Anyone Out There?

I was reading an article on the NY Times website about how this thing we call the Internets has affected the music biz. It wasn’t a “death of radio” rant, or how the record industry are a bunch of gatekeepers who promote the dross and tamp down the brilliant. No, it was more about how sites like MySpace or YouTube have altered our pop cultural landscape into niches that are becoming smaller and smaller.  The scramble to “get noticed” means those who supply content to sites like YouTube or MySpace (you could put blogs in there, too) need to make their private lives very public. The scramble to “get noticed” means those who supply content to sites like YouTube or MySpace (you could put blogs in there, too) need to make their private lives very public. What that means is that we’re becoming a culture (or is it cultures?) of exhibitionists and voyeurs on a larger scale.  One group parades and reveals the most intimate details about their lives, and the other gladly consumes these flashes of intimacy and then discards them in search of the next site that may generate a few forwarded emails or IMs that basically say “You gotta see this!” I’m not saying it’s a bad thing ‘cause, you know, I blog and reveal bits of my life to people I’ve never met in person, but I think my motivations for blogging (and even having a MySpace page) aren’t about “getting noticed” on a large scale.  If people like what they read on my blog (MySpace isn’t something that I frequent all that much, so ignore that), then great!
 

For all you bloggers, you know when you write that post that, for some reason, generates a lot of comments to your site?   You may wonder what made a particular post ping on the radar screen.  Sometimes you put a good deal of thought into a post, and it generates mild interest.  Sometimes you just talk about something trivial and you get a huge response. I would imagine there are people out there who spend a lot of time tailoring posts to fit the perceived to be the tastes of their readers. Me? I tend to write about what I want. The exception is my weekly Mix Six. With that feature I took a poll before I started doing it, so I plead guilty to a little market research there.  Oh, and also moving the Mix Six from Friday to Wednesday was because I noticed people weren’t really listening to my weekly mixes on Fridays because Friday is one of those light bloggy days where people are trying to wrap up work stuff for before the weekend.

Anyway, what’s all this leading to?  I was not only thinking about cultural stuff because of the NY Times article, but also about my bloggy friends who write about what they want (I believe that would be all of ‘em!).  And if you haven’t had the, um, pleasure to listen to Jefito and Jason Hare’s commentary on Xmas songs recorded by soft rock acts from the 70s to the 90s, you should!  It’s painfully fun, and if you’re a person who likes a good, cynical laugh at the crap that the “gatekeepers” of culture tried to force feed down our collective throats in the past, I invite you to sample songs from the newly created holiday of “Mellowmas!” It’s the 9^th day of Mellowmas, and today’s selection is one that gets a lot of airplay during this time of the year. 

 

Ready?  Okay, just click HERE and enjoy?

–PK
 

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