Living in the past is for Alzheimer’s patients, and possibly White Supremacists. Why spend your days reliving old glory at all, whether it be because your addled, stunted mind won’t allow you to see anything new, or if it was the last time YOU happened to latch onto some popularity? It’s gone! Let it go! Did he just compare Retro DJ’s to White Supremacists? Oh yes I did
Now yes, Music has a quality of all of it’s own that makes you warm to it, and gives you a certain ability to develop push-button emotions, with happiness, sadness, Ecstasy and heart-break available on demand. But above those primary qualities, lies a deeper level (above? Below maybe? Does depth go up?). Nothing noble. Just a wonderfully smug, selfish-bastard sense of self-satisfaction.
Geeks live online, yeah? But this is true, but so is one other important fact being true; being geeky, and being a techie, are not the same. You get music geeks who can recite Rolling Stone cover notes in a Pavlovian fashion; you get music geeks who could, given a pen and paper, draw a direct copy of the surface of the D.A.N.C.E 12″ vinyl. These individuals are not, as I’m sure you can imagine, really very suitable for the stress and weakness-of-moral-fibre of modern society; all the welshers and posers who have the frailty of spirit to LIKE a song and nothing more. And so they withdraw, and, as they sit, alone, masturbating themselves into a teary fury while tattooing repetitive lyrics into their arm with a spoon and 4 biros, they blog endlessly away, venting their spleens in a torrid of poor grammar, worse spelling, and controversial (read ‘Irritatingly naive’) opinion pieces.
It’s certainly a good world to get into none the less. I first stumbled upon this kind of distribution when I tried to track down the rather sexual Placebo cover of Running Up That Hill (the Kate Bush classic) that sound tracked an episode of the O.C. My first port of call that Google threw at me? Good Weather For Airstrikes (www.goodweatherforairstrikes.com). The next day brought a ‘Best tracks of 2006′ run down and I never looked back.
How does all this work? A Blog is an online journal (‘Weblog’ for when you explain it to the aforementioned racists and dependants) where people, in one of the vainer acts of self-indulgence, write something and wait for the world to come knocking. Typically bloggers have a vastly inflated sense of self importance (something that only takes me sporadically, hence what I hope are quite irregular updates), and so be prepared to encounter several incredibly assertive and opposing opinions. Not to mention a desperate need to impress upon you the staunch belief that you are reading the modern equivalent of Christ’s Moleskine, and there are seats at Table 1 in the afterlife if you pass it around enough. Needless to say, the chances are slim that tweedle-dim345@hotmail.com is really SebastiaAn’s personal man servant, but you never know.
I digress (and rant). So within this swathe of ‘Weblogs’ you get MP3 Blogs, which tend to follow the same format of intro, theme, song-review, song-review, download links, ego-inflation. Thus a new remix can swiftly spread around the Internet like wildfire. Some like Good Weather above like to release more sporadically, but offer a greater deal of substance in their text, while others like Put The Needle On The Record (www.puttheneedleontherecord.com – are you getting the hang of this?) do it song-by-song, but more often. You’ll get a .MP3 link (right-click, save as…if you can’t figure this out then ask a parent or teacher. Or just fuck off my Internet please), and there you have it. Musical, delivered, aural stimulation, as and when you like it.
Like all British children should, I watched Art Attack when I was a child. And I remember being taught to draw a tree by drawing a big line, then a U shape going through it, then another U shape going through each arc of the U, and so on and so forth until infinity and beyond. In the same way, Blogs look out for each other much like the Irish under pressure, and you’ll find links to often dozens of other treasure troves online to guide you. If you’re a pro, add them to a newsreader (www.google.com/reader gets a British Heart foundation stamp of approval from me), and use Firefox’s Down-Them-All plug in (www.google.com -not a homepage, but put some effort in please). With that you can become a truly ruthless music ‘Sampler’ (as you’re known in the legal world, it’s worth bearing in mind), downloading all the songs on a page, and then moving swiftly while the stream is flowing right to your hard drive.
Of course, when you’re looking for a CD in the real world (Remember that? You should do, unless you are, of course, a blogger), you don’t just ask your mates for advice, and then their mates, and then their mates do you? What kind of crazy person talks to friends of friends of friends? You’re not a fucking crazy person are you? You check a search engine don’t you? You don’t? Well catch on sharp (or see the solution two paragraphs up). The Hype Machine (www.thehypemach- hah, snap, actually it’s at www.hypem.com. Cocky) offers a run down of the daily tracks found on a frankly ridiculous amount of bloggery across the Interweb, and so helps you even more.
See? So simple a child can figure it out. Now go. Go fill your iPod and hit the bars. Just don’t ever start writing one of the damn things. Or even worse, a magazine about them. There’s a special circle of hell reserved for people like that. I hear anyway.
www.hypem.com
www.puttheneedleontherecord.com
www.goodweatherforairstrikes.com
http://music.for-robots.com/
http://www.cta-music.com/
