Skip to main content

Board meetings: how online forums created a new musical culture

In the first of a new monthly essay series on music, we explore how messageboards became a meeting point for 00s music fans – and how, after being killed off by social media, they might rise again

Back in the 00s, I ran an online music forum, most of whose regulars were bored office workers. Once, we made a sketchy calculation, based on rates of posting and average wages, of how much the site had cost the UK economy in terms of time wasted arguing about Daft Punk, Outkast, Britney and more. We estimated that around £1.7m of productivity had been gloriously frittered.

Music attracts conversation like a magnet pulls iron filings, and the form that talk takes changes according to where music lovers hang out with one another. Milk bars in the 50s; “head shops”, fuggy student digs and record stores in the 60s and 70s; fanzines in the 80s and 90s. These days, the word gets spread via memes, like those earnest pleas for 10 Facebook friends to share their favourite teenage albums. And in the early 00s, there were music forums: Drowned in Sound, my own I Love Music, Barbelith, Dissensus, Hipinion and dozens of others, fierce little enclaves of snark, in-jokes and bubbling enthusiasm.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L3YWqH
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more