverr rolled out an ad campaign centered on its “doers,” spinning the shittier, life-consuming aspects of grinding gigs as heroic. It was rightfully burninated, none more thoroughly than by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker. “At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system,” Tolentino wrote of the gig economy at large. “The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear.”
To Fiverr’s credit, it appears to be aware of its reputation. It loosened its hold on the $5 base price that gave the company its name in 2015, allowing sellers to set their own prices. Recently, it has worked to raise its Better Business Bureau rating from a Wikipedia-reported F in 2018 to today’s C+. But Fiverr isn’t really the issue, even if its more devious tendencies do occasionally metastasize into the self-parodic Randian cancer some fear the gig economy has become. As Tolentino wrote, this goes deeper.
Yes, this took a turn. Yes, this is the most me thing. I hate to smudge our fun little intro with this kind of stuff, but it’s hard for me not to interrogate my complicity in the dubious magic of competitive pricing and the race-to-the-bottom side-effects of globalization. (Regarding the latter, Fatty Carbuncle is a thoroughly international band, outsourced to Canada, Estonia, and Indonesia. Please don’t tell the U.S. Government or the local NYDM chapter.) It was disturbing how often I would see a seller offering a low rate for a service and think, Oh, that’s a deal! It’s like I’ve been trained to only consider how the gig might benefit me.
All of this reads as obvious, but it’s hard to see it in the moment, largely because the knock-on effects of that thought process feel like boons to consumers. But those effects can degrade the perceived value of creatives, especially if the humanity of the creative is deemphasized. Doyle Wolfgang Von Frankenstein, of all people, recently shared his perspective on the state of the music industry with The Liquid Conversations podcast.20 Quoting from the Consequence Of Sound piece that aggregated it:
“The thing that sucks the most about it is that everybody steals music,” he responded. “You spend thousands and thousands of dollars to make a record and all of these scumbags are just stealing it. And then they want more, and then you’re a dick because you’re doing a meet-and-greet for 50 fucking bucks to make up for it, which you don’t want to do. You think I want to meet all these fucking people? I don’t. When I’m done, I just want to take a shower and go to bed.”
Doyle, who once said “Do these people think songs fall out of the fucking sky?”, might be the most no-bullshit artist advocate out there. To me, his take rings true: It takes more and more work to make less and less money. But, keep in mind, Doyle is viewing all of this from the vantage point of having “made” it.
If you’re trying to break in, what other option do you have but to grind and eat a lot of shit? That’s the eternal quandary: Do you hold out for what you’re worth or get something, anything now? Fiverr offers a promise of gigs without the monetary cost of buying a website/SEO optimization and the psychic cost of getting turned down. It’s the path of least resistance. In that way, can you blame anyone for seeing Fiverr as a viable stream of income? As someone who has a lot of hustle irons in the gig fire, I can relate. It’s hard to pass up something when you’re usually offered nothing, even if that something ends up setting your market and devaluing your abilities. And, if you want to keep your sanity while staying in business, there are less cynical ways to look at all of this.
“Basically, I want to see how successful I can become working as a musician,” Casey wrote. “I see this as an opportunity to really develop my songwriting and production skills, which I carry over into my bands and solo projects. I compose horror/synthesizer scores as well, so I’d eventually like to make music for Hollywood films, major video games, etc. I want to meet and work with as many people as possible!”
Lindmäe was also positive regarding his longterm goals: “I want to master as many different vocal styles as I can, working on Fiverr helps me keep my voice in shape. And almost every track I record I can try out something different!” That said, regarding whether someone could make a living on Fiverr, he recognized that people coming into an overcrowded market will have an uphill climb. “For an example, there are too many graphic artists on Fiverr, tons of them, I don’t think any new guys can make it big any time soon. But if you find your niche, a more original service, and put enough time in it I think there is a possibility to live off of this.”
I’ve been thinking about all of the Carbuncles a lot. It’s weird. We’ve never met, we’re probably never going to meet,21 but I feel connected to them in a way that…feels like a band. Like, we made songs together! They’re good songs! And maybe they’re good because the buyer/seller relationship freed us up to “get shit done,” not unlike what Elif Batuman experienced in her brilliant piece on Japan’s rental family services. Or maybe, much like I have and will continue to do again, a creative freelancer will feel compelled to go above and beyond in order to live up to their own standards, whether the market rewards that or not.
So yeah, to answer my question, $205 will get you a death metal band for not a lot of your work.22 You can bet someone worked hard, though.
I'd like to point out that we beat the now-ubiquitous Fiverr YouTube format by a good year. I can't believe YouTubers would take an idea and run it into the ground -- really unlike them. This piece was actually inspired by an essay in which the author, and excuse the business speak here, leveraged two different Mechanical Turk merchants. One would find cheap gigs and then off-shore it to the other. Did the author turn a profit? Sure did. Brilliant, but also reprehensible, which is my kind of arbitrage.
Always here for a Wintersun dig. This isn't a stray so much as a dead-eyed sniper bullet that flies through his shitty crowdfunded computer x-ray-style a la Sniper Elite.
OK. So. We grappled with the ethics of how to approach this intro for a long, long time. As you'll read later, I finally landed on disclosing up front that I was a writer and asked for the sellers' permission to continue the orders. While that may have affected the output in some way, like the sellers trying harder since they knew their work was hitting a prominent website, it helped me sleep at night. Also, this probably goes against the Fiverr TOS, but, really, who cares. I'm really tldr things here, because this was, like, a month's worth of internal chatter.
I have no idea if these links still work. I'm not testing them on a work computer, thank you very much. What's up, HR? I know you're reading this.
I remember getting this back, staring at it for like a minute, and saying out loud to no one and anyone in my office, "Wow, he drew a vagina."
In an alternate universe, Wyatt wrote next month's column, which was magnificent. This is not that universe. Alas, in this universe, you got me writing about mashing up metal albums with field recordings.
How did I get this dark-ass joke past an editor?
This is the justification presented almost word-for-word by playlist ghost composers in Liz Pelly's Spotify piece that has been making the rounds recently. I'll write about that for Wolf's Week at some point. Although, y'all hated my Bob Seger thing, so I don't know if we're still doing that.
Again, I'd probably kick off the intro with this today. Took me a long time to dial this in, apparently.
"You false" is something Obsequious said in an Invisible Oranges interview, and it has lodged itself like a fossil in the loose soil of my brain for years.
Aaron and I used to get served these stories on Apple News with the frequency of raindrops in a monsoon. And then, the algo got changed, and we never saw another one. The future, folks! What a rad time to be alive, much to the chagrin of People Magazine, apparently.
So, I commissioned a Cameo from Chris Barnes a few months back, and he was actually friendly and funny. Go figure. The public persona sometimes doesn't match the man. Sometimes. Anyway, this might point toward a deeper psychological issue on my side: If you laugh at my jokes, I'll let you off the hook for most minor transgressions.
Oh, wow, you're telling me a deathcore singer became problematic? Really? Deathcore?
Forgot about this. Amazing.
Someone fucking do it already before I leave this planet.
I never posted the cello intro because it wasn't meant to be an intro but a solo in the song. What I got back was such ass, that I deep-sixed it immediately. The cellist was a nice person, but jeez, talk about not understanding the assignment. Anyway, I couldn't even use it as an intro because they didn't send back stems, just them playing for 30 seconds at the start of the song. Times like these make me feel like I'm a woeful communicator.
I don't think he's forgiven me for this. He got paid, though.
This is such a hilarious tone shift. If there's the New Yorker Eurostep, then there has to be a Black Market Eurostep where I make you think about capitalism.
Remember Threatin, the band that lied and booked a tour of Europe based on an inflated social media presence? Threatin lives the town over from me. Someone wrote a profile of him and his wife and got all the landmarks wrong. I was like, Yo, I am right here if you want this done better. I'm not going to link to that story because that would be an ass thing to do. But it sucked.
So this is where I can finally talk about Doyle. The final Black Market column was supposed to be me interviewing the one and only Doyle. I was going to ask him to guess what each band in the year-end list sounded like based only on the band name and album title. We'd yes-and his predictions, and then those would be the blurbs. The pitch got to him, but we couldn't hammer something out. This kills me. It would've been hilarious.
"Don't you dare email me after we're done here."
I won't disclose what I was paid that month for the column because, while I don't care, I don't know how Stereogum feels about it, but suffice to say I absolutely lost my ass.