So some of you reading this may remember the MP3 blog I was running intermittently from 2010-2013. If that’s you, consider this an update and also maybe an apology for bugging you about it back then. I just took it all very seriously - so seriously in fact that I stopped posting on it almost immediately after graduating high school. Its third and final iteration is somehow still up on Tumblr if you know where to look, and I considered picking up where I left off there as if the last 9 years were just a planned hiatus. But now Substack exists, so we’re gonna try this out instead.
In the intervening time I’ve done a few semesters of college radio (the awful review of St. Vincent’s self-titled that I wrote for the station was the last piece of real music writing I did and is unfortunately probably also still up), and I’ve had a few jobs at bookstores with generous selections of vinyl. But the ever-widening gap in my portfolio has always made me anxious about taking this up again as “work". And of course watching site after site within the general purview of “culture writing” either fold, get bought out, or “pivot”, and lay off huge swaths of their writing staff in the process, has made that hustle much harder to romanticize than in the days when I thought getting onto The Hype Machine would solve all my problems. But now, 9 years later, here I am making good on a threat I’ve been making over and over again to get back in the game. So.
Like many, I’ve spent most of my downtime during COVID doing a whole lot of thinking and processing and reckoning with all sorts of things, and telling myself to write the thoughts without ever managing to catch the spirit. But you can blame two developments so far in Q1 for finally getting me off the bench. First there was Joe Rogan, whose existence I generally try to ignore outside of memes and bits on other people’s podcasts, but whose bravely sheisty coverage of The Plague on Spotify’s dime has precipitated the current standoff between the platform and Neil Young/Joni Mitchell/a whole lot of angry over-40s. Loop in the years of warnings and admonishments about Spotify from younger, poorer artists and writers and the whole thing becomes much more interesting than the somewhat predictable culture war stuff. So I’ll be writing about this, and in fact music streaming as a paradigm is probably gonna be one of several threads I’ll be returning to here since of course I’m just bursting with thoughts. What really did it this time, though, was the out-of-nowhere announcement of the merger between Bandcamp and Epic Games, news which in my neck of the digital woods has been met either with total bemusement or deep consternation. As someone who’s played Fortnite maybe twice in my life, I’m still processing it myself—right this second, in fact, in another tab.
So that’ll be post #1 and it should be in your inbox by the end of the week. After that, who knows. Reports from miles down an Allmusic rabbit hole? Handwringing over the environmental impact of vinyl on a busy mail day? Listicles pairing <$10 bottles of wine with Robert Pollard side projects? Clumsily assigning political valence to, I don’t know, Yeat songs? Maybe! The one guarantee is that I’ll be sharing some of the music that moves and intrigues me while also trying to explore what an investment in this particular hyperfixation means and looks like in These Times. And we’ll mostly play it by ear. Hence Ex Tempo.