When I was just a wee slip of a lad, writing rock criticism for a living in the early 1980s, we didn't have the internet. Oh no. We had the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Christgau's Consumer Guide Of the 1970s , and everything else I used my memory. It meant mistakes aplenty, one memorable article had me claiming the Animals sang "Lil Red Riding Hood". It was Sam The Sham And The Pharaohs.
But right or wrong, at least I had to think about it.
The other day I wrote about an upcoming concert featuring Pissed Jeans -a band I like a lot. I wrote "Allentown's finest…". Now here is the kicker. I had to idea they were from Allentown until I looked it up on Wikipedia, And it is almost like I'm pretending I know stuff I don't. When all information is at your fingertips, every opinion you offer is corrupted by limitless amounts of other people's ideas. It goes beyond borrowing, or being influenced, or even counter-uninfluenced, by other writers opinions, or even just an accumulation of information. It tains everything.
What happens is you appear to know more about a subject then you do, You act erudite, you act (I act) knowledgeable, but at what point is all we are doing regurgitating everything else out. I could write 500 words about just about any band in the world without hearing a fucking song… if I chose to.
Sometimes I write without a safety net, without double checking my info. Oh goodness, I can lambasted if I get the name of a bass player wrong. It's like I have just proven some nasty fucks point that I don't know what I'm talking about. Of course I know what I'm talking about, what I don't know is the name of a bass player.
And there is the rub, to research or to trust to memory?