I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with this blog. I know you all are probably tired of me whining about how I no longer get very many visitors, so I’ll spare you that this time. I will say that Google recently announced it is completely changing the way they do search. Gone will be the days when you searched for something and you got a series of links to websites that would likely provide you the information you were looking for. Now it is all going to be AI chatbots, which is both dystopian and depressing. It will also kill the biggest way visitors come to the site.
But I’m not going to complain. What I am going to do is talk more about music. There is a realization that I spent over a decade providing music on this site, and that is all. Then out of the blue, I switched things up and started talking about music. Then I killed the music completely.
I’m sure many of you were like, WTF? Who cares about movies? I want music! Now, I will still not be providing music downloads on this site in any public way. But I would like to talk about it. I figure I’ll write some reviews of officially released live albums. I’ve been thinking about doing a series on the Grateful Dead’s Dick’s Picks releases for a while now, so that seems like a good place to start. And maybe I’ll review some unofficially released music. That sounds fun.
I do realize that I’ve gotten pretty good at reviewing movies, but I’ve not done a lot of music reviews. Certainly not in a long while. I haven’t worked that muscle in a long time. It has gotten flabby. Movies are easy. You can talk about story and plot. You can dive into a movie’s themes and talk about what the camera is doing. Or how scary, or funny it is. I know a little technical information about movies, and can impart that information. But I’m not a musician. I know nothing about the technical parts of a song.
There isn’t a plot to a song either. Not usually anyhow, and I’m not really a lyrics guy anyway. I dig on the melody and what the instruments are doing and pay little attention to the words. Music is about how it makes me feel, and that is hard to describe. It is very difficult to write down in something resembling a review.
This will be doubly hard when talking about live albums and bootlegs. Those songs won’t be new. They will have appeared on studio albums and played in concerts many times. So I’ll have to concentrate on the music. That will be a challenge.
But a fun one, I think.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy.
themidnightcafe.org 