Telehealth, A For-Profit Company
Photo by Mikayla Neves.
In a dimly lit bar, Alexander Attitude and Kendra Cox are sitting around a table trying to win the game.
“It’s called Golf,” Alex explains as I take a seat next to him. He goes over the rules: each person has a grid of cards that they score from, and you take turns exchanging those cards with ones from the draw pile or the discard pile. Lowest score wins.
The game is typically played with six cards each, but they’re playing the nine-card variant. I don’t really get it, but maybe it’s because my brain is wiped from working at the coffee shop. All-day rushes from participants of the nearby DOTA 2 tournament had left me enervated and late to our rendezvous, so I had to rush to get here. Kendra empathizes, having trudged through a lifetime of late-night bar shifts.
I’ve never been to the Neighbor Lady Public House before, only passed it on long walks in the summer. I soon learn that we’re not in the original location. According to the couple, the place had been around for decades but had packed up and moved after they shut down during COVID. They operate now as an affixation to the giant Midtown Square Apartments at the corner of 23rd and Union, one of the gentrified cores of the Central District.
I’ve been calling these kinds of buildings “fast-casual architecture,” but Alex, a student of the field, has a more official name for them. “They’re called 5-over-1” he says, referencing the common structure of one commercial unit under five residential floors. Then he dives into the efficiency-based reasoning behind their existence, his eyes darkening as he talks.
I wasn’t sure what to expect interviewing the people behind Telehealth. I had only known them from their incredible live performance on KEXP and their viridescent Instagram presence, both of which had left an impact on me. Maybe not a wholly positive one at first, to be honest. They came across as a group of people that were “trying.” Why bother? Keep your ambition private, and broadcast your effortlessness in situ. That's what was drilled into me.
A few friends who had encountered the band (all via the same avenues of the context-free internet) had been left with a similar taste. Who were these guys? Why insist on branding themselves as a “for-profit” company? Where was the genuineness, the authenticity? Are they kidding?
The answers came pretty swiftly. In retrospect, they should have been obvious. Telehealth is of course kidding, if only to a point.
“It's a joke, but it’s not a joke,” says Kendra on their devotion to getting the coin by whatever means possible. Or, in other words: “I would love to quit my job.”
It’s a sentiment willed by virtually every single creative person forced to spend too much time and energy making ends meet, given that the current artistic climate in America simply does not allow for it without some serious backup. Many people, for many reasons, choose to hide that motivation. Alex and Kendra choose to call a spade a spade. They just happen to do it the way so many of the post-punk and new wave bands they idolize did: straddling the line between overtness and subversion.
“There's a lot of freedom in the joke,’ says Attitude, who’s clad in a turtleneck that fluctuates between blue and black depending on how the light catches it, and whose real last name is Barr.
He looks to a legacy band like Sparks as a role model. “Those guys are fucking geniuses,” he says. “They have a cult following because if you get it, you get it. If you don't, it's no big deal. But the things that they're able to say with a joke and a smile…they’re the ultra punks for that. You can say a lot more that way than you can by actually saying it straight.”
Across our sprawling conversation, we jump back and forth between who, exactly, is the butt of that joke. Several possible culprits surface, but they’re all linked to everybody’s favorite enemy (and rightfully so): the corrosive runoff from capitalism. “There is no ethical consumption in a capitalist society” becomes a refrain of Kendra’s during our chat, and the truth of it rings from every second of Telehealth’s young discography.
Take their cheekily-titled debut album, Content Oscillator, full of songs that pair 4/4 motorik and squiggly synths with Attitude’s sonorous sloganeering: twelve tracks of company-approved party music, from its song names down to its album art. More recently, a pair of songs titled “Mindtrap” and “Bitter Melody” expand even further into angular territory but remain gleefully trapped in a corporate hellscape. Those songs comprise their entry into the storied Sub Pop Singles Club; according to Attitude, they're actually demos of songs meant for an upcoming record that they then rushed for the Singles Club release, meaning that they surely dictate the path Telehealth is taking for whatever gets released next year.
Though the band's only been around for a couple of years, people seem to be catching on fast. “I think so far the gimmick has held,” says Kendra. “I think that most people really get it, and I think that most people appreciate it. Most people have a good time responding back to us, and playing into that little moment is really nice."
She's referring to the band's Instagram presence, which features posts that exploit the site's algorithm through captions that are riddled with emojis and structured like multi-level marketing accounts. It was a tactic Attitude couldn’t resist.
“If you just say, 'Hey, we have a show on Thursday, come check it out,' versus an emoji-based shit post, [the latter] gets pushed four times more,” he says about his discovery. “You kinda have to type in this dumb, stupid way. So we're embracing that. If it means that 300 people find out about our show, sure. I don't care."
He acknowledges, right afterward, how self-conscious he feels sharing his Instagram with other punk bands, feeling the eyes of judgment from behind the screen. Kendra counters him.
"The garbage is what makes it good! It kind of feels like a weird form of therapy. It’s like we’re saying, ‘I know these are things you wish you could say, but you can't say them. But also, we're not being real right now either! So let’s both just be silly and make some jokes about how everyone is poor because the capitalists are taking all of our money.’”
“That’s the thing, we’re not actually getting paid!” says Attitude. “No one’s getting paid! We don't make more money than any other band. It's not that we're actually doing the thing we say we're doing. But if the money came, we would take it! The whole message is that we’re gonna try really hard at this, we're gonna make it fun, and if you pay us, we are super down.”
In 2023, “We’d like to get paid for our work” is a perfectly reasonable statement from anybody, but it’s especially germane for two people in their thirties. It’s even more prudent for people who have each, individually, already made their mark on the city by their early twenties.
Alex didn’t start his musical career in Seattle; instead, he cut his teeth at DIY venues like Trunk Space and Modified Arts in his hometown of Phoenix. It was an interest in the general Humanities that brought him to Seattle University, where, as a freshman, he formed a band with other Seattle University undergraduates, including future Seattle Weekly editor Kelton Sears and current Telehealth drummer Ian McCutcheon. Originally dubbed Chinook Jargon and later renamed Kithkin, the group would flourish into one of the most beloved local bands of the 2010s.
The common refrain around Kithkin is that “you had to be there.” I, unfortunately, was not, but I’ve met fans so ardent that they permanently modified their bodies with tattoos bearing the band’s symbology. Footage of their live shows, including an old KEXP set recorded in 2014, reveals a hot-blooded, raw-throated energy befitting the group’s youth. That zeal feels diametrically, even comically, opposed to the cool shrewd chug of Telehealth. Similarities certainly exist though, like how both bands approach music as theatre; the members of Kithkin adopted names like Spirit Dweller and Bigfoot Wallace, and Barr has become Attitude.
Kithkin’s sudden breakup in 2015 left its devoted pocket of fans, as well as its members, adrift. McCutcheon and keyboardist Bob Martin formed side projects (Familiars and Bigfoot Wallace and His Wicked Sons, respectively) that collected their own followings. Sears, meanwhile, watched their role as an arts writer dissolve with the Weekly and eventually moved to New Orleans. Alex joined a few tours with acts like Kairos, Tomten, Deep Sea Diver, and Bryan John Appleby. For his own post-Kithkin project, however, he turned to his romantic partner.
Kendra grew up a native of Pouslbo, one of the handful of cities that line the peninsula on the west side of the Puget Sound. In high school, she befriended Meagan Grandall, who at the time had started to write singer-songwriter fare. Grandall left for SU after high school while Kendra entered the workforce, but their paths crossed again amid an upcoming Battle of the Bands. “She was in her senior year and she wanted a backing band, and I had a drum set,” Kendra recalls. “We came in second.” From there, the duo formed Lemolo, a dream-pop act with a rock edge (the name, coincidentally, is a Chinook Jargon word meaning “wild and untamed”) and surged in popularity within a few years.
The act is still playing today and is far bigger than ever, but it’s currently a Grandall solo project. A press release at the time stated that the pair split amicably in the summer of 2013.
From the moment they started dating over ten years ago, Kendra and Alex fell into a musical chemistry that has persisted ever since. “It's weird because I don't think either of us really sought it out,” says Alex. “It was more like, ‘Oh, Kendra's the best drummer for this, we should just start playing together.’ And then it was easy.”
They formed their first band together shortly after Kithkin’s dissolution in 2015. The act, KA, was short-lived; they played around town, but only wisps of their existence remained online, and they only released a single song. Titled “Indecision,” the track is a slice of gothy doom-punk that's markedly heavier than Telehealth’s sound but still feels oddly foundational.
Relative to the short lifespans customary to underground music, Alex and Kendra are lifers of the scene. Since the beginning of the last decade, they’ve watched countless local acts (including their own) rise to national fame, fizzle into obscurity, or otherwise mete out a comfortable existence at the fringe of mainstream popularity. (One such artist, folk music legend Sera Cahoone, spontaneously stops by during our chat to say hi.) Telehealth is their third project together in eight years, and fortunately, it’s turning out to finally be the one netting them attentive ears.
Part of it is that what was originally a solo project (Alex plays every instrument on Content Oscillator) is now a group of five musicians who have belonged to an inner circle for years. McCutcheon remains an incredible drummer in a band that relies on an unerring, danceable beat. Bassist John O’Connor, who made up the third and final member of KA and also played in Tomten with Alex, similarly shines in that rhythm section. Finally, Dillon Sturtevant (who plays and writes songs in numerous projects, including KA, John Dillon, the proto-Telehealth act SPASI, and excellent current band fine arts) provides an extra oomph on lead guitar.
“This group of five has basically been adjacently playing music together for a decade,” says Kendra. In their live performances, it shows.
From left to right: Dillon Sturtevant, John O’Connor, Ian McCutcheon, Alexander Attitude, Kendra Cox. Photo by Jake Hanson.
But there’s also an element to it, they muse, that involves them finally embracing a certain pop accessibility. It’s perhaps related to an unspoken but heavy influence from another acolyte of “dancing yourself clean”: LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy.
“It’s funny that no one ever says LCD,” comments Alex. “No one ever says we sound like them. All we get is Devo, but I swear to God, three of those songs out of the album are straight LCD Soundsystem.”
Murphy, of course, is credited for helping to reintroduce a dance context to rock music in the early 2000s, not only through his band but via his trend-setting record label DFA. His success story is intertwined with his age; an indie rock artist throughout his twenties, Murphy discovered party drugs and crystallized into an aggressive, ambitious crafter of music best enjoyed through bodily movement. (“It wasn’t necessarily that he was a failed rock star,” said DFA co-founder Tim Goldsworthy on the subject. “It was more…a switch flipped and then he decided he wanted to win.”)
Similarly, Kendra recounts the feeling of attending shows during her time in KA and feeling weighed down by the gravity of their approach to music. “I remember we’d go to other shows and think, “Man, wouldn't it be cool to just play in a pop band?” she recalls. “We thought it'd be really fun to just play in a band that plays catchy, fun songs that people like to listen and dance to.”
“I think that’s what this turned into,” she continues. “It took eight years of playing music together to cultivate it into this vibe where we can have serious conversations about climate change, capitalism, and gender identity, but we can also do it while grooving.”
Though people dig the music for its pastiche of a schlocky era, Telehealth’s roots are very much grounded in the intellectual.
Alex conceptualized the band while standing at the edge of the cliff, the one every musician approaches as they exit youth. “I kind of felt this change, this external pressure to make something of myself and do something with my life,” he says. “So I did grad school.”
In 2017, after working in coffee for years, Alex quit music and started the Master of Architecture program at the University of Washington. “My career and the study of architecture are totally different things,” he says. “I could study architecture all the time. It was like going to design school but on steroids.” Architecture is much more of a theoretical field than how it’s typically expressed outside of the classroom, and that becomes apparent from viewing Alex’s graduate thesis, which he completed after the pandemic hit.
The thesis (which is available from U of W’s website and features an accompanying interactive website) doubles as a work of “design fiction” that revolves around the struggle between Alex’s conflicting views on architecture as a basis for creation. Through the fabrication of two separate characters, he clashes the field’s utilitarian purposes with its capacity to generate thought experiments and abstractions.
In its introduction, he summarizes: “I can tell you that [this thesis] is an internal struggle, a performance of transgression that favors intuition over rationality, and a process of deconstruction that utilizes alternative mediums — largely new media art, film, performance, and design fiction — to create a new identity for the architect, and for myself.”
After graduating, Alex found himself continually disillusioned with the real-life application of his tutelage. “Architects are great designers,” he discovered. “They're just stuck in a shitty profession.” He first landed a job at Miller Hull, the firm behind Capitol Hill’s ultra-sustainable, award-winning Bullitt Building. From there he bounced to Nahoko Ueda’s Ueda Design School, noted for its focus on Japanese-inspired designs. Then, he quit. “I just couldn't do it.” (Currently, he works at the House of Sorcery, an “environmental graphic design” firm that was recently responsible for the graphics and art installations for all 42 floors of Amazon’s new Bellevue tower.)
Though he’d once left behind his musical life for the pragmatism of a high-earning career, his thesis clearly illustrates his unwillingness to leave it behind. Telehealth spawned directly from his desire to explore what he had learned in school through his art of choice.
To reexamine Content Oscillator, only one of it’s tracks, the chugging “Cool Breeze,” hearkens back to post-COVID times. “That song was actually about Kithkin breaking up,” Alex says of the song, which he wrote in 2016. Everything else, from the anthemic Murphyisms of “Idiot Proof (nO SoUp Du JoUr)” (“It was a song about quitting music and feeling a fucking idiot,” he says) to the Cars-like strut of “Unsafe Feeling,” he wrote with his architecture education still fresh in his mind.
Every single facet of Telehealth’s aesthetic decisions falls into place within that context. The color green, for example, is meant to be an allusion to architecture’s current obsession with sustainability.
“Architectural pedagogy and practice has [sic] become so focused on green,” Alex penned in his thesis, “that they’ve missed the point altogether...having already arrived in post-critical discourse where architects sit comfortably within a political domain that is essentially capitalist and centrist.” (In other words, they’re missing the forest for the trees.)
“The whole message is that we’re gonna try really hard at this, we're gonna make it fun, and if you pay us, we are super down.”
-Alexander Attitude
The music itself, while clearly in the couple’s wheelhouse, is also part of this overarching concept. Telehealth calls itself “post-punk,” but post-punk is a context-specific term because of how many fragments punk split into after the Sex Pistols broke up. Of these, Telehealth most closely resembles “new wave,” which was once a term for pop-forward post-punk that Sire Records head Seymour Stein savvily coined to sell CBGB punk acts like Blondie and Talking Heads to the masses. Today, similarly to how “grunge” is a catch-all representing a demarcation line in American music history, “new wave” is an umbrella term that immediately signifies a very specific era of pop music: synth-heavy, homogenous, danceable, designed to be commodified.
Devo, as mentioned, comes immediately to mind — you don’t need to be a scholar of music history to hear the Akron band’s kitschy, satirical bops in Telehealth’s songs. Then there’s the B-52’s and their ebullient, pixieish devotion to “trash culture.” You can also detect the pioneers of synthesizer music, Yellow Magic Orchestra, who sought to counterbalance the bleakness of existing electronic music with a joyous lightness.
Pare down all of the heady shit and you’re left with a kernel of truth. With Telehealth, Alex wants to interpret the field of architecture within music, specifically through the lens of his punk rock roots. Its facade of capitalist complicity is its own form of anti-establishment antagonism, and musically it’s wrapped in styles that he feels are underrepresented in the current era, and in the current area.
"I have a pretty strong 'fuck you' mentality to most things," he admits.
"Yeah, you do," Kendra agrees.
In that way, his project resembles another post-punk band, albeit one from across the pond: Public Image Ltd., John Lydon’s band after the end of the Sex Pistols. Lydon (previously Johnny Rotten) used his platform to openly antagonize everyone and everything sacred, including his former band, his former manager, and the sound of the punk paradigm itself. That led to a career of riots, controversies, and relentless misunderstandings from an audience that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) follow along.
Coincidentally, Lydon led PiL’s 1987 LP Happy? with a song the band wrote in Seattle, titled “Seattle.” On it, his usual grievances abound; it can only be speculated how pointed his words were.
“Don’t like the look of this old town
What goes up must come down
Character is lost and found
On unfamiliar playing ground”
One Seattle entity that latched onto the joke quickly was the archetype of commercial subversion, Sub Pop. “They caught on really fast,” says Alex. “At our record release show, they showed up and handed us their info and said we should talk sometime.” There were no demos pitched, no emails sent, no greasing of the wheel involved; Alex had actually known Sub Pop’s A&R scout, Nick Duncan, since he was a teenager and yet neglected to take advantage of the connection.
For someone who’d been struggling for years to achieve broader success with his art, it was a shock to have caught the famed label’s eye so organically. “It kind of felt a ‘pinch me’ moment,” he says. “I moved here and that was what I wanted to do, so to actually get your foot in the door…it was kind of a wild experience.”
“Somebody explained it to me in this way,” adds Kendra. “The Sub Pop thing is cool because it's news your parents can be excited about it. They know Nirvana. They know Pearl Jam. You can say those words, and they'll understand the weight of how cool that is.”
Sub Pop made a name for themselves internationally by proudly embracing projection. Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman earned (and spent) a ton of money engendering a pocket of Seattle’s late-80s heavy music scene, oftentimes through facetiously extortionate practices. 45 years ago they started the Singles Club, a monthly subscription service for singles sold at ridiculously high prices. “We’re ripping you off big time,” ran the company’s tagline. No wonder the label reached out to the band to join the Club - their stratagems run parallel to each other.
“It took eight years of playing music together to cultivate it into this vibe where we can have serious conversations about climate change and identity, capitalism, and gender identity, but we can also do it while grooving.”
-Kendra Cox
And yet it can’t be ignored that Pavitt’s and Poneman’s blatant schtick worked because it lampooned what the mainstream music industry had become by the turn of the 90s. Today, the line between independent and major labels has blurred, and Sub Pop is a dinosaur in a city that has changed beyond recognition. Unlike its myriad transplants, Alex and Kendra had front-row seats from the beginning. “When they announced the Seattle campus, it was hostile times,” recalls Alex. “People were mad, and then the cycle of grief began. We’re in the acceptance stage now.”
What we’ve accepted is that Seattle has become a thoroughly neoliberal haven that merely pays homage, not a living, to its musicians. This happens everywhere in the U.S., but Seattle is unique in that it bears the additional curse of having been one of the last dig sites in history for American monocultural clout. That has saddled us with an established model of what kind of music is meant to represent the city, and how that music is meant to survive. That model is upheld not by its active participators, but by its patrons: the music fans who are able to clear the city’s ludicrous median household income of $115,000.
None of this, besides the socioeconomic shift, is new. Patronage is a concept that has existed in tandem with the invention of art itself. But in the 21st century, there are far more avenues to find a sustainable career in the arts besides finding a wealthy sponsor. Every year, governments in plenty of countries spanning the Western world allocate an amount of money adequate for their populations toward arts funding, allowing their artists to hone their craft via government money that is bestowed virtually free of obligation.
America’s National Endowment for the Arts, in contrast, received $228,000,000 in the 2023 fiscal year - a queen’s sum, until you realize it represents 0.003% of the federal budget. Of that sum, roughly 5% of that goes to music. (That’s assuming it remains a part of the budget at all; the NEA is consistently on the chopping block thanks to the country’s conservative contingent who don’t want their tax dollars funding what they perceive to be pornography or sacrilegious idolatry.)
This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the music industry as a whole hadn’t crumbled to the ground. Post-COVID, you notice the changes everywhere. Artists receive ever fewer streaming royalties, with plans to eliminate payments altogether without a minimum stream count. The vinyl market’s been on the rise, but smaller artists across the country are being choked out by powerful labels who have the power to reserve vinyl plants for that new Adele or Taylor Swift record. Even touring, now considered the only possible method for musicians to make a living, is becoming unsustainable. Costs have risen across the board, and that’s been reflected in stratospheric ticket prices. Ticketmaster and their predatory pricing methods are a huge part of that issue; because they’ve grafted themselves onto every significant venue, they can squeeze the market with excess fees. Meanwhile, musicians continue to suffer; even established artists are finding the prospect of touring economically unfeasible.
And that’s just the successful people. What are the prospects for those just trying to get off the ground? That’s a rhetorical question; you already know the answer. In the brightest age of entertainment known to humankind, every local musician you know is living in dimmer and dimmer lighting.
If the arts can’t survive through traditional methods of income, the only way for Seattle’s artists to power the infrastructure for their work seems to be by turning the city’s plutocracy against itself. A recent piece by the Seattle Times spotlights how many local organizations, from Freakout Festival to The Vera Project to SMASH to The Seattle World Tour Foundation, operate either as individual non-profit organizations or under fiscal sponsorship from another non-profit. With the old financial model of album sales and show income all but disintegrated, grant writing and tax-deductible donations have become the easiest way to redistribute the city’s wealth out of the hands of apathetic tech companies and into the creative class.
Yet this approach, as always, comes with its own caveats. For one, the growth of these organizations is limited by the rigid restrictions of non-profit status, restrictions that will likely only tighten even further in the future. Those grants, meanwhile, can come with quid pro quo and other requirements that can undercut your freedom to pursue whatever artistic decisions you wish.
Take, for example, the Seattle chapter of the Austin-based Sonic Guild, which is about to offer $10,000 grants to a handful of artists in the city. The artists that receive the grants then play free exclusive shows for the Guild’s donors and fulfill certain obligations for the organization (like, for instance, recording advertisements for Bloodworks Northwest’s blood drive).
The recipients of the grant are nominated based on votes from three contingencies: previous grant recipients, a music advisory board of local industry leaders, and the donors themselves (donations start at $75/month, or $750/year). It’s unclear which category of votes, if any, hold more weight in the process, but an even split of voting power would seem to give donors the majority.
Let’s be clear: $10,000 is not an insignificant amount of money, especially for a musician. When established venues are continually at risk of closing and artists feel the need to subject themselves to playing SoFar Sounds shows for a pittance, you cannot realistically fault anybody for accepting such a gracious offer, even if it might affect what they can do or say through their art. Money is money, and it is ever in short supply. Not to mention that Sonic Guild is, as far as is known, a reputable organization who genuinely wants to help artists.
And yet despite the fact that it is undeniably charitable, the grant is not a gift. It’s not "free" money in the way a country like Canada funds its artists. It’s patronage. It comes with strings attached.
Telehealth is one of the acts nominated for the 2023 grant; as of this writing, they've moved to the finalist stage, now 1 of 40 left in the running. So it begs the question: how much do those particular strings matter to this band, whose entire raison d’etre is criticizing the systems that sand down humans, and the capacity to express themselves, for the approval of the monied?
Ultimately, they’re not at liberty to say. I don’t blame them. It’s a minefield out there. All they can do — all they are able to do, really — is play.
“It's hard to explain, but…we know where the fucking line is drawn,” offers Alex in a grave tone. His playing cards rest in their plastic case, having long been stowed away.
“We always say 'Telehealth is a joke, but it's not a joke.' And it is not a joke. The joke allows us to do what we're doing in a cheeky way, but it's fundamentally not a fucking joke. If we could do political change here, we would do it.”
So, if you’ve gotten this far and you’re still looking for a punchline to the joke, let me offer one:
Telehealth, a rock band with its origins in post-punk pastiche and architectural design fiction, consciously wears the mask of a corporate shill in a city that indirectly constrains its artists and spiritually clings onto an antiquated idea of what music is supposed to be. It’s not an exaggeration to say they exist as a cri de coeur for a place that has rotted into homogeneous AirSpace before their very eyes. The jagged angularity of their music is a direct reflection of the toothy, terrifying landscape that surrounds them. They speak in code because it’s fun, but also because it’s a survival tactic.
This is a band that jocularly broadcasts being a “for-profit company" at the end of their press releases, their EPK, and every single one of their calculated MLM-esque Instagram posts. Sure, the branding cleverly differentiates them from their peers, and yet from everything I’ve gathered, it’s not just branding. It is a thoughtful, impassioned culmination of over a decade of dedication to the DIY ethos, presented in a package that is simultaneously goofy and honest, jesting and deadly serious, about the grim reality of living in a late-stage capitalist realm that honestly couldn’t care less about what its creators have to say or their capacity to say it.
So for that band to be potentially forced to stand on a stage, obsequious, and sing their ironic songs about unironically dire issues for free, at the mercy of rich detached benefactors? To choose between giving up a windfall and giving up its integrity, its foundational principles, because very little actual choice is left? Because America is a poisonous place to be an artist?
Now that’s fucking hilarious.