I used to run a music blog
I used to run a music blog.
Back in the day (early to mid-naughts) everyone and their cat had a music blog. The concept of a music blog was a little different back then from what it is today (if there is even such a thing as music blogs anymore?). A music blog was a personal thing: People passionate about music and wanting to share that passion with others by writing about their favourite new albums, and hosting (illegal, obviously) mp3s of tracks they particularly loved or wanted to spread the word about.
Music blogs, and MySpace, were how I found most of the music I listened to, even bands I still love today like the National (“Daughters of the Soho Riots” was the first track I ever heard by them).
It was 2006 and I had just turned twenty when I wrote the proverbial “Hello World” post in what ended up becoming my music blog “art-star”; at first, it was going to be a blog with a focus on art (hence the name, though it’s also a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song). The first blurb of text, a few sentences really, was about Gabriela Friðriksdóttir’s work. Soon after though, I wrote my first “concert review”. Here it is, in its entirety:
“I went to a really small music festival while I was in Norway, (Tømmerfløtivalen) some pretty good local bands played, such as Wintermare and Jaqueline (you might be able to catch the latter somewhere in Norway, touring until October 15th to promote the new album). There was a really good atmosphere both on and off stage, so much energy coming from the bands and their audience, and a beautiful starry sky to go with that.. Overall it was a nice new experience.”
Reading that, I kind of want to disappear into a hole, never to get out again. It’s embarrassing, folks. That paragraph feels flat, and boring, and absolutely doesn’t convey the way I experienced the music and everything around it. There was so much about that show that I still remember: The power of the loud music in that tiny space, the millions of shooting stars I saw after, the purple and golden light on stage, my friend Erik on stage with a bunny rabbit I’d drawn pinned to his black shirt, the sweetness of the locals’ curiosity — everyone knew each other, no one travels from other areas of Norway to go there, let along other COUNTRIES. But maybe the point of that entry back then wasn’t really to explain how the show was (to “review” it), rather to have a sentence to lead me back in time to that memories, even decades later (case in point, because I’d forgotten about that drawing of a bunny rabbit until now).
So today, I want to write about writing embarrassing things on the internet.
The internet is a public record
There is a public record, spanning almost a decade, of how my writing developed — something like 6000 posts about music, art, and all the personal stuff in-between — on my defunct-and-yet-still-half-online blog. At some point I found my voice — dare I say my writing wasn’t that bad when it let go of the weird cliches I felt I needed to use? I love and hate that this exists.
The reason I’ve been thinking about this lately, is because October will mark ten years since I last posted something in that little blog of mine. (Not true, actually; this is just a coincidence. The decade apart is a coincidence). The reason I’ve been really thinking about this is that last year, I put my newly designed site online, with a writing section designed especially to get me excited about writing in public again.
But writing in public, these days — maybe because it’s 2023 and not 2013, maybe because I’m 30-something instead of 20-something, or because people on the internet are, let’s face it, mostly assholes — feels different than it did when I started. The writing needs to be polished and have a point; it needs to be worth reading and worth sharing, because I wouldn’t want people to read something that doesn’t have a fucking point to it, right? We’re all too damn busy to read about someone’s thoughts, unless those thoughts are useful in some way (like to share them on LinkedIn or to grab a nugget of wisdom on work/life balance for our daily affirmations). Do kids, these days, even write? Do they have online journals? Or are their selves “just” scattered images and video reels on instagram and tiktok, all filters and no words?
Writing for me
In 2006, 2007, 2008, while juggling several small jobs and studying, music felt like an escape and I loved going to shows in my free time and writing about it. Incapable of just sticking to one thing, I used to also photograph bands and shows, hanging out with the other photographers occasionally. It was a “cool” scene, and it felt good to be a part of it. Most importantly though: I didn’t care who was reading what I wrote.
I wasn’t looking to be the next best music blog, because there were so many out there; I just wanted to have a place that was mine. Call it indifference or desperation or apathy — it meant I’d just write, and put my writing online and not really care so much what people thought.
In a way, it backfired, because my little blog started getting flooded with requests: Demos from bands, free tickets to shows, etc. I (mostly) listened to all the demos, and I went to (many of) the shows. I loved it all and embraced it. Looking through my old blog posts now is like looking through a journal you wrote when you were a teenager; some of the writing and the feelings sound so intense, unrecognisable. Sometimes in a good way, like: Wow, I wrote this? wtf, this is good.
Take these lines, from a post I wrote about my friend C staying at my apartment after their show in August 2011:
“Being at a hardcore show again after so long, empowered by the crowd and by Death is not Glamorous and their energy, the lyrics about anger and loss screamed, raised fists, us forehead to forehead like fighting bulls flirting with the thought of being bruised by the end of the night, was a relief. I was never deeply rooted into that scene, and yet it felt like being in a place to be called home where everything feels familiar. And so, after they have their van packed, we walk down the street and, back in my kitchen, he feels like family.”
I love this. I still love it, 10+ years later. I still love remembering that moment, us sharing earphones and listen to music on his iPod at 3am. I love that I wrote about it and that one of my favourite memories of this person I had a mild crush on in the late 2000s will float on the biggest network we have ever created forever, to be read, potentially, by millions of people or even just one (me); even if it also means that someone might hold me accountable for something else I wrote, perhaps, something taken without context to shame me into feeling like I should have never written it or never existed.
Writing, deeply
What do we need to do as a generation, or as a society, to write deeply and thoughtfully on the internet but also to be aware of the fact that we are humans, that feelings and thoughts and opinions change? That we evolve and make mistakes, and we can both be proud and be embarrassed by everything we’ve ever been? I think this is the kind of nuance that I miss, online, these days.
If I could blush, I would — re-reading my early posts, things like
“This is neither a young band (well not quite as young as the high-schoolers and university students out there) nor a band whose primary aim is to be a piece in music industry’s puzzle”
(brain managerz at fluc, December 2006)
and
“I find it sad that CERTAIN PAVILIONS (not to mention any countries, but, THE US *cough cough*) use a contemporary art fair, one of the biggest in the world actually, to promote artists who have been making art for about 143 years and have been dead for 30. Seriously? “emerging artists”, yeah right. Way to go, Venice.”
(complaining about the venice biennale in 2009)
make me feel cringe, as the youth would say.
But: I had that freedom to write, and I loved it and took full advantage of it over the course of 7+ years. So in the future, I’m going to try to write in this way again: “thoughts in progress”, perhaps, things that are on my mind and not fully formed, because the beauty of a personal blog is that it doesn’t have to be perfect.