As I have detailed in the past, I want a paper fanzine again, filled from cover to shining cover with good writing about music that doesn’t suck. But not only are paper fanzines basically obsolete, the process of producing one involves dealing with ripoff cowboy advertisers, dealing with ripoff cowboy printers, dealing with ripoff cowboy record shops, dealing with bloody arsehole ripoff cowboy indie record distributors who pay only on threat of lawsuit KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL and I got just a little burnt out on it.
That said, I remember sitting around my then-girlfriend’s back yard in 1998, idly leafing through the Trading Post and looking at stuff going cheap I would have killed for in 1990. Linotypes! Halftone camera setups! Entire clunky publishing systems, Mac IIx still in the middle! That stuff was sorta fun. Except that even 1991-level desktop publishing knocked it into a cocked hat for convenience and ability to get the damned information out, of course.
So I feel some slight old man’s schadenfreude at these meddling kids set to the task of producing a magazine with the technology of the 1980s. Poor dears had to do arithmetic to work out their layout. HA! HA!
No you don’t. The great superiority of the Internet is that you can click the MP3 or Flash embed and hear for yourself whether this is your stairway to heaven (or heaving), without the intervention of some sneering hipster who desperately doesn’t want you to know that this time last year he was listening to Kings of Leon. Unmediated consumption FTW! (in the sense of both “for the win” and “fuck the world”)
Or to put it another way – for years I DIDN’T listen to Dave Lang’s recommendations. Now my 16Gb iPhone is bloated with them.
“Back in my day, ‘FTW’ only ever meant ‘fuck the world.'”
I’d still like the good writing about music, even if the necessity driving it is gone. Not that I can be bothered producing any myself. “YouTube. Here.”