Happy blogday to me!
I have owned and written stuff on this domain since 14th March 2006. Eighteen years! It seems quite astonishing to me, that stretch of time.
This will come as not surprise to regular readers, of course, who will be accustomed to me writing “it feels like an eternity, and yet like no time at all”, or something along those lines. But I write it because it’s true. 2006-me seems almost unimaginably distant, a naive and blundering manchild wading into a discursive world that a decade of small-town music-scenesterdom (and chemical oblivion) had really not prepared him for at all, whether intellectually, emotionally or physically.
But at the same time, it feels like 2006-me is sat right here, just behind my eyes, less banished or transformed than steadily layered over with thicker skin and self-inflicted scars.
What is this blog even for, then? I think I’ve come to accept that there’s no immutable answer to that question: it’s here because it is one of the spaces (and ways) in which I write, one which has not yet definitively declared an end to its use-value.
(And, as discovered here not too long ago—in an act of discovery that justifies the process, perhaps—how you write is what it’s for.)
It’s a cliche both personal and general to the majority of all bloggers to say that I’d like to be writing here more often. It’s also a cliche both personal and general to say that the demands of other aspects of my life mean that the time (or perhaps the combination of time and energy) required for blogging is not reliably available.
However, it’s in some ways quite nice to be able to say that, and to know that my biggest reason for not having the time is that I’m busy writing things for other people that they are paying me to write. 2006-me would be pretty pleased to see that I’ve ended up “becoming a writer”… but while the content of that teleological goal is arguably contiguous, he’d likely be rather surprised by its form.
(Hell, even 2024-me is surprised by it on an almost daily basis.)
Dear friend (and friend-of-the-show) Paul 65-days-of-Wolinksi has started blogging (or newslettering, or “writing personally on the internet”, or whatever we want to call it these days). He and his bandmates have spent a lot of time in recent years trying to rethink what it even means to be a musician in the C21st. With Wolinski in particular, there’s a strongly Jamesonean strand to that thinking, which I think can be seen in this piece about what we mean (or at least what he feels he means) when we talk about “releasing” music.
Against the grain of the hegemony of “content”, but also perhaps against the earlier hegemony of “art”, Wolinski relinquishes (or releases, har har) the very idea of of his music having much meaning or value to him after it is finished… indeed, it reads to me like the moment of (or for?) release is defined precisely by its being the point at which it feels like hanging on to it any longer is making everything more difficult, in a fairly existential way.
Putting this music out into the world did feel like a release. I can forget about it now, if I want to. It has served its purpose. It is no longer a weight to carry around. Perhaps musicians are not supposed to say this. It’s not that I don’t care about this collection of music. I am proud of it and stand by it, otherwise I wouldn’t have put it into the world, but mostly I am relieved that it has gone. Because for me music is a ballast. And it plays this role perfectly. When I am making it, it keeps me steady. Keeps me together. Gives me a weight in the world. I feel like I am moving through life with intention. But also, as the noise slowly coalesces into something more song-like, it can get heavier. And when it feels like it is dragging me down, I dump it overboard so I can float free.
Inspired by the 65dos wreckage.systems project—which I listen to a lot, because it can reliably background an entire day of work with endlessly self-generating sci-fi glitch’n’roll without my having to think about it at all—I’ve spent a certain amount of my spare braincycles trying to think how one might move the art of writing into a more process-based model: a way of making a living as a writer that gets away from the idea of writing particular types and/or genres of thing, which one then sends to particular markets which might pay for things of that size and shape. It is this almost piecework-like model of creative work which, I think, Wolinski and his comrades are trying to escape.
It could be argued that the substacky-newslettery model of writing, so popular at present, is the answer to this question; I’m really not so sure it is. This is a McLuhanesque issue, perhaps: it’s to do with writing as a “hot” medium, which demands a different form of attention to the “cooler” media of music or, say, visual arts. I think people want to know what sort of thing they’re going to read before they sit down to read it. But perhaps they don’t?
Any which way, you can’t really sell the process of writing as a performance, as you might do with music or painting or sculpture: no one’s gonna sub to a livestream of some guy or gal sat at a keyboard and screen and sighing every five minutes.
(Feel free to prove me wrong on that last point, of course—cheques and bankers drafts to the usual address, etc etc.)
I guess where I’m going with this is that, in a way, my earliest learning-the-ropes days of blogging—most evidence of which was, rather mercifully, lost in a database migration incident over a decade ago, though I believe it’s all there in the Internet Archive, as well as being implicit in the mediocre jabberings of large language models—were perhaps as close to a pure-process model of writing as I’ve ever been. Most of what mattered to me at the time was that I continued to do it, kept the schedule; turning up to the edit window was literally all I knew how to do, in truth. The quality was frankly dreadful at first, but it gave me the confidence to write stuff for other people elsewhere, and then to write for Futurismic, to start my (long since defunct) music reviews site… and with time there came the pleasure of releasing, somewhat like that which Wolinksi discusses in his piece.
Perhaps it’s harder for a writer than it is for a musician to doubt that their work is fundamentally communicative, with all the communal conotations of that adverb; I’ve always known that was what I was up to, and for me I think a huge part of the appeal of writing was that it allowed me to communicate far more effectively than I ever could in person.
(As people who’ve met me will know very well: in conversation I am verbally manic, digressive, unstructured. I gabble! The ideas just pour out, and people quite understandably run away for fear of drowning in them. On the page, however, I have the time to think and structure and plan: trusting that I will eventually say all that I want to say, and not too many things that I don’t need to say this time, I can say what needs to be said.)
Perhaps that’s why I recognise the lightness that comes with release which Wolinski describes. Even with a piece like this one you’re reading—which began with the idea that I might mark the anniversary of this blog with a few lines, and maybe plug Paul’s new blog briefly, but has now taken an hour of my day and run to well over a thousand words—there’s something in me that goes into the work, something that I clearly need to do on some level… something that I cannot articulate in any other way, other than by doing the work.
(Yes, yes—that cliche of debateable provenance regarding writing not so much to tell people what you think, but rather to discover what you think. And I know from asking that it’s not true for all writers—but I know from experience that it is utterly true for me.)
In a way that is still surprising when I look at it straight on—like the blindspot in your vision, or a flaw in a mirror—I recognise now that I need to write, but also that I need to send some of that writing out into the world. Surely some part of that need is a residual desire to be heard, to be recognised for something unique to myself—the desire which made me want to be a musician.
But much as I loved (and still love) music, that was evidently not the form of communication which I needed to release; if it had been, I would surely have dedicated more of my life to it, instead of faffing about with words.
After eighteen years, I know with a somewhat useless certainty that this is what I need to do: that on some deep level I must write, and that at some point some of that writing must be released, and go out into the world.
But I’ll give t’other Paul the last word, I think:
Does any of this make it easier for me to release music? No of course not. I wonder why.
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