Simon Reynolds has recently written an ode to blogging for the Guardian, with a more bespoke and in-depth ode to and for the ‘heads over on Blissblog. I’m glad I’m not the only one feeling wistful. I too cannot imagine a life in which I no longer blog (at least entirely). There’s been quiet years, years of disillusionment, years during which I’ve simply been too busy, but in spite of the fact I’ve just recently turned 32, I’m only three years shy of a 20th blogging anniversary myself (here’s Simon’s). (In fact, that 20th anniversary is probably a little sooner, but there’s no trace of my really ancient attempts at blogging before 2007.)
I’d like to add one note to Simon’s retrospective: in addition to the music blogs Simon salutes, I do still miss that other (rarer) form of music blog, which is blogs run by musicians themselves. I wrote about these as part of a wider reflection a few months ago, when I picked up my guitar again after moving into a flat on my own for the first time, and thought about setting up a home studio and sharing musical experiments online again. (When I started blogging, I wasn’t a writer at all. First, I only shared musical demoes, then — for many, many years — only photographs. I thought about posting musical experiments again in 2023, but I really didn’t like the results I produced during a brief moment of renewed enthusiasm, so that might not happen any time soon.)
It made me think back to Bradford Cox’s old blog, where he’d share home-recorded EPs and demoes throughout the late 2000s. There was something so exciting about that kind of direct line to someone’s creative process — one that wasn’t simply textual. (Simon does nod to a few people who played around with this as well, in his corner of the blogosphere, but I’m not sure of extent to which this was a focus of their output, like it was for Cox.) It doesn’t feel like an entirely outmoded approach to the blogosphere, however. My favourite new blog is probably Phil Elverum’s Substack, on which he shares news and updates and reflections and — if you’re willing to pay a small monthly fee — access to demoes and live recordings and things from the Microphones / Mount Eerie archive. (If only these things were downloaded, as they used to be on other blogs… But I suppose the subscription fee would be quickly made redundant by file-sharers.)
It’s this necessity to somewhat privatise your online output that I think is partly to blame for blogging’s steady decline. Blogging for blogging’s sake is a dwindling sentiment, as even the “microblogging” sites we all now frequent by default are trying to monetise themselves. The recent developments behind the scenes of Twitter/X feel like a response to the decline of macroblogging more generally, even an echo of what happened around these parts a few years earlier. Indeed, if inter-blog communication stopped happening a few years ago, the end of big discussion threads on Twitter followed not long afterwards. So it doesn’t feel like a problem with the platforms in themselves but rather how they are used (or more specifically, how we are being encouraged to use them, as is Elon Musk’s desire.) It’s as if writing online has gone through its own Napster moment, as outlets big and small are tacked towards being subscriber-only affairs. No doubt some people have made this work, even necessarily so, in order to ensure their survival, but this increased atomisation has also killed a wider communality — such is neoliberalisation (something I write about, to ironically plug my more private endeavours, in Narcissus in Bloom).
It is this kind of wider communication that Simon highlights on the Guardian, writing:
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.
Personally, I don’t see social media as being responsible for this decline. When blogging was good, Twitter was good too. It felt like a sort of open forum for discussion and the main place that blogposts were circulated. This remains the case, actually — WordPress’s “insights” feature shows that I get far more engagement from Twitter and even Facebook (although posts get sent there automatically without me ever logging onto the platform), whilst email subscribers click through a lot more infrequently, with natural traffic from search engines being similar. It is the YouTube video essay that has changed things, I think, seemingly because (quelle surprise) that’s where the money is. Blogging has become just another online side hustle.
I’d like to say that that’s not for me, but as someone already precariously employed, I have noticed a drop-off in my own enthusiasm since the start of the pandemic, which is when I had to change career. Simon alludes to this on Blissblog, highlighting that I’m one of a number of “people on this circuit [who] became authors (and /or fulfilled other functions) within the Zer0 / Repeater empire”. Not only have I written / edited books for Repeater, I’m also a proofreader for them, having worked on around 30 books they’ve published since 2020. (I’ve got two on the go at the moment, in fact.) It was around that time I also set up my own Patreon and ran reading groups with readers of the blog for two years to try and boost my income a bit further, after it drastically diminished when I was forced to go freelance in the digital world during Covid. Unfortunately, personal circumstances and further life changes have meant I don’t have as much time for that anymore either, and it’s clear I don’t have as much time as I once did for blogging either because of these life changes as well.
And anyway, the most inspired development in the Zer0 / Repeater camp has been the pivot to more audio-visual content, led by the Acid Horizon podcast, which had done amazing things in recent years. I must admit, however, to feeling a little left behind by it all. Sean, Corey and I had so much fun making the Buddies Without Organs podcast, of course, but I couldn’t maintain the schedule when my mental health got bad and now the band has dispersed and moved onto other things. Maybe one day I’ll do something like that again, but still, nothing excites me as much as writing does. Perhaps because — as Mark Fisher could have possibly been alluding to in his essay “Good for Nothing” — it’s easier to work to one’s own pace and capacities, alone, when depression is a frequent obstacle in life. It speaks volumes (to me personally at least) that I’ve never managed to hold down a job consistently, but blogging has been a constant for half of my life at this point.
Blogging is the perfect outlet in this regard, or at least it once was, because it is a way to create and share and communicate that sits outside the necessary requirements of a more “professional” kind of “creative practice”. Accepting one’s limitations in life, blogging can give you a sense of community and comradery regardless. Indeed, what’s mourned — despite (or perhaps in lieu of) a rise in “profile” and visibility and a writing “career” (all pretty moot, if I’m honest, as I continue to flail in my overdraft) — is the real sense of community and being a part of something bigger than oneself that blogging once provided. That’s what was really so fantastic about blogging in its heyday. The stereotypes of the lonely writer’s life are all pretty accurate, but a blogger’s life used to be anything but lonely. The chatter never ceased! That is, until it did.
Since reading Simon’s post, I’ve been thinking more consciously about the future of blogging. Since the end of the Covid lockdowns, I’ve noticed a melancholic nostalgia that has descended over my own output, as I struggle to contend with the loss of a life once lived on- and offline. But I’m reminded of the ways that blogging used to really help me in similar moments of upheaval. This blog started, after all — at least in its current form — when I finished my Master’s degree at Goldsmiths and — taking a leaf from Mark Fisher’s book (or a post from his blog, to twist the idiom) — I decided to use it as an excuse to keep writing. (I’m certain Mark said this himself somewhere, suggesting the creation of k-punk was a way to scratch a post-PhD itch in the mid-2000s, but I can’t remember where he said this now.) What drove me then was the documentation of a community, both on- and offline. The online community may have dwindled, but there is so much more to life, and maybe it is simply a case of paying more conscious attention to the rest of life that could really get the blog-blood pumping again.
I reckon even my friends would like that. I noted in a series of still-melancholic reports from the summer of 2023 that my friend Kitty had reminisced about this, saying: “Remember when you used to write about every night out we had?” There’s nothing stopping me from doing this anymore, except perhaps a more reclusive lifestyle that has continued to linger post-pandemic. Maybe that should be my New Year’s Resolution for 2024: take my notebook outside more and chronicled the scene at my feet, rather than lament the one at my fingertips. That’s when blogs are the most fun to read and write, ultimately: when chronicling a subculture. And there is no shortage of those today. It’s just a case of plugging back in.
