‘Buyer’s Market’: the most morally bankrupt album in history?
It’s easy to say you love radical, boundary-pushing art until you actually come across radical, boundary-pushing art.
That’s when you discover that pieces of art created to shock and appal you might just shock and appal you, and, what’s more, they feel like they should.
That’s the thing about engaging with pieces of art that were controversial half a century ago: history has proven that Reign in Blood, or Lolita, or The Satanic Verses or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer had genuine artistic value, and thus, the panic around them on release seems quaint now. We don’t understand what it was like to be there at the time.
To be there at the time was to see these pieces of art in their least acceptable, least contextualised form. When the language used to talk about them had barely been invented, let alone popularised. Take Reign in Blood as a perfect example. Today, we can talk about it as arguably the best thrash metal album of all time, and an examination of evil throughout history. To listen to it at the time would have been to hear an explosion of vulgar noise with a guy screaming about Nazis in the middle of it.
At the time, it would have sounded like a cynical exercise in shock tactics at best and nakedly fascist at worst. An exploitative, worthless celebration of all the worst aspects of humanity that has no artistic merit whatsoever. We know that’s not the case now, but there would have been several voices saying that at the time of its release. There are still several voices saying the same and worse about the album Buyer’s Market, an experimental album by the writer Peter Sotos.
This may make me a hypocrite, this may not, but I find it a lot more difficult to argue with those allegations when it comes to Buyer’s Market.
What is ‘Buyer’s Market’?
We might as well rip the band-aid off early, and brace yourself, because things are going to get dark. Buyer’s Market is about sexual assault, with particular focus on the sexual assault of children. This has been a recurring theme of Sotos’ writing throughout his career, having got his start writing for true crime magazines in the 1980s that read a lot more like fanzines about the worst people to ever live than anything else.
Having dabbled in music as well as writing, Sotos made the album Buyer’s Market in 1992. It’s an avant-garde record of sound collages built around spoken word samples from parents, law enforcement officers and survivors all involved with sexual assault. Now, like pretty much all of Sotos’ work, it’s not just easy to write this off as disgusting shock tactics; there’s a fairly convincing argument for it being that too. Especially when you look at the heinous, fawning way that Sotos has written about the perpetrators of crimes exactly as bad in the past.
Yet, if you ask him, this is a work of art about the way that the media sensationalises and exploits the trauma and suffering of others. That there’s really no difference between the contents of this album or any of his work and the countless TV shows, news reports and documentaries that depict similar acts with similarly ghoulish relish. These quotes weren’t taken from Soto’s sources; he was uncovering nothing that someone hadn’t thought to sell first. If one is ok, then why isn’t the other?
Perhaps the most honest answer is to concede that he has a point, yet know that in making something like Buyer’s Market, he’s not really doing anything other than contribute to that culture. Sure, he may feel that he’s making a point about the culture of voyeurism that surrounds true crime in macro and child sex crimes in micro. Yet if someone simple wants to get a grim thrill hearing about the gory details of some of the worst crimes known to man, Buyer’s Market does that just as well.
Knowing that there’s a problem doesn’t exempt you from being a part of the problem, and while he might have some cogent points, Peter Sotos is very much part of the problem.