People are complicated

I dunno, I just wrote this Slayer review and I don’t want to be condescending or dismissive of any part of the metal scene. Unless I feel like it? I’m pretty much writing to myself here. Hey, you misspelled “aggression” in the goddamn title, genius. Well, I fixed it. Everything’s fine. Now that’s crazy talk.

[I do not want to disrespect the music or the people that make it, only an aspect of the scene. —OK.]

Politics in music

A great Billy Bragg/Marc Maron interview went up of the wtfpod. Choice quotes (which I did not post on twitter b/c it seemed too trollbaity) “Music can’t change the world.” and “The Clash were poseurs.” You’re gonna have to listen to it all. I think he’s a great guy. Never listen to his music tho. I like it when I hear it, but it’s just not for me. I’m not sure art is supposed to have a coherent message. But I am sure I like that people are using the word ‘poseur’ again. Everybody was using ‘hipster’ for everything for while there. There’s a difference! I don’t know if I would call The Clash poseurs. I mean, compared to Billy Bragg, on consistent political stance, yes. Do I care about that? No. I’m more interested in artists who use a particular framework to create their art and commit to that but are able to step out of that. Someone like Varg Vikernes can make compelling music, but he actually thinks he’s the fucking dungeon master. And the thing that gets me about that is, if you say of bunch of crazy shit, and burn shit and murder people, later on, you can take back the crazy shit you said. You can change your mind and all the shit is still burnt and the people are still murdered. And people are more upset about the words, which are entirely outside of the music in that case. (The words are pretty bad, if you didn’t know.) But the other thing is, if people like you, certain kind of people, no matter what you say they can twist it around to whatever they already believe themselves. If you can make art that exposes this, that to me is interesting. Billy Bragg isn’t a big enough pop star to reach those people so he never gets misinterpreted like that, but I bet it could happen.

#PRFM

Worked the Punk Rock Flea Market again. Things went even better than last time. I didn’t sell quite as much stuff this time b/c I think I’m running out of good, easily sell-able shit like the giant box of comic books I had last time. Some stuff I had that did not sell last did not sell again, like language courses on CD, can’t believe what I paid for those things, couldn’t give em away. Except I did the next day, to Goodwill. One guy went through all my $1 paperbacks with a scanner app looking for things he thought he could get more than a dollar for I guess. Good luck on that. I also saw Rodney Anonymous again but I didn’t have anything that caught his attention so he just strolled past. The guy I was sharing a table with clearly didn’t recognize him and I almost said something but if he also didn’t recognize the name, he would have felt dumb and I would have felt old. Lose/lose. I let it go.

Old podcasts

I deleted the links to the old podcasts on the tumblr. The old url, which I say repeated in the thing has expired. I moved some of them to this server. Then there were the podcasts before that that I am not putting anywhere. There were a few cool ideas in them (very few) that I might edit together one day, or reuse. if I do another talking podcast.

I wish I could have preserved the needlessly complicated tagging system I used. For example. You can kind of get the idea with the numbers but there’s no higher directory that shows you all the tags you’ve used.

Oh shit, right, tumblr got bought

I dunno why people are upset that facebook or google didn’t buy it cause it was gonna be one of these big companies. All of these free platforms are made to be bought.

Right, and flickr updated

I’m still gonna pay for mine to be ad-free, but it changes what I’m doing with it. Btw, I thought I had changed my flickr url but I only changed the display name. So I changed the url of my facebook page to match it. I’m only telling you in case you bookmarked the page without liking it, which you might have done. I’m not judging.

Press!

The Louisville Insider calls this blog “amusing but positive”. Not really, that’s just William Benton of the Phantom Family Halo who noticed my review of their Philly show opening for Acid Mothers Temple last year. (I had not checked the pingbacks in that long.) But technically, I think I can say that. Check out that post anyway for some links to recordings of some of the AMT shows on that tour. Cotton Casino showed up at one gig, pretty crazy.

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