Helen Bach pointed this out to me. It is a sign at a club during SXSW, My feelings about SXSW are documented elsewhere-to boil it down: I hate the fuckers and wouldn’t go if you paid me.
A blog called The Alt Report called the club owners out but I disagree with them. If bloggers wanna go poncing down to SXSW, harrassing rock stars who don’t like em, clubs who don’t want em, to write about bands who don’t care, they deserve to be treated like second rate hangers on.
I’ve tried to explain this to the writers here but they tend to miss the point. Bloggers are not rock critics even if they are more like eighties critics then the pros writing together. When you are posting ten, fifteen, times a day you are giving up a lot of fine tuning for speed, you are giving up accuracy for tonnage. And you are giving up the sophiscated twaddle of a dick like Jonah Weiner for the straight to the jugular attack or defense of a blogger.
We write more in a day then most ‘rock critics” write in a month.
And a Helen Bach does more in a week for rock music, finding and writing about bands just starting that climb, then New York Post’s Dan Aquilante has done in his entire career.
And we are on the outside looking in, which is exactly where we wanna be.
Who wants to be friends with fucking Panda Bear? To what end? Who gives a shit? Within a year there are bands we’ve written positively about who have moved on to bigger things. Will they talk to us. Maybe. But who cares. It is entirely besides the point.
I wanna document a scene while burning the liars and triumphantly searching out the bands who need our help to make themselves a career and continue to provide us with great music.
Does the world really need one more rock critic performing cunnilingus on the useless Joanna Newsome? When you and I, we bloggers, could be searching out the long gone Judee Sills, who had more talent in her little finger then Newsome wcould even imagine?
The question is do you want to be a rock critic? And by the way, when did it become in any sense cool to be a fucking rock critic? When I was one we were the bottom of the musical foodchain.
More or less. Fanzines were one below us.
While leads me to the death of MRR hardcore columnist Bruce Roehrs written about by Helen earlier today. When you’ve finished crying over Alex Chilton, maybe you can save a tear for him.
You wanna be cool? Be cool like Roehrs.
And if you wanna go to SXSW, don’t whinge because some low life club owner (or indeed the entire city of Austin) thinking you’re useless. This fucking guy spends his life cleaning puke and beer. Once a year he gets to strut his stuff. What does it matter unless you let it matter.
They don’t like us. We don’t like them.
Let’s get it on.