BULLETT

I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things, but on a scale of 1 to bogus it rates fairly high that Animal Collective’s Deakin took almost $26,000 in a Kickstarter fund that literally never led to anything tangible for the dozens of backers who thought they might be getting some cool swag related to a trip he’d intended to take to Mali in order to play an international music festival. And I hardly want to whinge about protecting the consumer rights of AnCo fans, but this is America: When you promise something, you’d better deliver. But today, Deakin explained the misstep in an interview with Pitchfork: All of the money didn’t go toward funding a really cool trip to Africa, but instead a sizable charitable donation to TEMEDT, a Mali organization. That’s a pretty alright explanation! And possibly an objectively better use for the money than the production of some hand-drawn liner notes. Still, it might’ve been appreciated more before a few years had gone by. As he says:

The gifts were supposed to be based around the music that I had been writing at that time, and when I came back, I personally felt really dissatisfied with it. For me, as an artist– whether or not people can be sympathetic to this or not– it’s just been a much slower process to do things on my own than with the band.

When in doubt, claim artistic privilege. Which isn’t to be a snarky snark dipshit about a genuinely difficult issue to resolve that probably weighed on his conscience for quite some time, but really: It was months and months of non-communication before the Amanda Palmer hubbub got people to start thinking about other ill-completed Kickstarter promises. As for when the project will be completed?

I promise that for the rest of year my only two priorities will be to finish this and to be on tour with Animal Collective. I will keep you updated monthly on what is going on.

So, never.