Hype Boogie Takes Off

After a few years of inactivity, I'm finally going to try this "web-logging" business in earnest. It seems like it's time to make my internal debates external, and this is the proper channel and the right time to give it a shot.

While Twitter gives me a space to offer my opinions to friends, strangers and porn-bots alike, the character limit generally reduces my thoughts to their simplest form, while also significantly clamping down on my ability to use profanity in original and disturbing ways. Plus, my handle (@Marcissistic) was my second choice, but @Marcissist was already taken, and that bugs me to no end. Facebook is another venue to share my thoughts with friends, but really, some opinions aren't meant to be shared with most everyone I know, minus the few dedicated holdouts who haven't signed up for Facebook because they already have girlfriends. So this seems like a happy middle-ground, in which (I suspect) only a few people at best will bother to read what I have to say.

I'm going to blog about music. I'll try to stick to that topic, because really what else do I know? I'm hoping to use this space to further my own process of musical discovery, which I freely admit is lacking these days. I may even sign up for eMusic again, since I'm tired of constantly re-registering for Spotify accounts after they figure out that I'm not actually living in the UK.

A few ideas for regular features: "Bad Songs By Good Bands." This is a topic that fascinates me. How does Neil Young write so many great songs and so many terrible songs? Surely he must know after he pens a song like "Cough Up The Bucks" that it's simply awful, and yet he plays it at concerts and includes it on an album all the same. Does writing and performing a throwaway song offer some perspective on the greatness of his better work, in the same way that watching a pee wee league baseball game might give you a new appreciation for the skills of a major leaguer? Does he actually derive creative satisfaction from coming up with these songs? Or is he just messing with us? I have no answer for any of these questions but I'll consider them nonetheless.

(The flip side of the coin - "Good Songs By Bad Bands" - is also ripe for exploration, but surely many less-than-stellar bands can and do get lucky and write a great song. Plus, while I may have a strong distaste for, say, The Eagles, and certainly consider them a bad band, there's a strong and valid argument that suggests the opposite, and I'd be hard-pressed to argue that Don Henley and co. are truly lacking in songwriting ability, especially in light of "Boys Of Summer," which really is a damn good song.)

Another recurring theme will definitely be my focus on musicians that play the shit out of their instruments, as there's really nothing I appreciate more than a demonstrated mastery of a guitar, bass, drum set, clavinet, sax, vibraphone or jazz flute (I curse you, writers of Anchorman/Fred Armisen for making a mockery of jazz flute, a fine and distinguished enterprise that folks like Herbie Mann and Eric Dolphy practiced to great effect). This inclination towards the instrumental probably explains why I tend to ignore or overlook many contemporary bands, because (rightly, or probably wrongly) I have the impression that so many of the greatest instrumentalists are not around anymore.

I'm sure I'll have show reviews in this space as well. Maybe I'll even go to some shows for the purposes of reviewing them, rather than simply to kill time, have a few drinks, and summarily forget the performance within days (or hours, depending on the level & rate of consumption). Wouldn't that be something? Actually, that will be my first proper post - a listicle of my top-5 Phish shows of the summer. Yes, I saw more than 5, and no I'm not ashamed of that fact. I'm also thinking, upon reflecting on this intro post, that I should place a premium on post and sentence brevity going forward, and I really should try to get rid of the parenthetical asides. Plus I'm using "I" way too much. If all goes well, the writing will improve, the posts will be shorter, and maybe they will even make sense on occasion.

Someday I hope to look back on this intro post and say, wow, what an asshole I was back in my intro post, and a bad writer to boot. But you've got to start somewhere, and I'm glad I decided to do this instead of buying Civilization V and wasting the next six weeks of my life waging endless war on the British.

As I take my first skip onto the hopscotch board of blogging, I offer tremendous gratitude to anyone who does take the time to read what I write, and especially to those who might deign to comment on my writing, because otherwise it's just a masturbatory exercise (not that there's anything wrong with that). I promise to try to keep future posts south of the 1,000 word barrier. Thanks in advance for stopping by.

Your humble servant,
>Marc