Do you care what bank your pizza shop borrowed money from to start that business? Probably not, right? Never occurred to you. The potential pizza shop owner found a bank he felt comfortable with, who offered him terms he could live with, and he went with them. Now you eat the product that initial loan helped finance, but the bank does not impact the taste of the pizza.

Labels are banks. For some of us, they are also friends. And for others they are part of an overall aesthetic. But at the end of the day they are a financial partner you borrow money from. A bank.

I want to make this clear because there seems to be a lot of confusion over why bands pick labels. On my band’s website, http://selfdefensemusic.com , we get questioned about every label we choose to work with. “Why do you associate yourself with LABEL XY, they put out records for INSERT DISMISSIVE COMMENT ABOUT LABEL LISTENERSHIP. Get a clue!”

In the view of some people, we’re too indie a band for our label home, Deathwish Inc. And, in the view of other people, we’re too gritty for labels we’ve partnered with on one-off releases (RFC, for example). Some people believe us to be “cool” and wonder why we would choose to work with UNCOOL LABEL YX.

Here’s the thing: Whatever adjectives the listener uses to define us, that’s his/her interpretation and not how we view ourselves. We view ourselves as musicians. And we rely on labels to fund our recording and distribution. We rely on banks.

And when the bank manager shakes my hand and tells me he believes in my pizza parlor and he wants it to succeed not just so I can pay him back, but because he thinks the world needs more pizza parlors, I DON’T FUCKING TURN HIS MONEY DOWN BECAUSE HIS BANK DOESN’T USE A COOL FONT FOR IT’S LETTERHEAD. I DON’T TELL HIM TO FUCK HIMSELF BECAUSE HIS BANK HAS AN UNCOOL NAME. AND I DON’T LET THE OPINIONS OF PEOPLE OUTSIDE THE DEAL POISON MY VIEW OF THE BANK.

I take that dude’s money and I make pizza.

Some people want to define themselves by the label they’re affiliated with. Maybe they believe it will help them get ass or maintain a cooler-than-thou status among their peers. I don’t exactly know their motivations. But I do know those motivations, whatever they are, have nothing to do with music.

The labels we’ve gotten on best with have been our friends. We like what they stand for (almost uniformly the thing they stand for is “doing whatever they want”). But just like all my friends, I don’t feel the need to see eye-to-eye with them on every topic. I don’t go through my friend’s iPods and choose not to interact with them based on what I find. I don’t do that with label rosters either. Come at me like a peer, show me respect, offer me the resources to make art- I’ma find a way to work with you.

To bands: Work with labels who treat you like you want to be treated. Define yourself, don’t rely on a label.

To fans: Fuck off. Smart musicians work with people who give them the ability to make music. They don’t choose partners based on the fickle preferences of listeners who need a label to complete their fragile sense of self.

To labels we’ve worked with: We appreciate the shit out of you for giving us resources to do the thing that makes us happy. May you all grow horns and put out uncool shit I would never listen to. I don’t give a shit because you’ve done right by me and that’s all I ever asked of you.