Looking through the old FT backups for lost material I came across the links list I made in 2000 when I ended Blue Lines. I’d thought it would be a good idea to run the links list as a personal history essay, so presented them in more or less chronological order. This post is simply me seeing what’s happened to them. Comments in italics are what I said in 2000. I had a non-google policy for most of this post – I followed the breadcrumb trail of the sites as far as they’d go then stopped.
Simon Reynolds’ homepage: love the back-to-98 aesthetic. He’s still going, of course.
Tangents: “They believe in a passionate, personal version of Pop where we sometimes prefer to bow down to the Top 40, but they also believe in great music writing and the fanzine ethos.” – closed its doors after ten years (!) writing mostly about indiepop. Very fondly remembered.
Dancing About Architecture: “A more ‘rockist’ version of Freaky Trigger” – frozen in 2001, very angry about the Strokes. I’m a bit amazed they’ve kept the homepage up.
Pitchfork: “inasmuch as there is a collective Pitchfork mindset, it leans towards ambitious, overcooked Statement Albums” – Well said!!
The War Against Silence: “tastes are pretty much the opposite of mine” – well yeah. TWAS finished with #500 though updates irregularly with year-end polls: Glenn M.’s dense columns married the personal and the musical more intimately and honestly than pretty much anyone’s, and sometimes I thought he was bonkers – he feels a very ‘old internet’ figure, sadly – no side or snark to him.
Moving into the actual blogs:
Josh Blog: still going, I’m pleased to say. Mostly shorter entries now. Good explanatory post here. ‘Often cited’ because he is the grandfather of all!
Plasticbag: “even the odd bout of graceless linkmania done amusingly” – still going. Looks now to have a media/2.0 focus. As you might expect, father of UK blogging etc. Boy done good.
Misfit City: “eloquently complex writing and an avant/prog musical agenda”. I don’t remember this at all. “New home” link leads to a dead site :(
The Horse: “a caustic mock news page and some excellent film reviews” – now an ad for a web hosting site.
Surface Vs Depth: Gareth from ILX’s page, now a big picture of a post-industrial English landscape.
Elidor: efforts to look at music in a social, historical and fresh context – Robin Carmody’s first website – he is still active on LJ and the Elidor archives remain at the link.
Linkmachinego: “a no-nonsense link blog” – still going, still looking and reading precisely the same as it did in 2000.
Prolific: Dutch (?) weblog, in English. Still going, still very similar in outlook and interests. It’s interesting that so many of the really old-school bloggers (pre-Blogger.com and early users of that site) are still blogging or at least net-active. I was expecting to find more dead links than I have.
Pearls That Are His Eyes: Still going! Though now here. I am really delighted by this, partly because I never reviewed or responded to the mixtape she made me (at my request no less!). Sorry! I like Spoon now!
“I wasn’t yet aware of the dread stranglehold indie rock has on web music writing…”
Kempa.com: still up, infrequently updated but obviously still involved in music. Nice and clean looking as ever!
Eurorance: still going! I honestly think that Euroranch might have been the first MP3 blog. It’s now a bit more indie than it used to be, or maybe everything is.
Steal This Blog: ended in 2003 with an imprecation about Hooverphonic records. Fred S may still be blogging out there somewhere…?
Skykicking!: “the best dance music reviewer I know online” Tim is obviously still an active critic and I saw him in London a couple of months ago – latest web address I can find for the blog is
Catherine’s Pita: now doing the same thing but looking unbelievably swanky at catherinespita.com.
Jejune: “breezy and lively” – and still going!
Splendid: stopped in 2005, on the same day as NYLPM in fact.
Us Against Them: “does what a proper indie rock weblog ought to do, spreading the word and ruffling some feathers in the process” – dead link.
http://spoonbender.org/amplified/: Amplified to Rock, the first site I saw using the Greenspun software, is now a link to a lame porn search engine.
“A vow I’d taken when I started blogging was “no personal writing, no personal sites”
maura dot com: still going, of course! Now a real actual tastemaker at Idolator, which is awesome and deserved.
notsosoft.com: “The lynchpin of UK blogging” – Not So Soft is now a search engine offering Ani Di Franco ringtones.
Lukelog: “infectiously likeable with a fearsome update rate” still up, last upate in May 2007.
The “Indie Zineblog Wars”:
Wisdom: “cantankerous, funny” – and now nothing but a huge picture of a Yeti!
Indieshite – dead link. Will the full story ever be told?!
Popmatters: surviving and presumably thriving. As crammed looking as ever.
Drawer B: now primarily a blog, reviews and MP3s, cursory glance suggests the artier end of indie.
Monosyllabic: “literate Pitchfork spinoff” – now just an index page.
Motion: “What if The Wire were good?” – dead link, so the question must go unanswered.
Rockcritics.com: now in blog format, Scott Woods’ continuing exploration of the meta which come to think of it has served as a handy link between the old print media criticism and its online inheritors.
Popjustice.com: you know about this one I think!
2000 – The First Summer Of Blog:
Bitch: still up (kind of amazed Fortunecity is still going), last entry November 2000 though. Snarky sleb comment before its time.
Kerplink: last update 2002, about Cornershop. This incidentally was the “Sophie” who contributed to FT a couple of times – someone was asking me about this a month or two ago having found a post of hers.
http://steakandwhiskey.com: now a search engine for marinades.
April’s Pita – apes.pitas.com (half of steakandwhiskey) now redirects to a little internet store selling badges and silkscreens! Hurrah for dotcom entrepreneurialism! I can’t remember anything about April’s blog but my original write up sez “pop fanzine energy and spark” so this is good to see.
Millie’s Pita: the other half of steakandwhiskey – how come dead pitas are so much more stylish than other dead blogs?
Metascene: “an freewheeling supply of original links and often hilarious commentary” – redirects to a kind of half-arsed attempt to start a sex blog.
Geegaw: still going, still the same charm, maybe a little more open than it used to be (I certainly don’t remember Geegaw having a *name*!). Very pleased to see.
The Laboratorium: still going – reviews, internet culture, law, commentary. Looks very good.
http://www.psn.net/~blue/scrubbles.html: Scrubbles – now a search engine for PS2s. Shame as this was one of the better-designed blogs I used to read.
This section could be called “Killed By ILX”:
http://www.empty.org/review/index.html: In Review – Sterling Clover and Jimmy The Mod’s old domain, now another search engine.
Ra Ra Ra: Nicky D’s short-lived blog, last update mid-2001.
Sink: absorbed into FT, kind of.
http://members.fortunecity.com/bitchcakes/: Bitchcakes – Ally K’s blog, now a PC hosting ad.
“the arrival of Blogspot has doubtless been greeted with horror by people who consider weblogging a debasement of the internet self-expression dream…”
Lapels And Lollypops: last updated November 2000 – funny Aussie blog.
Starry Vs The Baddies: “flamboyant, funny and fizzy” – dead link. Whatever happened to her eh?
Bloglet – dead link, though I know Catherine was still around as part of the extended Barbelith message board ‘scene’ cos I saw her at a club night once!
Hellsbelle – dead link. I can remember nothing at all about this!
Wherever You Are – dead link.
And that’s it. What to possibly conclude? Probably nothing much – I hope all the people whose links are dead are, erm, not themselves dead, and I’m pretty heartened by how many of the blog dudez who plugged away at it early on are still doing so (if only because it makes me feel less odd) – also how some of the indie people have stayed involved in good old indie rock. I will try to actually migrate some of these over to current sidebars. I could cut and paste my original thoughts from 2000 but they just said “blogs r graet yay”. And they are too.
Although not stepping onto the Blogtrain until Oct 2001, I know a few of this people IRL.
Darren @ linkmachinego does indeed win the award for Least Changed Weblog Ever.
Prolific.org is indeed Dutch. Caroline became eachman.com for a while, before returning to prolific.org earlier this year. She also administers U2log, Whedonesque and Gavin Friday’s site.
notsosoft.com is now meish.org, with all the old archives still available. Meg now works at Guardian Unlimited, and is very much involved with the whole Web 2.0/social software scene.
Wherever You Are is now An Unreliable Witness, with some of the old archives still available, but a very different approach… it’s sort of Kafka-esque.
Cool post, Tom, I’d noticed a few weeks ago you were ‘back’. I’m still Dutch, still blogging and am site coordinator of the web2.0-ish tvguide Zie.nl
Some of the links you mention here I hadn’t been to in years. Nice to be reminded of them.
Glenn is the best writer who has ever blogged about music. I don’t approve of his being referred to as possibly “bonkers.”
“Sometimes I thought he was bonkers” should be taken as an honest statement of how this site’s writers approached TWAS, rather than as a statement about Glenn’s bonkers-ness or otherwise.
Presumably “bonkers” was taken as being synonymous with “doesn’t like the same music as us” as tends to be the case.
Nah. As the write up suggests, I thought the degree of intimacy and personal/musical mix he did occasionally made him seem deranged. I was more easily shocked in those days. It’s been years since I read any of his stuff – something that stuck out like a sore thumb then and possibly now is the way he links music and living a good life/doing good: he felt a moral connection with music in a way that nobody else around except maybe Robin C does. (And Robin’s conception of morality is rooted in the cultural and political in a way that Glenn’s wasnt).
He was also – like the people in Tangents – an massive idealist – which is something most music writers would claim to be but very few are. FT has always had a more pragmatic outlook and admitted it.
I still think he has mostly rotten tastes in music but I think that of most writers I like sometimes (and vice versa I would hope!). Liking the same music as us isn’t hugely important.
Well actually other people might FEEL the moral connection but they sidestep it in their actual writing.
TWAS was without question the number one blog influence on my own writing when I started CoM – there were other, potentially greater influences at work but in music blog terms TWAS was my main model – so I’m inclined to be very protective towards what Glenn did.
His music tastes don’t really overlap with mine very much but I respect him for writing about the music he loves so passionately and honestly. I wish I could believe and agree with what he says about, say, Marillion or IQ, but then it’s not just about the music; I look for a writer’s soul and heart first and then work outwards (or inwards) from there. It was the story that hooked me and also the fact that he clearly approached every entry as though he were writing as a professional, even if he was equally clear that he didn’t want to write about music for a living (as if most people could).
Each entry was like an encrypted tablet of prayer and I felt that very deeply. It reassured me that I wasn’t bonkers myself for wanting to do something similar.
[…] bring the ruckus, Idolator. After that Freaky Trigger post the other day that mentioned in passing the Indieshite furor, back in that distant Golden Age, i have a craving for some of that flavor of […]
I know the whole Indieshite story, including who was behind it. Those were the days.
I’m sad that my old URL now links to a porn search engine, though. I just couldn’t justify continuing to pay for the domain space when I hadn’t used it in years!
nanette (formerly of amplified to rock)