Everything You Know About This Band Is Wrong

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Here at NPR, we get hundreds of press releases every day – pleas from publicists imploring us to cover their client's most excellent music. They're sort of like commercials to the media trying to convince us to buy something. We're used to them being full of hyperbole, but recently we got one that seemed kind of ... different. When I started asking around about it, the story just got weirder.

I got this email from a publicist, and started to look through it because I'd heard some of the band's music. It's all instrumental. But I didn't know anything more than that about Delicate Steve. At the top of the email was a sentence that didn't make a whole lot of sense: "The critics unilaterally concur: Delicate Steve is a band who creates music." What? I kept going, and then I get to, "Like a hydro-electric Mothra rising from the ashes of an African village burned to the ground by post-rock minotaurs." THEN there's this line about Delicate Steve sounding like the band My Bloody Valentine, but without the guitars. This is what My Bloody Valentine sounds like.

That is a lot of guitars. Then I hit a name I recognized. The press release says the band was discovered by Luaka Bop's A&R man, Wills Glasspiegel. I know that guy, and he is not Luaka Bop's A&R man.

When I asked Wills what was going on, he told me the whole bio is fake, that it was concocted by music writer Chuck Klosterman. The same Chuck Klosterman who worked at Spin magazine in the 1990s, and who wrote a memoir about loving hair metal, and a book about driving across the country to see the sites of rock n roll's most famous deaths.

So I emailed Klosterman, and then went to talk with him about what happened. "I describe Steve as sort of this really intense perfectionist," Klosterman told me, "who has dedicated entire swaths of time to working on, like, one chord he heard on a Jandek record."

The bio also describes Steve as "a polymath who plays over 40 instruments." I called Steve Marion, who's on tour right now. We spoke while he was standing in front of Bruce Lee's grave, in Seattle. I asked him how many instruments he plays.

"Probably not 40. I couldn't even name 40 musical instruments," he says. "I don't even know if there are 40 musical instruments."

It turns out this whole thing wasn't Klosterman's idea, or Marion's, but actually the brainchild of one Yale Evelev, who runs the label Luaka Bop.

He says he hired Klosterman because Delicate Steve is a brand new band that makes music without lyrics, and he wanted music writers to pay attention ("Can Delicate Steve become the wordless New Jersey U2?" writes Klosterman in the release). "I've watched how writers write about things," Evelev says. "[With instrumental music] they are left with just kind of describing a sound. We thought it would be interesting if we kind of came up with something that they could grab onto a little bit more."

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"And I thought, since I'm really tired of bios for bands," he says, "wouldn't it be great just to tell Chuck to write whatever the hell he wanted as a bio for the band? So I wrote him an email and I said, 'Chuck, would you do a bio for Delicate Steve? You don't have to talk to the band and you don't even have to hear the record.' He wrote me back: 'I don't do bios.' And then, 2 minutes later, he wrote back again: 'Wait a minute. Do you mean I don't have to talk to the band or listen to the record? That's AWESOME! OK, I'll do it!'"

A few music writers thought it was awesome too. They wrote about how funny the bio is. A lot of music writers ignored it – as they do most press releases. But many of the rock clubs and venues that booked Delicate Steve published the release – in full – on their web sites, no questions asked. And some people that cover music got taken, including NPR. We fell for the 40 instruments line. So were we all just lazy?

Kinda. The regurgitation of facts and stories from press releases doesn't only happen in music writing — WNYC's On The Media aired a story in March about a British web site called Churnalism where you can track the percentage of any given reported story that's lifted from a press release. To get attention for their site, the group behind Churnalism sent out a release about a garter belt for women that texts her significant other when it measures certain biological signs that she's about to cheat. The story was picked up all over the world.

"The whole idea of public relations is to stop journalism," says Klosterman. "It's to basically give journalists an opportunity to write something without really asking any critical questions or investigating at all. It's really antithetical to journalism. So that's why doing this ... I mean, I wouldn't say it's really a media hoax or something because no one in the media really cared."

I care. And I bet all of the other writers and people who buy music and tickets to shows out there who fell for this fiction care too.

Klosterman continues: "One person asked me, 'Will you feel bad if someone goes to this show or buys this record based on the fact that you wrote this fictional piece? And then you're kind of ripping them off in a way.' I'll be honest — I don't feel bad. Because to me, I've probably helped that person to learn that you should not make consumer decisions based on some random media message that someone just fabricated for no reason. And I'm just not talking about my press release, I'm kind of talking about all press releases."

Right. But one of the reasons Klosterman was able to pull this off in the first place is that we NEED stories about music, and those stories really do change how we hear the music.

Michael Beckerman is the chair of the music department at NYU. He's done research on this very subject. Five years ago, he invited a group of people to listen to a piece of music in a church in Germany. He gave program notes to half of the audience that told them the piece they were about to hear was written in a concentration camp, by a composer who was sent to Auschwitz only days later, where he died. He told the other half nothing other than the composer's name.

"Afterwards," Beckerman says, "we interviewed everybody. And the people who didn't get program notes thought it was sort of a sweet, lovely, folksy, Eastern European piece. And the people who got program notes almost uniformly tended to understand it at as one of the great tragic statements of the century."

He offers another example.

"What role would it play if I told you the title [of a piece] was called 'Dark Blue World'? And what if I further told you that it was written by a Czech jazz pianist around 1929? And what if I told you that the jazz pianist himself was nearly blind? Could see only shadows, and that 'Dark Blue World' became his kind of personal anthem?" he asks. "You might listen to it differently, knowing that this was again a fraught story of a dark blue world all put together in this world of Czech jazz. That might give you kind of an edgy way of listening to this."

But what if the story behind the music just isn't that interesting? What if Steve is just a 23-year-old from northern New Jersey who made an album in his bedroom and recruited his best friends to play it live with him?

"I called it Delicate Steve because I had a recording studio that was called Delicate Studios," says Steve Marion himself. "That's Delicate Steve. Kind of a boring story, like every other band I guess."

So somebody came up with a better story, and a few more people listened to the music than maybe would have otherwise. Was it a good-natured prank? Or a lie?

Read the whole press release below.