(This is part of the Selected Interviews series. More of these can be found in the Words section!)

Kléo Michel-Valentin SPARK: “So here’s something you and I have struggled with a lot – with me having been your publicist, and living in London where social media has been so accepted as this almost inherent aspect of being a musician – and you’re coming from a very different background, where for a lot of your audience, social media has long been treated as kind of a joke – we’ve always tried to figure out a realistic way for you to use social media as Cannonball Statman, to promote your work – and what we settled on was that it wasn’t actually useful at all.

And a number of people asked me about it, when you pulled the plug on your social media. There was this attitude like what you’ve described, this pathologization of our decision around that – “is Cannonball Statman crazy? Why is he not on social media?”

Some of these people were genuinely shocked to find out it was, in large part, your publicist’s decision to pull the plug on your social media! Some of them seriously believed you’d had a psychotic break. I said, “actually, he’s never had a psychotic break. You might remember, he’s quite hard to break.”

Now these people think I’ve gone a bit “mad” – and I’m starting to think the same of them.

So I was wondering, could you explain this to us?”

Cannonball Statman: “Well, Hard to Break is the title of my album you ran the publicity campaign for, so that was very clever of you – this is why you were such a great publicist.

Now with regard to this question – as a writer, the words people decide to use are interesting to me – so someone is asking you about a business decision we made, and they’re using medical language and sometimes even outright slurs to imply there’s something “off” about our decision.

And plenty of artists are leaving social media these days, and people in the music scene are spending less and less time on it – so the person who asks this kind of question has a lot more to answer for than we do!

But I like to tell this story, because it’s an interesting one – so I’ll tell it anyway.

My whole history with social media started in my mid-teens, and I mostly only used it to share my work and signal boost my friends’ work – I used it a lot in the 2010s to promote my New York gigs and to build my networks for organising international tours.

And what I found was that the New York scene only ever took it seriously for finding out about gigs, and maybe for finding out what an artist’s political views were, to make sure they weren’t promoting fascism or something similarly horrible – the New York scene has a racism problem, especially with more rich kids moving in from the suburbs and occasionally bringing their White supremacist politics with them – and, sometimes coming in because they want to get away from those politics, but they don’t have the life experience yet to know what to do in practise.

So if you’re in the New York scene, and you speak up for the Black community or for the Palestinian community, that means a lot for your fans who just want to know they’ll be safe at your gigs – we have White supremacist street gangs in New York, and sometimes Zionists and other militant racists, so people want to know you’re not tolerating that sort of thing. Social media can be a good way to communicate that.

Around the mid-2010s, it gradually stopped being useful for promoting events, to the point where already around 2016, really no one who came to the gigs I was playing at or attending was coming from a social media invite or post.

And that was true across the board – not just in New York, but even in cities like London that maintained this insistence on social media promo as a kind of sacred cow. The only real way to bring people to gigs was word of mouth, having people message each other directly and tell each other in person on a local scene – which, to begin with, is more the work of a local promoter than a musician.

As someone who’s worked as both a gig promoter and a musician, I would say it’s not the musician’s job to promote the gig – it’s the job of the promoter.

A lot of so-called “promoters” in places like London and New York will tell musicians it’s the musician’s job to promote the gig – to the point that this became conventional wisdom for some people in the industry – but what it really means is this promoter just isn’t very good at their job.

Of course I also promote my own gigs – but why would you rely on me to do the bulk of that if you’re the promoter?

It’s common sense – even if you’re a serious music fan who’s interested in new music and some musician you’ve never heard of tells you “hey, come to my show, I’m really good” – especially in a place like New York or London that’s full of scams and all kinds of other bullshit – you’ll be like “yeah, no.”

And if it’s a musician you are already a fan of or at least vaguely have heard of, then you’re like “why are you the one telling me this? Shouldn’t you be rehearsing for the gig or writing songs or doing something else that pertains to – um – your actual job?”

But if the word about the gig is primarily being spread by a promoter – someone whose job really is to promote live music events and whose name is trusted by music fans in that specific niche in that area for putting on good gigs – then people on the scene are like “yeah, this sounds good, I’ll spread the word about it and I’ll also bring all my friends who like this kind of music” – and the word seriously spreads, and then you get a successful gig.

That’s always been my experience, both as a musician and as a New York promoter.

So I was thinking about all this – especially because I was even running into these technical problems where I wasn’t even able to access my accounts for extended periods of time, starting in late 2017, right in the middle of my multi-year world tour.

That was specifically during the 3-month East Asian leg of the tour – and in East Asia at the time, people were straight-up telling me “if you’re not on social media in East Asia, you’re dead.”

I proved them all wrong, by doing almost all of that leg of the tour without access to social media. It turned out to be one of the more successful legs of the tour!

Several months and two continents later, when I was able to access my accounts again, I thought about all this was just like – “why am I on social media at all?”

And – in the middle of my 3-year world tour – I quit social media.

My tour continued – I kept doing gigs all over the world.

Without social media.

And as you’ll recall – I didn’t return to social media until 2022!

But as you’ll also recall from having been my publicist for a bit in the summer of 2023 – my return to social media was not the advice of anyone in the industry.

It was actually from a document I signed at the psychiatric clinic in rural Mexico where I’d been held for 3 months and subject to some serious human rights abuses, as we’ve discussed – this document, titled “Proyecta de la Vida” – “Life Project” in English – is something they have each individual patient sign as a condition for release from the clinic, and it’s different for each patient.

Normally, your Life Project says you’re supposed to swear off social media for your first 6 months outside the clinic, because they actually understand social media as something that can be harmful to your health.

But because the clinic had received word from people in my life about how I hadn’t been on social media for years, and how they found that odd – the clinic gave me the opposite mandate, which was that I had to promptly rejoin social media, and even to get back in contact with certain people who I’d cut ties with years ago in response their abusive behaviour – because they saw my absence from social media and my lack of contact with former abusers as signs of a tendency to isolate myself from society or even as a kind of paranoia.

Which is just absolutely bizarre.

Social media is notoriously antisocial. Abusive behaviour is inherently antisocial.

When I left social media and cut ties with my former abusers, that’s when – for the first time in my life – I actually joined the rest of society and started connecting with my fellow human beings outside the context of these kinds of abusive relationship dynamics that had been playing out over the course of my life.

People who’ve left these kinds of abusive relationships will know about this – when you’re in a relationship like that, whether it’s a familial relationship or a romantic relationship or even a platonic relationship – even if you do manage to also have plenty of friendships and outside influences that are “non-toxic” – every moment of your life, everything you do, everything you experience, is being processed within the mental bars of the prison of that relationship.

And it can take years, even decades, to release yourself from that prison even after you’ve cut all ties with that person on the physical level. Certain predators have a tendency to hook themselves into your life in these really deep and elaborate ways, and it’s a whole process getting out of that.

But you still have to do it – and that’s what I did.

So when they had me sign a document that said I would be locked up again in a physical prison if I didn’t return to that mental and spiritual prison of social media and abusive relationships – yeah, I signed it – and, at the risk of sounding like a total sell-out – I did in fact “play the game” for a little while.

I did rejoin social media. I used it to promote my albums and tours and some of the other work I was doing at the time. After the escalations of the ongoing Nakba in October 2023, I also used social media to share my perspectives on Palestinian liberation that you later shared on the blog, and I used it to signal boost Palestinian voices and other folks on the front lines of various struggles.

And once again, I found it to be completely futile in terms of actually getting shit done.

Attendance at the gigs was great, and none of it came from my social media posts.

People are buying and streaming my music and playing it on the radio, and none of these people have been finding out about it through social media.

Whenever I posted anything on social media, it got “likes” and nice comments, almost entirely from people who already knew my work – almost always from having seen me perform on stage somewhere. But none of this social media activity ever went anywhere.

So – though you were no longer working as a publicist, I generally trust your takes on these things and we’re on a similar wavelength – and you and I decided to draw up our own agreement.

In June 2024, there was the release of Killing The Flowers Will Not Delay Spring, which is a benefit compilation by over a dozen queer New York artists for the Freedom Theatre in Jenin that features a new recording of my song “Henry Hudson” as its lead track – a huge honour since I’m not even based in New York any more.

And that’s a compilation to benefit a cause that’s near and dear to my heart, and it has no financial benefit for me, just for people in Palestine who want to channel their hopes and dreams of a better future into performance – as a recovering theatre kid and as someone whose music still appeals to theatre kids today, this is inevitably going a project that my audience is interested in.

Also important to note, the in-person release party for the compilation was a couple days after the release of the compilation itself.

So we drew up an agreement, that for the days between the digital release and the in-person release party, I’d promote that compilation on social media in all the ways you’re “supposed to” – posts, direct messages, “statuses”, “stories”, all that – and if I could get one person to buy that compilation to support Palestinian kids via my social media campaign, I’d stay on social media.

If not, I’d quit social media.

And we also agreed – no matter what I do, I’m never allowed to be locked up in a psychiatric clinic or anything of the sort at any point in time and space, in any dimension or universe – because my human rights were violated. People died in that place, and we were routinely trafficked to perform unpaid labour under threat of being caged.

So anything drawn up with the clinic or anyone involved with that – including, but not limited to, the “Proyecta de la Vida” – is hereby fully and totally rendered null and void as it is understood to be a violation of my human rights.

Well – needless to say, I got some “likes” and some nice comments and messages on social media in response to my campaign to promote the compilation.

And – not a single purchase. So I guess no one on social media really “liked” any of what I was doing enough to actually give a few dollars to Palestinian kids.

So – the night of the in-person release party, I permanently deleted all my social media accounts.

The next morning, someone emailed me a question completely unrelated to Palestine or social media or any of that, and I briefly responded to the question – and this was one of the first emails I sent after putting the link to the compilation in my little email signature – and within a few hours, this person had bought the compilation.

In fact, he was one of the first people to even buy the compilation, when it had been out for over 72 hours at that point – despite over a dozen New York artists who are super talented, well-known, and genuinely beloved in the scene being on the compilation, and Palestine now having become a genuinely popular cause in the New York scene.

So obviously social media is just not where anything is really happening any more.

People might be spending time on it, but where is the energy? What does it do?

Email is where it’s happening – websites are where it’s happening – maybe blogs and message boards are where it’s happening in some places.

And much more so, real life is where it’s happening – that’s where people are listening to my music on stage and on the radio and in their cars and on their sound systems – people buy CDs and vinyl and various other merch at gigs and maybe in stores, but really not so much online any more.

The only thing that’s really happening in terms of culture these days on the fucking Internet is AI and similarly low-engagement art that is so far removed from anything I do or have any interest in doing – when it comes to music, the Internet is primarily for background music – it’s just not for the kind of thing we do.

And of course, Internet culture will change, as it always does, and maybe people will become more interested in the kinds of things we’re putting on here than they are in what’s happening on social media.

But most of what we’re doing these days is still about in-person performances and releases we’re selling in physical formats – CDs, books, zines, clothing, even cassettes and VHS tapes – we did these limited edition cassettes and VHS tapes in the early 2010s and there was a good audience for that sort of thing in some places, it seems like there’s even more of a market for it now since a lot of our friends are releasing on those formats again.

It varies depending on where you are – in France, they’re not into these formats at all, as we discovered when Jason (Trachtenburg) brought some of his cassettes and vinyl releases with him on our Europe tour last year – but there’s a lot of it in the underground scenes in the US and the UK.

For the most part, the Internet just isn’t the place where music happens – and music is my career – so unless I decided to have a sudden and total change in my career path and become a social media influencer, I’m not going to be on social media.”

K: “In fact, I’m not on social media either – I joined for a few months when I was running the publicity campaign for your record last year, and to be honest, I mostly just received a lot of spam – and people wanting to hire a publicist without even bothering to research the artists I work with – and some good feedback from friends and fans of yours, but they all know your work anyway, so I didn’t feel like I was doing my actual job, which was to spread the word about your new record to people who didn’t already know about it.

Outside social media, the publicity campaign brought some good attention to the record – we had a bit of good press and radio play leading up to the tour – but as I noted in my blog post at the end of 2023, you ended up having far more radio play and media coverage simply via the attention from the tour itself, which I take zero credit for – you were the one who put that together, along with Albert Portavella who sorted the Catalan dates.”

C: “I think it’s more accurate to say live music just has an attractive energy to it – I mean, Kléo, you put together a great press release, that’s something that can get some people pretty excited and it’s made every journalist’s life so much easier when they cover my work – instead of wading through endless photos of dogs and random snacks we’re eating on tour, they have all the relevant, important information in one place – thanks to your work on that, publications are able to include information about my work that had never really been made clear – one of the blogs even mentioned the poetry comics I made with my grandpa when I was a kid, which is an important part of my background, and it’s even led to some offers to show those comics as part of the centennial events for him in 2025.

So don’t be too hard on yourself, is what I’m saying.

And, you know something that gets a lot of people excited is live performance. Or a really good recording.

The music itself does a lot of the work. When I ask people at my gigs how they found out about the gig, it’s hardly ever because of anyone’s social media marketing – it’s almost always just word of mouth, someone told them about my music and it sounded like something they wanted to hear, so they bought tickets to see me.

And people are always telling me about new music, too – that’s what brings me out to gigs!

I’m always asking other music fans about this, and that’s honestly what brings people out, at the end of the day – occasionally people will follow some of the artists they like on social media, but even that has become kind of unusual lately.

I’ve noticed, even most of these people we talk to who have this rigid dogma about social media where they tell us, “this is how it’s done, this is where you have to be, you’re (insert random ableist slur) if you’re not on social media” are actually not paying attention to the musicians they like on social media either – it’s become like a ghost town for a lot of people – and it increasingly seems that a lot of people, both within and beyond our industry, are just imagining there are millions of these mythical, “ideal social media user” types out there who actually use social media to find out about new music or to follow musicians they like.

But this type of person is extremely rare, in our experience! And I know I have some fans who are like this, so I didn’t want to leave them behind in leaving social media – still, I had so many technical issues with social media that made it increasingly difficult to justify staying on there, it was taking so much time and energy just to log in to my account when I would get locked out because I was logging in from other countries on tour.

And, I realised that even the really dedicated social media fans in our audience are also mostly following our work through our email list, or a platform like YouTube or Spotify – it’s more that they liked seeing some of the more random, zany things I would post on there or the posts about social issues – we’re bringing more of all that to the website now, thankfully!

I also still post some zaniness on YouTube and TikTok when I have the energy to – I’d say those platforms are a much better fit for musicians, because they’re built around video instead of still images – just like our photographer friends and model friends get a lot more use out of social media platforms, because the culture of social media platforms is mostly based around still images now.

So, you know – we’re all going to keep making music! We’re just not going to do it in a place that’s become a ghost town for us.”