Blogs prevent music standstill

By Nick Walters

Sometimes throughout life you may find yourself becoming musically stagnated. The playlist on your iPod is filled with the same songs you have heard millions of times, and you just can’t find anything new that peaks your interest. If you’re like me, then you may be completely turned off by local radio. Normally, I forego listening to the radio completely. Besides WRFL, I find most radio stations in Lexington to be musically unsatisfying and just plain boring. On top of that, the on-air personalities are usually quite moronic.

So, where can a person look to find some new and interesting music? To aid in the search for new quality music, a great resource is music-based blogs. Not only do they discuss happenings within the realm of music, but lots of them have plenty of free MP3s for your downloading pleasure.

One of my favorite blogs is Stereogum, (www.stereogum.com). The good folks at Stereogum write about all sorts of styles of music, and cover popular acts as well as some that you’ve probably never heard of. The site has introduced me to countless bands that I now love and listen to on a daily basis. The site offers tons of new downloads each month, which can be downloaded as individual MP3s or all together in torrent form. Occasionally, the blog will produce a digital album of their own that you can also download for no fee. Past albums have included compilations of different bands covering R.E.M. and Bjork, as well as a few remix albums.

Another truly awesome blog is Pitchfork, (www.pitchforkmedia.com). Pitchfork follows the model of most music blogs, posting music news and plenty of interviews, but they go one step farther by having another site devoted entirely to the video medium, (www.pitchfork.tv). Pitchfork.tv offers tons of music videos that you will never see on MTV or VH1 (when they are actually playing music). The site also has exclusive live performances that are usually in intimate settings, though my favorite offering has to be the obscure music documentaries that they post, usually offering a different one each week. Pitchfork even has a yearly festival with this year’s lineup including Spoon, Animal Collective, Vampire Weekend and Ghostface Killah.

One last blog that needs to be discussed is the Lexington-based You Ain’t No Picasso, (www.youaintnopicasso.com). The blog covers musical occurrences within Lexington and other places as well. This is a great site to check out if you are looking to find interesting concerts in close proximity or to pick up some free MP3s.

There are a great deal of other music blogs on the Internet that are just as good as these, it just takes some time to find one that is to your liking and pertains to the style of music that you prefer. So, get out there and find some good music because all the mass media is going to force feed you is the same old mediocre crap.