Soundtrack in my head: Thievery Corporation, “Sound The Alarm”
An old blog is back. Run for your lives.
I’d been thinking for a few weeks of starting a new blog and had been brainstorming names for it, when it the idea suddenly hit me. That old Different Dinosaur Soundtrack—er, I mean The Different Drummer Soundtrack—why not revive it? I searched my hard drive, and it turns out that I still had old .xml files from it. Why just display current content when I’d been writing for a long time? While there were some entries that were a clear waste of pixel space, some of them were pretty good. I figure it might make sense to show my old stuff as well.
And there were a lot more posts than I thought. Five hundred of them. Amazing what an .xml file can store. I did whittle them down to about 350.
When The Different Drummer Soundtrack started in 2005, I started it on a platform called Squarespace, because it was the most sophisticated web platform at the time. I wasn’t the LiveJournal type, Blogger wasn’t much to write home about, and WordPress had yet to become of the powerhouse tool it now is. MySpace was the king of social media, while what we now know as Facebook was exclusively reserved for college students, and it wasn’t until a year later that said students would be mortified by a friend request from a middle-aged parent. While Friendster had been around, social media was still consider a new concept people were trying to wrap their minds around.
About a year or two after the this blog was founded, an online magazine from Milwaukee (MKE Online, I don’t think it still exists) nominated The Different Drummer Soundtrack for “Blog of the Week.” The contest would have readers look at the nominee blogs and vote for their favorite. I ended up losing out to someone’s MySpace page (even though I did my best Laverne and Shirley chant), because the editors apparently didn’t know about how easy it was for a MySpace user could mobilize their friends to vote for their.
Here in Madison, this blog also made a few appearances on Madison.com. This news and features website, which has online editions of both the Wisconsin State Journal, the Capital Times, and a few other publications, also had a publication called Post which featured local bloggers, and I made a few appearances there. They even had a print edition of Post. You might still occasionally see a plastic newspaper box out there with that logo on it, It looks like a cheap spray paint stencil with the word “post” and the Madison.com pentacle logo on them. (Yes, they’re closet pagans, I’m sure of it). Such boxes were last seen holding random real estate and grocery advertising rags.
Remember when MySpace was considered creepy while Facebook seemed shiny and clean? Do you remember blogrings? This blog was a member of a couple of those.
I’d started writing The Different Drummer Soundtrack because, well, I had a different perspective on things and I felt it was worth sharing. This is still true. And honestly, I feel like I have a lot more to say now, as we try to act like everything’s normal when the world is anything but.
So, feel free to explore. There’s some entertaining reading, from the time that I tried to stalk a Wisconsin U.S. Senator, to lambasting the lamestream media for publicly humiliating someone never previously in the public spotlight, offending the religious sensibilities of a spiritual organization I used to belong to by performing a sacrilegious act describing it in excruciating detail.and gleefully causing dozens of people to unsubscribe with a single post. Finally you can see where I might turn you on to lesser known music either once popular or perpetually obscure.
In fact, I will conclude this post with a video from some technical geek musicians around my age who are still bringing down the house more than twenty years later—on their own terms.
