orbis quintus

One of these days, i’m going to write a post whining in detail how onerous blogging about music became for me. The quick story is when my younger coworkers would breathlessly tell me about their newest, most favorite band in the world has just been discovered, and no one else knows about it, and they are going to give this awesome tip that they just read on Stereogum¹ as a favor to me making them some cool mixed CDs… only to find that it was a band that not only that i knew about, but may have blogged about before Stereogum… that i was blogging about music before Stereogum even existed.²

Yep, i became a bitter, jealous old man. I can spend hours putting together a mix that seamlessly blended unfairly neglected bands from the ’60s to last week, but it would be brushed off because it wasn’t blogged about on a blog that was essentially an upstart. No, i am not proud of my behavior. There is not much of a record of my hateful lunacy online, but it exists.

The pithy reactionaries theorists and historians never stopped being fun to read, but it became frustrating to read some breathless hype, then became counting the hours and days until my younger friends would regurgitate the very same press release that i read, as if it was a sincere championing of an underdog.

I’m still “stuck” in this same situation, although i’m more of a hermit than i once was.

Finding out more about the different music scenes in Louisiana that existed in various eras still seems like a worthwhile project, but those projects fell behind when i had to move back to Husser. Another member of the Shitdogs passed away in the past few months, so valuable people are being lost. He even turned out to be an archaeologist, oddly enough. It pains me that i didn’t get around to contact him when he was still around.³ This is not exactly a promise to rededicate some of the effort on this blog to those investigations, but this is close enough.

Until that comes back together⁴ , i might do some more of those blurb things that i was doing the last time i had my shit together with the blog, that lasted perhaps a week or so, before i trudged off in some existential despair because i fell behind in my silly resolution to complete at least twice as many books as i did last year.⁵

1. as if i don’t read the internet [↩]
2. Oddly, none of these coworkers were ever readers of Pitchfork, which seemed more obvious. It existed before i began blogging, so i cannot be as resentful of it, even if the folks at ILX, who all seem to have written for it at one point, have talked more shit about it over the years. [↩]
3. or that i’m just getting around to acknowledging this. I’ve been a little embarrassed on not following through with that stuff. [↩]
4. as there might not be many people who are interested in emailing about old, somewhat obscure local bands anymore [↩]
5. Hot damn! This footnote plugin works after all. I probably should have read the instructions months ago. [↩]