other ephemera

An introduction, a screed, a statement of purpose, a reason for living, a worldview, a hope for a greater tomorrow, a call for calm in a world spiraling out of control, a beginning.

Hi there. How’s it going? Nice to see you again. You may be wondering why we’re here. Well, let us explain. Other Ephemera is a blog, short for Web log. You may have heard of them. They’re very popular these days. In fact, it’s a pretty safe bet that you have one of your own. Maybe you’re writing about your love of cats, posting YouTube videos of you baby’s first steps, pictures of your friends getting drunk, rambling monologues on your love, or hatred, of Andrew Sullivan, dripping anticipatory screeds about the next season of Lost, or, if yours is a music blog, proclamations about the unparalleled brilliance of Beirut, or Guillemots, or Mommy & Daddy, or Cold War Kids, or Tapes N Tapes or whoever else you read about on someone else’s blog. More than likely you’re telling us all breathlessly about some secret show coming up. Always with the secret shows. Art Brut 47 is really We Are Scientists? Wilco is playing Siren? Scissor Sisters are at the Mercury under a fake name? Really? Do they still suck? Thought so.

Other Ephemera aims to be a little different. If you want MP3s about the latest blog sensation opening for the previous blog sensation, we’re probably not for you. If you want a lot of photos of some show from the night before, we are pretty much incompetent with cameras, so, sorry. If you want news about festival lineups or presales or on-sales or Madonna, you might want to head elsewhere. In fact, if you want news about Madonna at all we’re going to have to ask you to leave. Now. We mean it. Other Ephemera is a Madonna-free zone. It will also betray a stunning lack of interest in Justin Timberlake, Lindsay Lohan, Annie or any other pseudo pop star that the indie blog world is for some inexplicable reason babbling on about this week. Besides, a friend of ours once said that anyone who embraces that stuff is clearly not in this thing for the long haul. We think he’s right. If you’re tired of musicians who wear only T-shirts and jeans, well, hate to break the news, but we’re a decidedly T-shirts and jeans kind of place.

So, what are we? Or, more accurately, what do we hope to be? We hope to be a blog about, as Jack Rabid would put it, music with heart. We love what the Internet’s done for music, and indie music in particular, but we hate the NME-ization of the indie world that’s come along for the ride, and we’d like to do our (admittedly small) part to fight that impulse. We want to write about music we love, music that means something and music we think will last. Sure, that will include some concert reviews, some writing about new albums, and, more than likely, some raves about a new band whose MP3 we just heard and loved. But you should understand that we’re the kind of people who care more about what Mojo has to say than what Brooklyn Vegan does (even though we love his site, honest), the kind of people who still read Magnet, Harp, No Depression and the Big Takeover, the kind of people who went to SXSW last year and were blown away by Steve Wynn, Nicolai Dunger, The Tyde and Superchunk and who stayed the hell away from Tapes N Tapes and Wolfmother. We like the new stuff, and we’ll write about the new stuff, we promise, it’s just that we tend to like the (slightly) older stuff a little better. What can we say, but for some reason we’d rather listen to The Cure than The Stills. That’s just the way we are.

Before you start thinking we’re a bunch of old cranks, we’re not. We do like a lot of blogs out there, including many that write about presales, secret shows and Madonna. We even have a good friend whose great at that whole MP3 thing and at discovering new bands before we do. We just figure that arena’s covered, so we’ll take a different tack. Which is to say Other Ephemera is going to be about writing, or at least our attempt at it. We like writing. We like magazines. You know, print ones. Who knows if we will succeed. We’re not claiming to be masters of literary style, just that we want to take a writerly approach to music. As such, we probably won’t update as frequently as other blogs. We’re hoping for about three times a week. We’ll see. We’re of the opinion that as fast-moving as the indie world is these days, there’s really not enough happening to justify the thousands of words posted every minute on every blog out there, so we don’t want to add any more to the clutter than we have to. Besides, we have to work. You’ve probably heard of work, but, on the other hand, if you’ve read this far, maybe not.

So, please, sit back and enjoy (or not enjoy, as the case might be). We hope you like it. If you don’t, let us know. It won’t hurt our feelings. We promise.

Sincerely Yours,
The Other Ephemera Staff