If you really want to point fingers, you can blame Animal Collective. I was lying on my bed, listening to Merriweather Post Pavilion for the first time after a recent revelation made me realize it wasn't just a hock of bullshit, and a voice in my head told me to back up and delete my blog without thinking about it. It was the sort of Saturday afternoon where listening to voices in your head strikes you as a good way to be.
Which explains nothing, in and of itself. I'm aware. So let me try and clarify. I was thinking, as I listened to this music, about the fact that, for all their raving fanbase and superhype, the band itself is astonishingly nonpretentious. Several smart musicians gathered together and started making music good enough for people to start loving them. They've released eight albums; only this last one has really caught the public eye. And by all accounts they seem like normal, ordinary people, who still care first and foremost about making something people'll love.
So this is what I was thinking about. Also, that Animal Collective doesn't really have a big blog-RSS-Twitter combination web site. People didn't find them through viral marketing. They found them through their music.
I get really nervous whenever something I write spreads. I spend a lot of time studying viral marketing and word-of-mouth; I enjoy it. It's a game to me. But I don't like the idea of marketing bullshit and making it famous.
I spend a lot of time cheerfully mouthing off the likes of Dustin Curtis and Mark Bao and everybody else who sells hype rather than content. But I only feel comfortable doing so if I'm constantly striving to make something myself. When things I make start getting hyped past the point I feel comfortable about them, I become a hypocrite.
More people read my iPad posts this week than have read anything else I've written in a long while. They were rants, long on hyperbole and short on balanced opinion. They were getting cited as thoughtful responses to essays by people who know a fuck of a lot more than I do. A growing minority opinion was that I was an ignorant asshat. I don't disagree with that minority.
So those three Twitter essays are available again, along with my entire web site, in a zip format. But my blog is gone, as was the plan from the beginning. Something new is coming, but I'll be honest, I have no idea if it'll appeal to any of you. It'll appeal to me and my small crew of art school assholes, but beyond that I've no clue. There's no marketing plan as of yet.
As much of a part of me would like to hang around and shoot the shit with all you fascinating new people, especially those of you who've been role models of sorts to me growing up (lots of excited phone calls home about some of the names that popped up this week), it's not what I ought to do. Partly because I was already moving out, especially because of these rants, I'm calling it a day, letting you know that there's something else coming, more importantly letting you know that I don't think you'll all like it. I love you guys and I love the conversations I've been in these last few days and I'll beat myself up for doing this a day and a week and a month from now, but, well. I'm hoping this makes sense to a few of you.