WOEBOT

There's a load of mixed sentiments about the blogosphere in two recent interviews with Simon Reynolds for his excellent collection of essays "Bring The Noise". I feel a little uneasy taking up the thread of his objections here, I mean are we joined at the hip or what? But seeing as how Simon quite explicitly laments the halcyon days of inter-blog banter I suppose tackling this was reasonable enough.

In his FACT interview with k-punk, Simon is fairly unequivocal at laying the reason for the dearth of vital energy in music at the feet of the internet:

"The web has extinguished the idea of a true underground. It’s too easy for anybody to find out anything now, especially as scene custodians tend to be curatorial, archivist types. And with all the mp3 and whole album blogs, it’s totally easy to hear anything you want to hear, in this risk-less, desultory way that has no cost, either financially or emotionally."

Reading this I felt like I was dodging bullets, if not exactly taking one in the neck (not being a scene custodian, phew!). Even if you take the position of not downloading music, if as a music buyer you rely on eBay and GEMM, there is an implicit disconnection from the grassroots networks that used to contain one's consumption of music. The barriers once erect, if not demolished, have been lowered. Simon's is such a well-worn unequivocal statement as to be almost transparent.

I admit to wriggling in the noose here but there might be sticking points. Myspace has thrown up some interesting phenomenon, eroding insurmountable obstacles to the will-to-glom in otherwise hopelessly disconnected and fractured networks. It has created scenes where otherwise there would be none; for instance the healthy collectives of Gypsy music. An institution like The Wire magazine could be seen as proto-web, relying not on hegemonies bound by geography, but by forming a focal point for like-minded individual across the globe. As such it managed to survive the extinction that befell many other mags earlier on this decade. Much of the cultural impulse behind blogs like WOEBOT and the sharity mp3 LP sites works on a similar premise to The Wire. Of course, infintely more than the press, the web is the perfect vehicle for narrowcasting. But crucifying the net itself for being the perfect utility to channel what are indubitably swelling currents in society is unfair. Indeed there's an irony in recognising that by "Underground" here Simon means an alternative consensus.

I'm not sure if what Simon regards as the "Underground" doesn't by definition (cf Dick Hebdige) require a greater investment in fashion and style, music and literature than will ever be available through the internet. Scenes require talismans. If you're socialising at clubs or festivals, and these will always be the degree zero of any vibrant music scene, you need the right junkets. Though equally this applies if you're inviting people round to your house. Showing some girl your Arctic Monkeys mp3 just won't wash. The other night I was in Hoxton upstairs at The Old Blue Last. You'd have to be both blind and ignorant not be able to pick up on the deftly-tailored styles, musical and otherwise, on the vibes of the whole scene. It was the same at the Grime raves I used to go to (and I imagine it still is). One shouldn't go looking for the "underground" from within the context of the internet and equally one shouldn't be disappointed by music being used in a utilitarian fashion in the hood.

There's also a couple of things I wanted to pick up from Simon's interview at Ballardian:

On Blogs: "Now I’m significantly less excited, while still finding more to read and be inspired by in the non-professional blog world than in music magazines. What I enjoy most, and what has dimmed quite a bit since ‘the golden age’ a few years ago, is the conversational aspect – people riffing on other people’s riffs, that whole argumentative side. But with a few exceptions people seem to have retreated back into a more solitary, monologue-like thing."

Guilty as charged. Quite a bit of that original discursive energy from these parts went into Dissensus, where enough of it for my tastes survive. I suppose I got a bit burned out by the orgy of interlocution and went back to mono-blogging. I also have to admit a bit of a distaste for the "link-me-link-you" motor at the centre of the Technorati blog economy, and quite often that's what is at stake with hyperlinks, even if Simon to his credit is oblivious of this. The move away from inter-blog banter was concomitant with the balance of my writing shifting from exposition to research and that leads me to the last point of Simon's I wanted to look at, about theory:

The only music blogs I can think of that go for real hardcore theory are k-punk and… that’s it really. There are blogs that are primarily philosophy and/or art blogs who also deal with music now and then, like Sit Down Man, You’re A Bloody Tragedy or Poetix, but I don’t think people would think of them as music blogs. Actually k-punk isn’t just a music blog either, although music is a privileged area of culture for Mark. You get music blogs that do music criticism in a high-powered form or go deeply into the minutiae of subgenres and esoteric knowledge. But I can’t think of that many who are applying concepts from critical theory.

I’d make a distinction here between theorising about music and using critical theory and applying it to music. The former goes on a lot, obviously – and you could argue that any critical position is at some level theoretical, it relates to an idea of what music should be and how it works. But there is plenty of theorisation about music going on. What I don’t see a lot of is people using ideas from critical theory or philosophy and so forth and using them to explicate pop music. Even I don’t do nearly as much as I used to. But I certainly still generate theorems and analytical ideas that go beyond the thumbs up/thumbs down consumer guidance aspect.

This is bound to be a more introspective and self-serving observation than usual, and I'd like to apologise in advance for that, but when the shift occurred in the nature of WOEBOT, essentially when I worked my way to the bottom of my then-existing collection, and the blog started to be almost like a diary of my day-to-day searching and researching rather than objectively poring over the past, then it simultaneously became less theory-orientated. It became less about perspective because, working so close to the coal-face, that perspective was something of a luxury. Whatever theory I've picked up has almost exclusively, even though I've labored at times to disguise this, been gleaned from music journalism. As soon as I set off on my own travels unaided then there has been no hiding my general, not necessarily disinterestedness, but discomfort, with theory. Stuff I picked up and read more recently, Badiou and Spinoza, (unlike the Virlio, Rorty, Deleuze, Popper, Bhaba, Gilroy and McLuhan I'd read in the past) just didn't seem to have any bearing on music. I am aware that Simon himself has less room for theory in his writing than in the past.

I've moved to a position of being very focussed on history, on tracking currents within music with micro-precision, quite like someone in information technology might track flows, but usually with the explicit aim of trying to tease out new possibilities for the stultified present. Even though this has quite occasionally led to, perhaps amusing conflagrations with my peers; I can see that to quite a lot of people it might be very boring. Except to point out crassly that the stats on the site last month showed over a million hits, I wouldn't really know how to defend myself.