the internet cooled my fire

I dont think you're a Luddite. But I don't think there's much point in bemoaning the Internet, just in recording what being 'into music' was like before it. I think there was big advantages to communal horse-drawn coach travel in terms of enforced sociability among other things, but the car arrived and that was ultimately that. As long as *someone* records what was lost, the loss need not neccessarily be mourned.

I hear you, completely, but I think for me the spark went out when it became exceptionally easy to get hands on indie releases even in my small town because of better distribution, etc. I was in a small rural town, about two hours away from the big city, so you could imagine that there wasn't a whole lot of underground culture happening. We would listen to the CBC late at night to hear the "alternative" program play stuff like Big Black, Residents, Neubauten, Diamanda Galas, whatever, and then we'd have to wait until the next time we ended up in the big city for the chance to search for some of these things...and then hope like hell we remembered them when we got in, and had some money saved up. It was really magical and lent a special something to the music that I just don't get with something that's supposedly obscure that I can just walk down to the HMV or Soundscapes and nab for a reasonable price within a day of its actual release date. I think maybe the Internet rekindled things somewhat because it actually brings news of things that are even more obscure than the stuff I can find locally in the BIG city, and gives me something to look forward to for the next time I go to NYC or SF. It's also a great way to look for obscure old comedy albums that you just can't find around these parts, and the ebay experience adds a bit of excitement back to the chase..."will I get it or will some evil fuck outbid me at the last second?"

As far as Run Westy Run, the first time I heard of them was in the context of being connected with Golden Smog, but coworkers who actually wanted to order some of the releases had a hell of time finding anything at all.

I should rephrase my opening line... I don't begrudge the net or long for the old information Dark Ages... I'm just wonder if we've lost a little of the magic... have we lost the keen eyes and ears that would look at what band name was written on Molly Ringwald's binder in a Hughes film, or what t-shirt Joan Jett wore in a photo? When the underground was really underground, you had be sharp and observant, or you'd miss it in a flash, and there was no search engine to show you the way.

Yes I can aggree with you Andy but the times are a changin'.

Of course...it has entirely changed the way people discover music. Mass exposure has the unplanned effect of exponentially speeding the rate of subhybridization/genre development...as the trickle-down time for cross-pollination has been drastically minimized. Ya Dig.

You don't have to 'dig' anymore...indie/punk culture is almost shoved down your throat to a certain extent these days

it sounds to me that what you are sad about is the loss of effort required, which sort of relates to the interest held in the first place ie: you are so keen to learn/find/listen that no matter what the journey involves you go for it, and the journey becomes part of the whole thing.
now with minimal effort information comes pouring in, and the sense of achievement or joy i guess is lost when anything is so easily gained.
plus with the net so full of readily available 'anything and everything' there is little left that could be called obscure or indie/alternative, since it all becomes so known so quickly and somehow less able to create that feeling of discovery.

I think that as I've gotten older, that whole business of setting up some sort of identity through being involved with obscure music has become unimportant to me. (And by the way, did anyone else catch those Mohammed El-Qassabji rarities posted at zeryab.com back in January?) I know that I enjoy the initial shock of discovering a whole other world of music beyond the bounds of what I had heard on commercial radio or anywhere else, but I think I gave too much importance at the time to whether or not something was underground. I guess I still feel that it's nice to have an underground or avant-garde, and maybe it's necessary to have some sort of opposition to the big music business machine, but to define myself as a person in terms of being inidie or avant doesn't make much sense anymore. Maybe I just recognize that I've embraced a middle class life and might as well not pretend otherwise?

When I said 'obscure', I wasn't speaking of willful obscurism. At this time, 'obscure' pretty much meant 'quality', this is when Bon Jovi and Martika ruled the airwaves.

Now I clink on a link, download an MP3, raise my eyebrows and move on. Am I just an hopelessly lost luddite, or did anyone leap hurdles like this to find out who the fuck the Run Westy Run were?
I have stacks and stacks of album guides, but even with all this knowledge at my fingertips, I rarely get the opportunity to HEAR what I keep hearing about. I know about Orbital, Ornette Coleman and the Pooh Sticks. The 13th Floor Elevators and Eleventh Dream Day. Faust and Flipper. etc etc etc.
BUT I HAVE NEVER HEARD ANY OF THEM. NOT ONE SONG. NOT EVEN ONE NOTE!
The used CD shops just seem to collect piles of Celine Dion returns and dogeared classic rock casettes. All the local music mags are lame and the radio stations are lamer.
Please donate generous amounts of money to the "Get Custos a Vacation to Somewhere Cool" Foundation. Give 'til it hurts.

i think you have a valid point Andy, b/c in some ways i feel cheated out of an experience that people my age ten years ago seemed more engaged in. but on the other hand, now that things are easier to get, the difficulty is in figuring out WHAT to get. bands can't get by as legends based on obscurantism - i remember someone saying on here recently that they finally got hold of The Desperate Bicycles record and that it wasn't all they had expected it to be. so maybe we become more focused on evaluating the quality of things than in finding them?

it's like music writing... in some ways the internet has given access to a lot more voices, but some are terrible and you have to filter out a lot of crap to get to the good stuff. Church Of Me, Skykicking, Freaky Trigger and various other outlets are just as good as (if not better than) the best zine writing, but i rarely reread their pieces the way i would if i had them in my hand, or the way i do with, say, my one copy of The Idler that i picked up when in the UK. instead most of my time is spent filtering out the blogs and blog entries that i don't like to get to the stuff i do. so maybe it's that the abundance of outlets for these things doesn't mean that we have any more quality writing than we did before, but that our new difficulty is in finding that which is actually worth reading. and maybe it's the same with music itself...?

I suppose some of these feelings are nostalgia.

In my square hometown in the late 80s, the summer before I moved away, someone opened a small punk/indie record store for a few months (it was gone by Halloween). The guy that ran the store was cool and I walked out with Coltrane's "A Love Supreme", Nick Cave's "Tender Prey", that Rykodisc Misson of Burma disc with Vs and the singles, and Zorn's "Naked City". I went back a few more times that summer and picked up some other good titles. Other than an afternoon at college few months later when I found out about The Birthday Party, Wipers and Big Star the same day...I don't think I have ever gotten more keyed into many sounds that became favorites at once. (The same guy got me into Gang of Four, Can and a whole bunch of other things down the line.)

It seemed with some records, before the internet and all of the books, etc... you kind of had to run into someone who knew the music and could connect the dots. This kind of thing still happens, it just may be on a Finnish bboard or those lone saints who don't have to pretend being cool working at a independant record store and are not so jaded to perhaps point out some music without riding a high horse.

I saw Run Westy Run open for fIREHOSE way back...they weren't bad and I remember playing something off of their SST records on my radio show back then, but never got one of their records.

I wrote a column that touched on this.

I suppose I was a bit lucky because shortly after I really got into music buying and searching in 1988, I ended up at UCLA, where there was enough local press, good record stores and more to initial point the way -- then later my freshman year, I joined the radio station there and bought the third edition of the Trouser Press guide. So for me all the resources I needed pre-Net to search out a lot of goodness came together pretty quickly.

I used to believe that there must be all this incredible music out there that would blow my mind if only there was a way to find it. Now that the net has largely taken away that mystery, I realize that there's plenty to be discovered right under my nose, and the adventure is in finding a way to hear it with an open mind. Which is where ILM becomes more useful than any other music site.