the original doomscroller

As the end of a year approaches, Sasha Frere-Jones invites writers, musicians, and artists to come up with some words about that year.  "Reflections on 2023" went up on his Substack on January 1st and it includes some thoughts from me about doomscrolling. You'll have to - haha - scroll down a ways to find it, though, as he's got a hell of a lot of guests and some of the contributions are quite lengthy. 

The gist of my micro-essay is that the doomscroll is a new affect, brought about by a convergence of technologies. To achieve that specific mental-physical sensation in the pre-digital era would have required cobbling together a Professor Branestawm/Rube Goldberg-style construction, a rotational contraption through which would pass at speed a ribbon onto which was glued stories clipped out of the newspapers. But the ribbon would run out... and it's the inexhaustibility, the endlessly renewed quality of the scroll that induces those fixated feelings of panic and paralysis. 

About a week after the reflections went up, though, I stumbled across a precedent! 

Something on Twitter (more on that in a minute) led me to look up "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall":

Bob Dylan attributed his inspiration to the feeling he got when reading microfiche newspapers in the New York Public Library: "After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It’s all one long funeral song."

Dylan, original doomscroller! 

And the microfiche reader is a machine that you crank manually - so not unlike my mad-inventor contraption. (You can watch someone actually using one in the 1960s here).

The reason I was looking up "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" is a Twitter thread, started by someone who proclaimed that: 

"the music opinion I have that people would hate me for is that I truly think Bob Dylan is underrated, like severely underrated. and that he’s maybe the single most interesting person alive on earth right now. and that no other living artist even comes close to his significance"

Someone else chipped in with a hard agree: 

"It’s like living at the same time as Shakespeare"

Then someone else co-signed using a George Harrison quote: "There’s not a lot of people in the world who I see from a historical point of view. Five hundred years from now, looking back in history, I think he will still be the man. Bob, he just takes the cake.” 

And then - in what was turning into a competition between Dylan nuts to say the most Dylan-nutty thing ever -  yet another person declared that the line “Where black is the color, where none is the number” alone merited the Nobel Prize.

Not being a Dylan-nut, not in the least, I had to google the line, which led me to "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."

An enduring bemusement for me, this phenomenon of the Dylan-nut. D-nuts are forever quoting lyrics, brandishing them as if the most profound utterances ever uttered -  oracular, Bible-level stuff. They seem to like the parable-like cadence, or the old-timey American quality: plainspoken yet poetic. Sometimes, they'll talk about how funny a particular line is. (I'm always like, "really?") 

"Where black is the color, where none is the number” - partly it's the way it's sung, I should imagine. But as a stand-alone line, stripped of intonation, taken out of the mounting intensity of the rest of the lyrics, that particular line strikes me as.... fine.  

Of course (I've written about this before), Dylan would not make my Top 1000. Not contesting the  objective eminence, the historical importance, here - just talking about what I personally would reach for as something to listen to.  

Still, Bob did invent doomscrolling, so there's that.  

I wonder if he owns a dumbphone and actively doomscrolls today. Perhaps he'll write another "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall". Then again, he doesn't need to. It's a hardy perennial. 

postcript: A Britrap doomscroll from the mid-2000s

the final (connect_i)cut

Talking about blogs operated by musicians, word comes that the last ever album by connect_icut, also known as Sam Macklin and whose nom de blog was Bubblegum Cage III - is now out on the Blasted Gorse label. 

And it's really excellent, weaving Sam's abiding passions for early UK post-rock (Disco Inferno and that kind of thing), left-field electronic music, glitch, et al, into a shimmering final statement. Nice late period ECM-ish cover design too.

But it's not the last we'll hear of Macklintronica -  simply the retiring of a particular identity and the launch of a new direction. 

Check out his back catalogue while you're about it. 

blogging, continued

Xenogothic with some thoughts on blogging.  

Among many other things, Matt talks about blogs operated by musicians, by the likes of Deerhunter and Phil Elverum, as a whole other field of bloggy action. I suppose Momus's Click Opera,  mentioned in the previous Blissblog post about blogs then and now, counts in this category. In an earlier longer version of the Guardian column, I did link to a currently active music-maker blog that I enjoy: Wreckless Eric's Ericland. 

I have been going back and adding more blogs and bloggers that I remembered from the olden days to that post. But there are still swathes of blogging that I didn't cover - even within the music blogging arena.

For instance, I don't talk about MP3 blogs. But then they were never something I got into. The free MP3s seemed as unenticing as the flexi singles attached to fanzines back in the day. And the textual element rarely seemed as interesting as the output of the blogs I considered my true neighbours.

There was a whole other phase of hyperactive blogging I clean forgot about - all the blogs associated with hypnagogic pop and that late 2000s / early 2010s emergence of largely-online DIY micro-genres like witch house and vaporwave.  Blogs such as 20 Jazz Funk Greats and Visitation Rites and Gorilla vs. Bear and Rose Quartz that would be shepherded for a while under the Pitchfork-hosted mantle of Altered Zones.  I tried to evoke its neophiliac fever in this piece:

On Altered Zones and its constellation of blogs, the flow is relentless: What matters is always the next new name, the latest micro-genre, another MP3 or MediaFire. Artist careers likewise are a continuous drip-drip-drip of releases, a dozen or more per year—there’s no reason to edit or hold back, every reason to keep one’s name out there. Stimuli streams in, largely via the Web; creativity streams out, largely via the Web. Today’s musician is a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.... This scene is about being engulfed and enthused, carried along by the currents of the new. Drifting not sifting. 

Another huge wave of blog energy - and one that had a huge effect on me, albeit not necessarily for the good - was the whole-album sharing blogs. Some of these didn't just offer an album cover image and a link to Rapidshare / Megaupload  / Mediafire, but had proper textual content: well-written and informative, if rarely polemical or argument-starting. Serious curatorial activity, as undertaken by the likes of Mutant Sounds, Continuo's, Twice Zonked!, A Closet of Curiosities... I wrote about that scene in this piece for The Wire on "sharity" blogs. Even interviewed a couple of figures behind blogs.  That scene is much declined from its height but there's sharity soljas out there still, digging strange shit up... 

Yet another still active sub-subculture of music blogging: the "imaginary albums" blogs. This overlaps with the sharity in so far as they sometimes - not always - share their recreation of the rumored but never released album. Some of these blogs generate an enormous amount of counterfactual text, as discussed in this essay of mine on alternative history and music: 

Fans for years have been creating unfinished or unreleased albums like Beach Boys's  Smile, Hendrix’s First Rays of the New Rising Sun, The Beatles's  Get Back, the Who’s Lifehouse – using bootlegs, demos, out-takes... Today there is a whole realm of blogs dedicated to this practice – Albums That Never Were, A Crazy Gift of Time, Albums That Should Exist, Albums I Wish Existed… Usually they create fake artwork for the counterfactual albums. 

Some of these blogs, such as Strawberry Peppers, don’t stop at creating imaginary albums and record covers – they write incredibly detailed and extensive alternative histories of worlds where the Beatles didn’t split up, or where David Bowie joined the Rolling Stones, or where the Soft Machine’s Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt and Daevid Allen don’t leave the band, or alternate timelines where Syd Barrett stayed in Pink Floyd.  A kind of counter-discographical mania erupts.  

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

In addition to Xenogothic, there's been some other post-Guardian-piece posts -  a few from blogs I know well (like Feuilleton), most from blogs I'd never come across before:  Torpedo The Ark, Bhagpuss, The Sphinx. Somewhere amidst all that chatter I gleaned that there's been  unconnected blog talk going on too, at The Lazarus Corporation, at Velcro City Tourist Board, and in a piece about the internet getting weird again by Anil Dash for Rolling Stone.