Mission Statement
I’m just trying to keep up with the underground music my peers actually listen to without dumbing down or numbing my own tastes, keeping it cynical when possible, and praying for breaths of fresh air.
I know there’s good stuff out there, and that sometimes, good music breaks through into these top lists as well – even these top lists which focus on lesser known music tend to still reward mostly dogshit. And digging through the shit, I have realized, is not doomscrolling. No, in fact, it’s just like doomscrolling, but the doomscrolling itself isn’t actually problematic. As Sun Tzu said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Just like we must as good communists, it’s our duty to read the Wall Street Journal and watch Tucker Carlson: because we have to study the enemy to find their weaknesses which we can hopefully exploit. It’s the same way here, except the stakes are lower (well, I think Adorno would say the stakes are never higher than in the culture war – and believe me when I say this is culture war). Hopefully I will keep up the good work and continue updating this blog every week, and maybe my positions will shift, but like I said, that is not the goal of this project. No, the goal of this project is to make me more staunchly and stubbornly firm in my current position, and by exposing myself to this kind of music I’m going to do exactly that.
I’m going to use one or two or more concepts of my own invention in an attempt to eschew genre arguments. I will use them perhaps a little bit interchangeably, but I think they encapsulate the realm of college radio/underground DIY music pretty accurately in this pretty limited selection determined mostly by public opinion not by music-critical listeners. These concepts are “indie” and punk/rock. “Indie” has come to mean nothing at all except for a vague aesthetic prerequisite, but I would pose the Socratic question, “Is their something in the thing’s nature that makes it ‘indie,’ or is the thing only ‘indie’ by nature of being described that way?” A similar question can be posed about the punk/rock distinction. “Is the thing punk because it draws on rock tradition, or is it rejection of rock tradition that makes the thing punk?” Depending on the state of mainstream music, this can change quite a lot, and has gone back and forth in the decades since punk’s inception. Is punk a nerdy rule-breaking-for-the-sake-of-rule-breaking intellectual exercise, or is it an anti-intellectual/blue collar/street movement which draws heavily on the mainstream guitar music of earlier eras as a base of common understanding between fellow urchins? Depending on the era you’re talking about, the scene the band in question emerged from, it might be the standard-ness of the music that makes it punk (see Minor Threat-derivative straight edge and all D-Beat) or the complete weirdness of it (see DNA or Butthole Surfers). So I won’t draw a line. I see it all as part of one middle-and-lower-class American tradition of garage guitar music, with various regional and cultural differences ruling things like tempo, time signature, technique, experimentation, improvisation, technical manipulation, etc.
To keep everything relevant and hopefully reflective of music-listeners, music-makers, and music-industry-professionals at large, I'll start each week with the North American College and Community Radio charts, and then the top chart from the main Minneapolis college radio station, Radio K, and I’ll mix in standout hits or bombs that I come across on my own, too. And maybe some of my own favorites and least favorites.
This whole blog is also on my RateYourMusic profile here.