screensucking

Perhaps out of frustration, but also in the interest of integrating experiential blogging with music journalism, I have found myself in the unique opportunity to write about the scene that I am involved in. After several years of writing about critically acclaimed albums that have search engine pages of reviews, I began writing about local musicians while living in Boston. Although this felt better, in a lot of ways the style felt disingenuous – simply to come from a journalistic perspective was a strange feeling of code-switching, to be so formal felt foreign as a poet, lyricist, creator of avant-garde art. I felt extremely inept in getting answers to the questions that I was really interested in, as an artist myself.

I began to feel less isolated from the scene when I began writing locally, finding the scene piece by piece was a gratifying sensation – reaching out to venues to try to get free entry in exchange for press coverage, finding touring bands through the local bands they’re paired with, finding photographers to pair images with my descriptions of the bands, the atmosphere of a venue, the energy of a crowd.

This is why I like to think of music as an experiential entity, whose true power has been dulled and packaged to the liking of corporations that peddle it to us. Chewed up and reduced to monetary value.

The plethora of opportunities to see anything on any given day and the plaguing fear of missing out can often drive someone to decision anxiety, but wherever you go that supports the scene that you’re in is always the right choice.

The ephemeral nature of a live show is both exciting and nerve-wracking, and the industry’s competitive nature often leaves people feeling at a loss, frustrated, wandering miles away from the purity of the experience itself. It’s easy to see people as heads in a room, and as we grow detached from one another, we retreat to internet bubbles & it becomes more difficult to see these sub-genres reflected in real life.

I mean all this simply to validate that desire to retreat into oneself, and welcome those who are fearful to revel in their failures in the same way that one would with their successes.