Format

I'd forgotten this about Rock'n'Roll. Just how pervasively it eats away at your soul. I've just spent an hour or so working though a small press database I did for myself last week. About an hour later, about ten lines in, I'd had enough. Four emails, three dead sites and four wanting a Cd.
So? Two things. One. I emailed a contributor to one web site (as was suggested in their notes).
I'm an old Marxist, everything is an economic exchange. Chris, (it was the guy's name), please review my album... No, there is nothing in it for you, no BJ, or big bag of sweets. It will take up your time and will not pay your mortgage. What's that line from half a band hawking round a 30 year old classic album “an economic exchange in the bedroom”.
I read a very very rubbish book about rock venues recently. It was so bad I nearly killed another tree putting pieces of paper in betweeen pages of book to highlight the factual errors, and sections of prose that made the facts meaningless. Right until the end, where the book ends up with a couple of stunningly written and informative chapters. Totally out of tune with the rest of the book. So does it work like this? Evil publisher gives writer book deal around a couple of articles, but, with so little money said writer needs to cut and past the rest of the book from the internet over a weekend. Integrity or starvation?
Point Two. I can live with web sites wanting hard copy of our Album. What I might not deal with is when they ask for something that is not a Cdr.
For 30 odd years I've had two mantras, one of them being. “It was easy,it was cheap go and do it” an early “Desperate Bicycles” single. It has become so easy and so cheap over the recent years that “us creative's” can just shovel stuff into the ether at a pointless rate. Who are the gatekeepers? We have not moved forward if every website and magazine requires a glass mastered Cd before it will consider a review. But, we are moving backwards if the arbiters of taste, the journalists, are hobbyists too. At some point we must start paying for something. If not the content, the analysis of that content. If not, we will not hear the quality though the noise.