Actually, Barry Schmaltz is a lot more than just my boorish alter ego. He is the key player in my quest to unify my entire catalog with a common contextual thread, namely, music from other worlds. Not like Venus or Mars, as he says, but other versions of Earth, with different histories and different songs. And one might imagine that the songs from other worlds might be of the same caliber of music that hit songs from our universe are. Maybe so. We'll never know, because Barry Schmaltz, this world's one and only multiversal disc jockey/promoter, has terrible taste in music. The artists he finds for us to listen to may be popular in a world next door, but they're just awful over here. Nevertheless, if every song that could ever be recorded has already been recorded somewhere, it stands to reason that if a song exists, it might be popular somewhere, because in a seemingly infinite number of universes, some of those worlds would have popularized some of those songs. Very many, perhaps. Furthermore, why not postulate that some of the songs I have created here also exist Somewhere Else? And that they're popular over there?
I also conceived of a vast conspiracy wherein XM Radio was involved in bringing exact duplicates of hit songs we have here over from other worlds where the songs sound exactly the same, but since the artists are different, no royalties are paid. If you have two groups, one named, say, The Beatles, and another named The Brittles, wouldn't it be a lot cheaper to just play Brittles tunes and not pay anyone? But how is that possible?, you might ask. Well, if Barry Schmaltz has a multiversal radio receiver, he could hear all the tunes from all the other worlds and record the ones he likes and bring them to us. I enjoy imagining that he does exactly that. And if a seemingly infinite number of possible variations of reality can be imagined, it can just as easily be imagined that in some universe, perhaps one quite close to this one, a version of Barry Schmaltz is actually already doing this sort of thing. Which means that my music may end up being wildly popular in some other universe.
That is my vision. I have created Barry Schmaltz and enlisted his help in the hope that he will make me a multiversal musical icon.
I also conceived of a vast conspiracy wherein XM Radio was involved in bringing exact duplicates of hit songs we have here over from other worlds where the songs sound exactly the same, but since the artists are different, no royalties are paid. If you have two groups, one named, say, The Beatles, and another named The Brittles, wouldn't it be a lot cheaper to just play Brittles tunes and not pay anyone? But how is that possible?, you might ask. Well, if Barry Schmaltz has a multiversal radio receiver, he could hear all the tunes from all the other worlds and record the ones he likes and bring them to us. I enjoy imagining that he does exactly that. And if a seemingly infinite number of possible variations of reality can be imagined, it can just as easily be imagined that in some universe, perhaps one quite close to this one, a version of Barry Schmaltz is actually already doing this sort of thing. Which means that my music may end up being wildly popular in some other universe.
That is my vision. I have created Barry Schmaltz and enlisted his help in the hope that he will make me a multiversal musical icon.