False 45th in Rolling Stone

Here's how you kill a blog....You take a two-week hiatus from posting right after being a panelist on blogging at a large music festival and while your blog gets mentioned in Rolling Stone. Free publicity flushed down the toilet due to zero new posts.

Oh, well. I guess I'm not quitting my day job.

I knew I was wasting whatever attention for this blog that was generated by being a panelist at NEMO. However, I had no idea False 45th was going to be mentioned in Rolling Stone. Hell, the issue had been in my house for a few days and I hadn't even noticed it.

I learned about it this afternoon when I received an email from Sean, who runs Daytrotter, congratulating me on being in Rolling Stone. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about but, an email later, I learned what he was referring to.


You can see the entire chart in this photo from Stereogum which I marked up with a crude green circle. Here's the close up below.


You can see the entire post Rolling Stone was referencing here.

I remember writing that post. It basically resulted from seeing Tapes n Tapes pop up on almost every blog I read for a few days. It was becoming ridiculous. Plus, "Cowbell" and "Insistor" were incredibly catchy. So, it felt like the blogosphere was in the process of lifting TnT up on their collective shoulders. So, I made note of it and eleven months later Rolling Stone made note of me making note of the hype.

By the way, if you actually look at the chart, it's idiotic. The y-axis isn't any quantitative number. It's just some made up "Heat Index" that the writer increased or decreased for a band in order to make the writer's preconceived point that blogs just chase fads. The fact is that Rolling Stone wants to portray music blogs as fickle fanzines because they don't like anyone cutting into their music hyping business. It's just a small step in them protecting their turf.

However, their chart shows why they suck. To make their point about the blogosphere souring on Clap Your Hands, they write, "Dec. 15th, 2005 A Pitchfork scribe calls their debut one of the worst albums of '05." The fact is that Pitchfork gave the album a 9.0 and ranked it 18th for the year. Pitchfork did say that the song "Clap Your Hands" sucked (which everyone including the band knew) but not the album. Who the hell is editing this crap over at Rolling Stone?

Yes. The popularity of bands ebb and flow but it isn't as dramatic as Rolling Stone makes it out to be. And just because one blogger liked a band and then another blogger didn't doesn't mean the band's popularity has peaked and plummeted. Like I said, it's a silly chart that was done in a passive aggressive manner to dismiss the value of music blogs. And my blog was just randomly chosen to be a part of that silliness.

One last amusing note about being in the magazine: when I was at the NEMO music festival in Boston a few weeks ago as a panelist on music blogging, someone asked if we only post about music. I said I post about other non-music things and feel those posts make my blog a fun & different site to read. Then I made a snarky condescending comment like, "Nobody wants to read a blog that's filled with more friggin' posts about Tapes n Tapes." The line got a few laughs in the crowd and I felt pretty smug about it.

I never expected to have that line come back and bite me in the ass in a national magazine. Too bad the disc the panel was recorded on was damaged. It would have been fun to put that audio clip up here right next to the picture of the chart.