OPINION

There was an unnoticed absence, and now, after some hesitation, we’re back. How long will we make it this time? Will we give up after realizing written media isn’t as important anymore?

     The year is 2025 so it’s a bit fitting that this is the moment we chose to come back. It was originally intended -should we hadn’t sopped- to have some big event to celebrate what would have been our seventh year, but that was quickly discarded as we don’t know were we stand after this absence. Yes, this little project achieved some notoriety -to the extent something without any connections or funding ever could- but it never truly broke the surface. Plus, trends are changing faster than ever, so where does a page run by two oldheads stand in a world where even The Wire is struggling? Short answer: we don’t know.

     The goal was to just keep the old archive available for reference, and maybe include new sporadic content as I won’t be churning out as many reviews/articles as I used to. Life is hard and I am a simple man surviving from week to week. Nonetheless, I still feel there’s a lot of ground to cover, and a lot of new, and tenured, artists that deserve to have their work talked about. Because, let’s face it, a lot of things are still just existing on their own, even if they’re not precisely coming from struggling artists. 

     We know that giving the audiences what they really want would be the easier way, but nah. We refuse to give into the redundant, recycled regurgitation of facts taken from Wikipedia or RYM in the form of a TikTok/Insta reel, with my dumb ass holding a microphone trying to school you on why HANATARASH is the MOST DANGEROUS BAND, or unboxing my most recent crate-digging haul just so you can see ME as a distinguished collector with sophisticated taste. 

     Music journalism or music “content” shouldn’t be reduced to the gentrified idea of “cool” and its surface-level aesthetics, or the obscure artists you can namedrop because of a 15-second TikTok, your new “goth outfit” or the latest corporate-backed festival you went to. It can be, and there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but music is a broader topic. These endeavors should be about the artists and the music, not about the writers or “content creators”. In that sense, we want to keep on doing what we have been doing since the start, and if it catches on, cool. If it doesn’t, no biggie. As Fiona Apple beautifully puts it in “I Want You To Love Me”: “And I know none of this will matter in the long run, but I know a sound is still a sound around no one”.

Who knew we were such romantics?