“You’ll never know until you try” is pretty close to a universal truth, experience shows*. There really is this great divide between Creator and Consumer that can only be grasped by someone that has had to fill both roles. Take Bristol’s Banksy; with captions like “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit” no doubt doesn’t identify fully with the hordes of wannabe, copy cat stencilists and inkers who only venture away from their Myspace web-shrines to visit one of his own mini-Meccas across the country. And equally, until very recently I’ve been cheerfully assuming that any organized writing like blogs and magazines just sort of happen.
The path of the modern music lover is somewhat as follows; we’re pretty willing to soak up anything that steers its way towards wrapped up in the deliciously tantalizing shrink-wrap of a dose of hype and spittle, as long as its been given an entry for its ‘Genre’ field that means we won’t be embarrassed to put it on a mix-tape. And so, we scan blogs, devour magazines, newspapers, and even Wikipedia entries for the latest hint of a slightly relevant reference. We stream music from the great electronic Ether at a rate of gigabytes per day; this leaves us as one of the first generations to truly, and easily, be able to develop an appreciate and synoptic view of music, rather that a piecemeal look at individual albums. Even the EP, in today’s download era, has become almost too great a package in favour of a single .MP3. We analyze, and we dissect, and we shove those malformed opinions into the public domain with terrifying alacrity and freedom, as well as an undeservedly self-righteous snarl rarely seen outside of the Daily Mail forums.
I feel I’m approaching that point where you’ve decidedly shot yourself in your own foot. The point is, even in Web 2.0, or whatever you call it, where your input is practically begged for by companies left right and center, there’s still this void to be seen between that, and what might be called the science of Journalism. What I hope goes here, what we all hope goes here (‘We’ at the moment comprises of Myself and 6 others. The magnificent 7, if you like), is something that will be saved when they’re counting up the bodies,something that might enter an RSS reader or two, or, when the printed edition is born, kept in a cuboard to help you remember. “We live in interesting time”; and it would be lovely to be able to take some responsibility for that.
Dave McLeod – the one to blame for all this.
*Ba doom Tsch!
