NYLPM No More

I lost a post sometime last week. This wasn't Blogger's fault, it was mine. It was in my head and I lost it. I was walking home with an armful of records and CDs, fresh from the Rotate This Boxing Day sale and pondered the notion that this was probably my ninth or tenth straight year that I'd shopped at that sale -- a streak that is in danger of ending once I finally graduate. Shops opened and/or closed during that time, others have been around the entire time but I don't bother with their sales anymore, but Rotate stayed constant. I returned from Berlin on Boxing Day 2003 and hit the sale the next day. This year I returned from the much closer and less exotic locale of Hamilton, Ontario and went straight from the train to Rotate This, making it my first stop ahead of the Yonge/Dundas corridor and avoiding being on those streets around the same time as a tragic fatal shooting. Or, I might have been thinking about how I had thought, back on the 15th, that my favourite albums of 2005 would be more in line with critical consensus than they had been in years (maybe ever?), only to watch year-end lists with little ressemblance to my own roll out for the past two weeks. Like I said, I don't know what I was thinking about. I lost that post. Oh yeah, I returned from California on 3 Jan, 2003 and missed all Toronto Boxing Day sales entirely. Not much of a streak then.

New York London Paris Munich is calling it a day. It's a low-key finale, coming on the final day of 2005 when few people are reading blogs, but ending something on New Years Eve Day does feel like the most appropriate way to end something. It'll be easy to remember the date, if nothing else. I don't really know him, but Tom's readers and friends are likely none too surprised at this. Over the past couple of years, Tom's done a lot of reflecting on the role music plays (or should play?) in his life. Likewise for NYLPM. Tom has written about how others used to want their blogs to be like NYLPM, whereas now they're more likely to emulate something like Fluxblog. He's not dissillusioned about music by any means (for instance, his UK#1 project Popular isn't going anywhere, thankfully), but there's been a "blogs and/or lording over message boards has passed me by" attitude in his writing for some time now, and when that happens, motivation vanishes rather quickly.

I've been a Freaky Trigger reader for many years now, back to the days of Tom and Ned's famous 90's lists, but strangely enough, I didn't read NYLPM very often. It was (proudly!) more POP and UK-centric than my typical tastes over the past six years, and when comparing more recent posts to those in the archives, the dwindling energy was instantly noticeable in everything from the lack of unbridled enthusiasm to the decreased frequency of posts.

The abrupt cessation of one of the longest-running blogs on the internet (in any discipline) makes me think about the status of this blog. Actually, this subject has been on my mind for a few months now. I started this in January 2000, two months before NYLPM started up. There really is no comparison between their massive 3500-post excursion (and dozens of regular contributors) and my one-man operation.

This was the first year that I felt the quality of writing and content here didn't improve from the year before. Not because I'm no longer improving as a writer, because I am, but my best writing of 2005 turned up on another blog in a different discipline and I'm immensely proud of that. I thought just as much about music this year as I have in past years, but I wrote about it less often. This resulted in fewer think pieces, and more instant reactions to gigs I'd seen or ecstatic rants about albums I'd heard.

However, unlike 99% of bloggers out there, I don't care if I jump the shark. Unless I completely lose my interest in music at some point, I can't envision an appropriate reason to stop writing the Diary of Musical Thoughts. I never kept a "proper" diary. I was never interested in that. If I want to know what was happening in my life from Jan 2000 onward, reading these archives helps me vividly reconstruct what I was doing at that time. I might only write about music here, but the music that occupied my mind is the gateway to whatever else was happening in my life.

I might have been less attentive to the "craft" of music writing lately, but the more visceral, less polished nature of these posts is probably closer to the real, unhinged, electronic apparition of me. Lots of blogs wrap up because the authors don't have their hearts in them anymore. Maybe my writing was sloppier this year, but it was closer to the real me, rather than the real me trying to convince people that he is a competant music writer.

I'm terrible at predicting the future, but it seems certain that blogs will evolve from their current form and eventually we'll all be listening to podcast feeds beamed directly into your wireless handheld (or the chip in your brain)(or whatever). Until then, this is my "proper" diary. It ends when I die.

See you next year!