The Imperfection Artist: Amanda Palmer Reflects on a Long Career of Pissing People Off

Amanda Gaiman Palmer counts off her controversies like battle scars. There was the outrage following the release of her song Oasis, in which she narrated the act of getting an abortion after being sexually assaulted at a house party. Then there was the backlash after she started using Kickstarter to crowdfund her album production costs, and the flak when—after raising $1.2 million through that enterprise—she offered to pay volunteer musicians nothing but hugs and beer.

There was the time she penned a poem to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the men responsible for the 2013 Boston marathon bombings. There was the time she said Donald Trump was going to make punk rock great again, via a questionable allusion to Weimar Republic Germany. And then there was the time she found herself in the eye of a Twitter shitstorm after publicly admonishing mainstream media outlets for not reviewing her latest album, There Will Be No Intermission.

Suffice to say she’s no stranger to a scandal. But after nearly 20 years in the spotlight, Amanda Palmer is still figuring out how to navigate the minefield of public life: how to manage success, and practice humility, and repay her legions of diehard fans for their unwavering loyalty. She is many things—singer, author, performance artist, TED talker, and former frontwoman of cabaret punk band The Dresden Dolls—but depending on who you ask, Palmer can more broadly be defined in just one of two ways: as a brilliant, fearless visionary who continues to push the boundaries; or a self-indulgent provocateur who doesn’t know where to draw the line.

In the lead-up to her appearance at Australian arts and music festival Mona Foma, VICE caught up with the polarising figure to discuss how she handles criticism, what she thinks of cancel culture, and how she’s managed to fashion a career out of making public mistakes.

VICE: Hi Amanda. You’re going to be in Australia in January to perform your new album, There Will Be No Intermission —which you crowdfunded, like much of your other work. Are you happy with the way that album's been received? And how do you gauge success in a piece of work that you've both self released and essentially given away for free?
Amanda Palmer: I'm so glad you asked that, because that's a really important question and not one that I get asked. It's important because the way I gauge success has evolved so radically over the years. I remember putting out those first few Dresden Dolls records and really deeply caring about chart position and album sales. Then I remember putting out my first solo record, and my first crowdfunded record, and starting to understand that there was a more important kind of success that had a different measurement.

The interesting thing about this album is that I didn't just make it with crowdfunding, I made it with patronage, which is even more extreme than crowdfunding because the people who are my patrons—15,000 of them—are not just in it to get a single product; they are in it for life. They are in it to support whatever artistic path I’m going to take. And that has completely revolutionised the way I have thought about what a good song is and what a good record is.

My ego often gets the best of me and I can switch into popularity contest mode on my bad days—but on a good day, which is most days, I am really able to see that I've drained myself of most of the Kool-Aid that believed success was something doled out by critics, and sales numbers, and labels. This is the first record I've put out that I believed in so wholeheartedly that the reviews really didn't matter and the reception of the album from my community was truly all I cared about. And that is a gift I wish I could give to every fucking songwriter and artist out there.

How do you respond to negativity, or criticism in general, toward the things you make, or say, or do?
I have been a touring artist for 20 years. I have experienced a lot of negativity, from the very first review of The Dresden Dolls, and I never knew that it was going to be an important part of this job: to learn to withstand and sit with criticism. But I learned that very quickly and very early on. And one of the things that I am proudest of in the course of my career is the fact that I have made a practice of sitting with the discomfort that criticism can bring, and really trying to figure out what to do with it.

Learning from it.
Right. Because sometimes criticism can simply be destructive. You know, the "You are just a fat fucking cunt and cannot fucking sing" variety. I've gotten that criticism time and time again. But the other kinds of criticism, especially the gentle criticism that comes from within my own community or my own industry, has again and again forged me into being a kinder, more compassionate, more open-minded person. There is absolutely no doubt about that. I have literally made a living for years out of exploring my own imperfections artistically. Like if I had an alternate job description on my business card, that is what the business card would say: "imperfection artist." And that also means that you move through some incredibly uncomfortable moments.

But I can't imagine, at this point, turning into a different kind of artist who doesn't lean into and grapple with these topics. It has become more and more a trademark of my songwriting and my career: that I try to face myself and artistically make something out of what I find.

As an artist who has attracted so much controversy throughout their career, what's your view on cancel culture?
That's a good question. I think even using the term "cancel culture" can itself be very dangerous, because it minimises the importance of what is shifting right now in general consciousness. Especially in America and in the UK, there is a massive reckoning regarding injustice, inequality, race, misogyny—you name it. And I think cancel culture, as you are referring to it, is a massive growing pain that points to a larger progress. But it's sloppy.

I have always been a defender of freedom of speech. But I am also constantly questioning and trying to right-size what freedom of speech means in 2019 versus 2012 versus 1863. And I have seen so many voices from across the spectrum wander away from the conversation just because of exhaustion and fear, and I get personally frustrated wondering sometimes who is left in the conversation when X number of feminists have just decided to leave Twitter because it's too punishing and too exhausting and too toxic.

I think the question itself brings up a crazy question, which is: how do we even dig our way out of this one? And I don't know.

Do you ever feel threatened by this “reckoning”, or scared that you might not be able to say certain things or express yourself in certain ways? Is that a fear?
I don't think it would be quite right to call it a fear.

Well does it come into your thought process before you say or do certain things? Is it something that you feel like you have to negotiate or be cautious of?
Well of course it does, but I think that is true of literally any public person with a platform. This is something that [my husband] Neil [Gaiman] and I spend a lot of time discussing, because we have both constantly adjusted and fine-tuned our approach to public conversations in order to address and accommodate what we feel is needed. And the interesting thing about that is we both work across so many different kinds of media. There are books, there are novels, there are blogs, there are tweets, there are songs, there are gigantic theatres, there are teeny little bars. And every single one of these delivery systems has its own code of conduct.

One of the most fascinating parts of my career has been navigating the code-switching between what is called for in a theatre versus what is called for on the Internet. And sometimes I feel like a lot of my career has been about learning nine different languages; how to speak.

I mean God, I remember the first time I went on Facebook I was horrified, because the rules were so different from Twitter and I didn't know them; I had to learn them. I had to learn a new etiquette and a new culture and a new language. That is just a salient point of our culture nowadays as we all try to navigate the Internet and what it means to our communities and to our artists and to the people who are trying to use these ways of speaking.

I guess one potential consequence of cancel culture or boycotting is it doesn't always give people that chance to learn. Is that ever something you're afraid of? That people might shut you out and not give you the opportunity to learn from certain mistakes or missteps?
One of the things that I have always found incredible about my community is how resilient they are. Because my community have been following me since the dawn of the Dresden Dolls, through the controversy with the song Oasis, through the controversy with using Kickstarter, through the controversy with volunteer musicians, through the controversy with the Boston bombing, through the controversy with saying that Donald Trump was going to make punk rock great again, and again and again and again—all of those moments just solidified a long term relationship.

I am not in a short term relationship with my patrons. There are 15,000 people who, despite the fact that I may be careless with language, or careless with my ego, or any of those things, the fundamental thread that connects us is that they know I am imperfect and I continue to work and grow. And in that sense, my relationship with my audience most resembles an actual relationship. Like a relationship that you would see between two human beings, where you take turns fucking up and growing, instead of preening narcissistically at one another that everything is fantastic.

One of the things I really love is that my conversation with my community has been double-sided. It has been an artistic one—like when I write really openly about abortion, and miscarriage, and cancer, and grief—and then there's the human side of the conversation, where everyone is basically in my kitchen with me watching me produce this work and going through the much more human side of the process where merchandise gets lost, and tour dates get shifted around, and Twitter kerfuffles come and go. In that sense my community doesn't resemble an audience as much as a family, where they're actually in it with me instead of standing there with their arms crossed.

Amanda Palmer will be performing at Mona Foma festival in January 2020. Details here.

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