What now, indeed

What to do. I'm kind of all over the place. I've just printed my black metal article with the intent of editing it so that I can submit. My mind is also on all the innumerable albums and bands I still want to check out. That reminds me of Adorno's pessimistic vision of leisure as work -- ugh, the weight of being an aspiring music cognoscente weighs heavily on me! I discourage myself a lot when it comes to doing what I want to do. I would really like to put myself out there from a journalistic standpoint and see if I could get some freelance gigs. Concerts, album reviews, movies, etc. And funny enough, part of how I stifle myself is really fretting over what any of this work amounts to -- I read my fair share of cultural criticism, and I am especially interested in heavy metal shit. Leafing through Reynolds' dissection of postpunk, Rip it Up and Start Again, however, I got the somewhat queasy feeling that it's all a lot of scene showmanship, and entirely too dry at that. It's useful, to be sure; perhaps Reynolds' comments on DEVO just wounded my spudboy heart a little too much.

On the other end of the spectrum, I'd really like to commend Erick Lyle and SCAM! Magazine for putting out such a bad-ass chronicle of the inception, life, and death of Black Flag. I need to re-read it, but I devoured that thing as soon as a coworker brought it in a month or so ago. Critical without being cool-guy about it, it's just a good fuckin' read, and beyond talking only about Black Flag, it speaks more deeply to concerns about where scene and commerce meet, especially in an age where the marketing of subculture seems to have been perfected. (On that note, one could make the argument that recent trends toward some forms of self-sufficiency -- urban farming, purchasing local, etc. -- might be another attempt by people to opt out of that which is marketed to them, just as subcultures like punk and metal have been before.)

Which I suppose is what interested me about taking a critical eye toward heavy metal to begin with -- that the ongoing movements of a hardy musical and cultural form like heavy metal have real and lasting relevance as applies to issues in our world today. Plus, it doesn't hurt to be a helpless headbanger with a mind for analysis.

And so a lot of it is just fear that I don't know how to begin. But that's not true. It's fear that I won't know what to do when the next step comes, whatever that next step may be. Fear that I won't live up to someone else's idea of "authenticity," which is really just my own judgment. OK, over and out for now.