Music

Price-gouging pharma exec revealed as a wolf in emo clothing

by Jesse Locke

Say hello to the new face of evil, who might look a lot like you.

The New York Times recently introduced the world at large to Martin Shkreli, the 32-year-old founder of Turing Pharmaceuticals, who notoriously purchased the drug Deraprim (used to treat parasitic infections in babies, AIDS patients, cancer patients, and malaria sufferers) and raised its price from $13.50 to $750 per tablet. Now, new facts have revealed that Shkreli is also a major investor in Thursday/No Devotion frontman Geoff Rickly’s Collect Records.

An article from Bullett Media broke the story of the young millionaire’s involvement in the label, which currently houses artists such as Wax Idols, Nothing, Black Clouds, and Cities Aviv. It also points out Shkreli’s love of emo and pop-punk in the form of band shirts, live photos, and other weirdness like his purchase of Kurt Cobain’s credit card.

A damning Gawker piece also details how a previous business deal gone awry led to Shkreli’s ugly online harassment of a co-worker’s entire family. This is essentially the 2015 real-life equivalent of Mr. Burns’ disguising himself to come onboard a Greenpeace ship. “It was I, you fools! The man you trusted wasn’t Wavy Gravy at all. And all this time I’ve been smoking harmless tobacco!”

Before the knives are sharpened for Rickly and other artists of the Collect Records roster, it should be made clear that they were completely unaware of their angel investor’s background. Members of Wax Idols and Nothing have sounded off on their anger at the revelation, while also rushing to Rickly’s defence. “Geoff did NOT understand what kind of person he was dealing with,” says Nothing frontman Dominic Palermo. “I vouch for him 100%.”

In an interview with Noisey Rickly admits to his naive loyalty after meeting Shkreli on Twitter and becoming business partners. While he wanted to see the positivity of a label with the power in the hands of the artists, he now sees the source of its success as “completely heartbreaking” and cannot imagine a foreseeable future for Collect Records.

“I can’t see my future at all in the label,” says Rickly. “I have to see what the bands want first, and see if there is any meaning or any mission following all of this. More than anything, I want the bands to see that I hold art as the guiding force in my life. Ultimately I see this going in the same way it always does, where all the artists get blamed for everything and capitalism is never held accountable. I really think that if Collect is going to be scrutinized as being capitalism, but that is how music survives. I’m not making excuses for what has happened, but there is no corner of the music industry that doesn’t live and breathe from subsidies from business. It’s reductive and hypocritical to hold us and only us accountable though, we are all at fault in some greater way.”