Howard Who?

My colleague at The Rawking Refuses To Stop!, who incidentally inspired me to up the ante on this blog, muses if mp3 blogging is in its final throes. Gerard vs. Bear implies it’s due to his ombudsmanship that many guys have decided to fold up their tents. Regardless of the reason, it’s a question that’s worth thinking about considering that blogging is such a vital force in music journalism today.

So today I’ll attempt to lay down the philosophy of my blogging. I’ll start with the simple fact that I’m not blogging to make money. I have not earned a single cent on this enterprise while losing quite a bit of time and money. If you don’t think blogging takes time and effort, the perfectionist in me begs to differ. It’s definitely a commitment whose rewards are intangible.

It all stems from a belief that music is itself intangible. Tunes exist in our heads, and they don’t let us go. We can karaoke them precisely because they are ingrained in our beings. They help us imagine who we are and what we desire, and if we want to see what’s it’s like to be other people, we’ll often try listening to their music…trying on their shoes so to speak.

Because of the intangibility of music, the idea that we can own a physical copy seems counterintuitive. What the iPod brilliantly did was remove the physicality of music (the records, the CDs, the tapes) and the pre-programmed nature of radio and liquified it into something that approximates how our brains would prefer to listen…with fewer limitations on the variety we’re allowed physically and immediate access to everything we own.

I’m not here to just post the most popular songs and get lots of hits, although I do reserve a post a quarter for some of my favorite songs of that quarter. Like I said, I’m not about the money. What I do want is for people to try on different shoes. I wouldn’t necessarily call them my shoes, because there’s no single pair that I wear all the time. Sorry, for the extended metaphor. Point is the perspective I’d like to bring is the idea that music can do cool cross cultural things and great music can transcend all the labels we try to use to cage them.

As far as the illegal nature of it goes, I believe that I’m providing free advertising for the artists and songs I discuss. I really try to refrain from posting too many songs from the same album or work. I prefer to give a taste and encourage readers to do the rest if they so choose. I always link to a place to purchase like Amazon. Because the songs I like and post are not usually the ones with the biggest marketing presence, this blog fills in that void.

And finally, I am a musician and write my own songs. And I do keep them running and downloadable at my Myspace page. I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t allow my own music to be out there.

So to celebrate this post, here’s an mp3 that I am authorized to distribute. The Middle Distance Runners is solid stuff. Their album opener is my favorite track.

Naturally (mp3) - Middle Distance Runners Buy

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 11:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Pop Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.