I started blogging in 2002. Prior to that, I’d operated a website for about six years, but what grabbed me about blogging was the speed and the responsiveness – the way blogs picked up on what other blogs posted, and responded almost in real time. I wanted to jump right into the midst of this crackling synergy between blogs. So I did.
The blogging circuit I joined was only one corner of an ever-growing blogosphere. Even within music, my blog’s primary focus, there was a whole other – and larger – network of MP3 blogs. Still, my particular neighbourhood was bustling all through the 2000s. Out of its fractious ferment emerged cult figures such as K-punk, aka Mark Fisher, one of the most widely read and revered leftwing thinkers of our time, and the prolific cultural critic and author Owen Hatherley. Then there were those like me, who fit a different archetype: already a professional writer but someone who relished the freedom of style and tone offered by blogging.
Today, there are still plenty of active music blogs I enjoy reading. But what’s changed – what’s gone – is inter-blog communication. The argumentative back and forth, the pass-the-baton discussions that rippled across the scene, the spats and the feuds – these are things of the past. If community persists, it’s on the level of any individual blog’s comment box. I prize the unusual perspectives and weird erudition of my regular commenters, while wondering why so few of them operate their own blogs.
It’s easy to pinpoint what caused the fall-off: social media. On Facebook, once-prolific bloggers craft miniature essays for an invited audience only. The then Twitter – at least when it was good – supplied even more instant feedback for rapid-fire opinionators. There are other rival repositories of bloggy informality, such as podcasts. Just generally, there are more views – and there is more news – bombarding us than ever. No wonder the blogs have been shunted to the side.
I miss the inter-blog chatter of the 2000s, but in truth, connectivity was only ever part of the appeal. I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zero responsibility to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.
“Ramble” is the right word. When blogging, I can meander, take short cuts and trespass in fields where I don’t belong. Because I’m not pitching an idea to a publication or presenting my credentials as an authority, I am able to tackle subjects outside my expertise. It’s highly unlikely I could persuade a magazine to let me write an essay comparing Bob Fosse and Lenny Bruce, or find a thread connecting Fellini’s Amarcord, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Jacques Tati’s Playtime.
In recent months, I’ve ruminated about Wiki-Fear and the sticky way that upsetting information attaches itself to favourite artists and their music; looked at fame-as-royalty and royalty-as-celebrity via Dame Edna Everage and Clive James; and remembered the suggestive Flake commercials of my youth.
As those examples show, one of the great things about blogging, for a professional journalist, is that you can write about topics that aren’t topical. You are unshackled from schedules. An old record or TV programme you’ve stumbled on, or simply remembered, is fair game. YouTube’s arrival in 2005 brought a new dimension to blogging. The two go together so well because they are both servants of 21st-century archive fever, instruments of the atemporal culture brought about by the internet, social media and streaming.
The motto at the top of my primary outlet, Blissblog, twists Tricky’s lyric, “my brain thinks bomb-like”. My brain thinks blog-like: the digressive rhythms, the lurching between tones, it’s how my mind moves when it’s not behaving itself in print. I realised that I had, if not a problem, then perhaps some kind of disorder, when I started to spin off satellite blogs initially dedicated to the books Energy Flash, Retromania, Shock and Awe, but soon splintering to encompass particular obsessions and modes.
Freedom and doing it for free go together. I’ve resisted the idea of going the Substack or newsletter route. If I were to become conscious of having a subscriber base, I’d start trying to please them. And blogging should be the opposite of work. But if it’s not compelled, blogging is compulsive: an itch I have to scratch. And for every post published, there are five that never get beyond notepad scrawls or fumes in the back of my mind.
I’m heartened that some of the younger generation have caught the bug – including my own son Kieran Press-Reynolds, who operates his own outlet and contributes to the collective music blog No Bells. I can’t imagine stopping blogging – even once there are just a few of us still standing.
Simon Reynolds is a music journalist and author
