I’ve always had the feeling with this site that it should represent with text and pictures as much as possible my true tastes on music and culture (and pretentiousness), as well as my methods for critiquing. I can see the appeal in mega-posting, but I just would not be able to verify that everything I posted would fall under the rubric of “music that I like, and can vouch for”. Sometimes that takes years to discover! The same goes for free stuff from PR people–sure, maybe the 1% of it that I like will go up on the site, but the other 99 goes in a stack next to my desk (or on my HD). I just couldn’t imagine being able to say, each week, that i ‘liked’ 20 new songs. Not saying that others don’t have that capacity, but I surely don’t.

And as far as trumpeting to the heavens one’s love for music, I think that’s a subjective area–I think a lot of bloggers see themselves as doing exactly that, but in wildly divergent ways colored by their individual personalities/relationships to the world/amounts of free time.

Along the lines of your last thought: My thing with marathonpacks, which is the only one about which I can objectively speak, is that I want each and every song/post/thing to seem important. So that people that visit, over time, can get a clear idea of what I value enough to rail on about.

I don’t think I expressed myself very clearly w/r/t “ambivalence”, because your reading wasn’t what I was getting at at all. Like I said, I’m still feeling it out, but it’s something to do with an ambivalence toward um… individual voices? individual tastes? Bloggers don’t seem to take much responsibility for anything any more – I’m not talking about taking responsibility for “breaking” bands or whatever. I guess it’s just that lots of bloggers don’t seem to take things as seriously as I do (or I feel Matt-Fluxblog, or John-Tofu Hut) did/do. That there’s something worth being proud about, in singing loudly and clearly the praises of the music you -truly- love; and not undermining that with bands you only kinda like or think others would be into. It’s easy to shrug off any criticism when you’re ambivalent about how much your blog -means-, even just to yourself, to your vision of the world.

I think it’s maybe this? That the blogs I most respect are -adding- something to the conversation, and not just providing more fora for the same conversations?

If they’re taking a shape (to get even more pretentious), it’s one of incorporation on the part of the labels, both big and small. I mean, it was written in the stars that it would eventually happen, but it’s slightly distressing to the purist side of me that content is being dictated from outside instead of inside.

That said, I find equally interesting the forms that blogs have mutated into. There are the “mega-blogs”, like GvB, YANP and MOKB, the more high-falootin’, like StG and Fluxblog, and the stalwart daily papers, like LHB and CW. Then, all the entrepreneurs! In a lot of ways, blogs are a parallel form of promotion, and thus mirror, to a large degree, the fragmentative and niche-leaning tendencies of (post-modern) capitalism, broadly defined.

As for it being “pretentious”, I think that’s, as they say here, utter bollocks.

“The first time I said “Gnarls Barkley” aloud was about a week ago, and just saying the names of other blogs during my conversation with Dodge was somewhat surreal, as if I was learning a new language and just figuring out how to form strange new words.”

word up.

people need to lighten up and stop causing drama. bottom line.