Doubting doubts, and overcoming same — it has been a long while since I posted on NYLPM, largely because while I’ve gotten over my crisis of confidence/lack of interest in music from last year, I have felt strongly disconnected from the world of instant music updates and the latest thing and so forth since then. Partially I think it’s a response to the world around me — the blogs and news sites I’ve been obsessively checking lately are those regarding US politics and Iraq’s mire and more, where it doesn’t matter if you venerate the Beatles or know about the latest grime track when you’re dead or wounded thanks to an adminstration’s idiocy and humanity’s folly — partially I think it’s been building up a certain new defiance to return to where I was in the first place. Namely, talking about that which interests me as opposed to what I’m supposed to be interested in, and more often than not it is work of excavation and reconsideration rather than tuning into whatever the mp3 blogs have just stumbled across or talking about Britney…again. But at the same time it’s a rejection of the Mojofication of the music world, where what is old becomes stultifying cosseted comfort, rather than something that lives and breathes because it exists and is heard and loved again right now, right this second. The digital bass on something like “Fine Time” by New Order may be fifteen years old now but it’s still a message from the present and future for me, not a dim glow in a cobwebbed past — that’s for Interpol to run into the ground instead.
The above serves mostly as a somewhat conflicted statement of purpose to talk again more readily about music than my occasional journal contributions on the one hand and my continuing stream of AMG work on the other hand. What will occur first I don’t know — but hello again. For all the slightly sour tone above, trust me, I’m still myself. ;-)