A Review Of Reviewing Drums And Drummer
Ok, I hate to paint myself into a corner with a generality. For example, I don’t really like a double bass pedal. Or double bass. This is a generality. I love Slayer. I love Metallica. I love all kinds of metal. There’s lots of double bass in metal. See A generality closes the doors on observation and experience. A generality is an easy way to set something aside and not confront it. It is the end of logic and communication. I am guilty as the next guy of holding onto my generalities. I like what I like and I like drummers. I’ve heard it said that the drummer is the most important part of the band. Led Zeppelin hung it up after John Bonham passed away, knowing that it would never be the same with another drummer. THe WHo on the other hand tried to replace Keith Moon with Kenny Jones. Kenny is a great drummer for the Small Faces and Faces. But he is not Keith Moon. More importantly, The Who were not The Who without Keith Moon. That is not to say that they didn’t still write good songs or that Pete didn’t have something to say or that they should have hung it up. It’s their life and they have the right to do whatever they feel is right for them. So I want to simply point out that I have some basic rules for myself when writing reviews. And I have my own rules that govern the music I like and the music I listen to. And one of the reasons I want to start reviewing records is to challenge those rules within myself. One of my self imposed rules is that I don’t like to tear people down or criticize other people. Especially artists and musicians. If I don’t like something I probably won’t review it. This is because I believe it takes more guts to put your art out there than any thing in life, and I wouldn’t want to have someone second guess my art. I do my own art to express myself and thats reason enough. So to this degree, most of the reviews on this site will be positive. I plan on finding like minded people to write reviews, but will probably want only positive reviews because of my philosophy that art should be supported, even if it’s not my bag. I admit, I’m jaded. I’m guilty of saying to people “the music business is dead” And I’m willing to admit that I could be totally wrong about that. I hope I am. In fact I’m sure I am wrong....
Update On The Updates
Now that I’ve imported all my busking/street drumming posts from the other site all the interviews have been bumped down. So, to see sweet and graphically satisfying (meaning the type is inside the lines and stuff) interviews of Band of Horses , El Ten Eleven, The New Pornograhers, Buke and Gass, Sloan, Local H, Nada Surf, Broken Social Scene, Cheap Trick, Why?, Bear In Heaven, Sonny And The Sunsets, St Vincent, White Mystery, Delta Spirit, The Golden Dogs, Bazan & Band Click on these here links or just go to the Interviews link thing above. Thanks to all the great drummers who’ve participated in these interviews. Coming in the next couple of days, the lost interviews of Dinosaur Jr and Fang Island. Onward!...
Street Drumming Project
So, I’ve been busking for the past several months. Since my web skills were lacking, I just started a new blog to document all the action on the streets. Now that my web skills are dialed, I’m going to import all that content into here. Most of the articles are tagged in the Street Drumming Project or the Life and Living sections. Plan to interview some street drummers and stuff too....
Updated site
wholly shit. Ok, so I’ve had this site for about 8 years now. I’ve rebuilt it from a self promotion device to a site where I started doing interviews with some of my favorite drummers. I started off doing video interviews and realized quickly that I had zero video editing skills and things quickly log jammed. I updated the wordpress backend and lost the whole site. rebuilt it again but got overloaded with bullshit that I didn’t know how to fix. Yesterday I started from scratch and rebuilt it again. As of this moment I am about 75% done and I am more happy and optimistic about it than I have ever been in the entire time I’ve owned it. I’m a drummer, not a web builder, but as of right now I feel pretty good about being a guy who has a cool looking blog. Once I finish fixing all the other sucky things about past posts which go over into the borders and other shit I’m going to start with a bunch of articles I’ve been meaning to write. I’ll review the Band Of Horses show I saw last weekend. The new Redd Kross record and a bunch of other stuff I think is cool. So, just mark this down as the point where this site re-started and is now pretty...