The post that follows is (mostly) a response to Jimmy's lengthy comment that was a response to my rant yesterday. I'll try to keep this a bit more brief (looking back, i failed), though, because I think we were both actually saying a lot of the same things.

I'll start off by saying that 70% of what I wrote yesterday was just stream of conscious rambling. Jim mentioned pitchfork, I was still buzzing from last weekend's Buzz Pop festival, and my work neighbors were out for the day giving me more than the usual two minute windows of opportunity to communicate with the world at large. The remaining 30% was split between my mixed feelings of the way the music culture has changed since '99 or so, about my own personal taste in music, and an excuse to invent the phrase "fuck-fuck".

Essentially, my stance on music in my life and the world right now is that everything is a double edged sword:
* I love that technology makes obscure things easier to find, while at the same time yearn for the golden days of having to work a little bit harder to find out about good music.
* I like that a good band can get national or even international exposure in a short time, but miss feeling the tightness that regional scenes used to promote.
* I love that with digital recording a band can put together a professional sounding record without spending a thousand dollars... but I also hate that it promotes a lot of young kids spending more time learning software trickery than good songwriting.
* I love that if I'm in a shitty mood on the bus ride home from work, I've got the perfect soundtrack of my own design in a little white box that's smaller than my wallet, but I hate that the iPod has become the cultural norm for music listening. It'd be sad if a whole generation of music fanatics never get to know and love the smell of a new record, proudly displaying a new recording in their collection, or the awesomeness of finding a used gem in a record store somewhere.

Etc. etc.

As far as my own tastes/methods go. I've had less and less time to dedicate to finding new bands since I started working like a grown up two years ago. I used to spend my free time at work/school cruising all sorts of music zines, blogs, label sites etc. to find out new things. I'd get home and download tons of MP3s and find a lot of good things and share them with anyone willing to listen. But my newfound lack of free time has forced me to rely on a small staple of go-to sources that I've certainly grown to disagree with. I know there's probably just as much stuff out there now than there ever has been and that the only thing keeping me from finding it is me. I will not be working 10 hour days with 1.5 hour commutes each way forever and I most certainly will never give up on my life-long love for listening to things that sound awesome. So once the former gives, I'm sure I'll be much more pleased with the musical landscape that probably alrady exists unbeknownst to me (this more than anything else was probably the largest take away of my last rant, which Jimmy properly called me out on in his).

A sort of related story about technology driven friendships: Last week at the Baltimore Fest I overheard Corey talking to someone about our hometown of Wayne, NJ. I perked my ears up and heard this stranger say, "Oh Popkid? I love Beezewax more than anything in the world, in fact we put on a ton of shows for Kenneth Ishaak last time he was in the US"... so I walked over to him and said, "Hi I'm Chris and South of Boredom is most definitely my favorite record of all time." Forty-five minutes later we'd talked about Beezewax up and down the map, the new Ken Stringfellow solo album, Big Star, and just about fucking everything that had to do with that genre of Beezewax/Posies sounding music that I don't even really know how to categorize (aside from "fucking awesome"). It was time for us to file in for a set (the Copyrights, I think) and we both kinda gave the "let's talk more about this stuff in the future" look. He prompted me with "what band did you say you were in again?".. "Hot Cops", I responded. "No shit? I know who you are dude. You and I have already talked on myspace about doing a split together (he's in the excellent DC area band Greasegun)! You should hit me up there when you get home since we're already friends." I had to take a step back. We were already friends. I thought I'd just made a new real friend and found out that we were already 1 and 0 friends from the internet. This shouldn't be that shocking here in the year two-thousand-and-motherfunking-six, but it serves as a good reminder that in the end technology isn't going anywhere.. and as it becomes less new and more a way of people's everyday lives, it will end up not really changing who people are and what they like anyway. --

The U.S. just got booted from The World Cup.