Hello again! Sorry that it’s been quite some time since I’ve blogged. I was having some technical difficulties over the past few days (aka exhaustion from SXSW) and wasn’t able to blog. I know that a week in the blogosphere is equivalent to about a millennium in normal time, but I’m officially back and blogging.
SXSW gave me a lot to think about. (You can, by the way, check out my photos from the festival here.) It’s a truly ridiculous week. Before I left people would ask me which bands I was going there to see. Or they’d say things like, “Oh yeah, there’s a pretty sweet line-up this year.” That doesn’t really compute, as far as I’m concerned. SXSW doesn’t have a line-up. It’s more like what band isn’t playing in Austin. And when that’s the case, it’s easy to get cynical. There are so, so many bands that it all starts to seem meaningless after awhile. When you’re seeing your fifth power-trio in two days, you start to forget why bands are interesting to watch. It seems like an endless combination of drums, bass, and guitar. Then, the whole event just starts to spiral into corporate-sponsored meaninglessness.
That is, of course, until you’re watching another great band. They entertain you, captivate you, and make you glad that you’re not anywhere else in the world. That’s why the bands who really have something stand out at SXSW. Since coming back, I’ve reread my mission statement for this blog a couple of times. It’s a good reminder. SXSW confirmed my belief in the fact that the chemistry of certain people adds up to more than the sum of their parts. I don’t really know why I’m saying this now, but it feels like a good time to remember that innocent wonder of rock and roll music, especially in the aftermath of one of the most amazing/horrifying weeks that the industry surrounding that music has come to offer.
The conference also afforded me a lot of time to think about the direction in which I want to take this blog. I attended the blogger panel one morning before any of the music for the day had started. One of the biggest points I walked away with was the place of negativity in blogging. Basically, the consensus was that bloggers are not journalists, don’t have time to write as much as they wish they could, and thus almost exclusively write about things they like, foregoing things they dislike. They act as a filter to bring their readers, who have less time to be music nerds, music they will probably like. I don’t know, though. I think negative reviews are responsible, and an important counterpart to the positive. Obviously there’s going to be more music I don’t post about than music I do. But just because I don’t post something doesn’t mean it should all be lumped into the same category. It’s important to write about things you really, really don’t like in order to better define what you really, really do like. I’d like that to be an aspect of this blog. I will write bad reviews of things when I listen to something and truly don’t like it.
I also realized, with everything out there, that I need to narrow down what makes this blog special. I’d like to focus on more of the live, Brooklyn/New York scene aspect of the blog. (Going to Austin helped me to realize that despite its vast size and transient nature, there is a New York/Brooklyn scene, and I was pleased to find that I rather like it. I just didn’t realize it was a scene until I got away from it for a little while.) I’m going to try harder to see shows as often as I can and blog the photographs. But I love writing a nice, meaty album review, as well as recommending stray songs or bands that I like, so I can’t help but not keep it a solely live music blog. I will also continue my There and Back Again feature, as much for my own education as anything else. One major change is that I don’t think I will post a recommended show each day. My thinking with that in the first place was that this blog could be a place where one could come in order to find live music any day of the week. Sometimes, there just aren’t good things to see. Stay home that night, and save up for the next. Eventually this segment of the blog may get reduced to a once-weekly list, but it still seems like a good way to introduce people to new bands, so it will mostly stay the same.
I’m not going to do music news or anything like that. Other blogs have that covered. I’m just trying to put music out there I think you’ll like. I’m sure no one will make it this far in the post, but I wanted to just document that I’m thinking about these things. You may see some changes in the blog in the coming weeks. I suppose that’s all I’m really trying to say. That, and let’s talk about music, and hopefully I’ll see you out at a show sometime soon.
MP3: Changes (David Bowie Cover) – Seu Jorge (Thanks to IGIF)
