Entry 1: Writing

First blog post. Maybe the last. Who's to say? Some omnipotent Blog-God keeping the score? If I were the sort of lunatic who kept a blog of my own thoughts, unchained from the restraints of grammar, syntax, and all of that polite guff, then sure – as liberating as running down a beach tackle-out. Feral. Like pitching a Molotov at the guidelines and watching them burn gloriously. But here we are, at the meridian of this fine digital catastrophe we have gotten ourselves into as a species, in the midst of it a website-slash-portfolio I compulsively keep open bleeding RAM like a bloated, parasitic tick. A monument to my vanity; look upon my works ye mighty and despair!

I’m going to write about writing. A noble, albeit onanistic pursuit. If you're still here, bless you, dear reader. In an era where some believe reading for fun is as obscure as alchemy, you’re one of the few torchbearers keeping that so enduring of flames from dying out entirely. The digital world is blackness. Entropy manifested in clickbait and other such guff. Even if my words amount to a glorified rant, your presence is noted. Semper gratiam habebo, comrades. May we all be able to express out harangues in a blog post someday hand-in-hand, away from the maddening crowds of AI and celebrity trivia.

So, writing. Love it. Always have. Even when I suspected I was bad at it. And I still suspect I’m bad at it. The great and bearded wizard Alan Moore once said you need to read both good and bad stuff to know the difference. I’ve read both, written both, and in my worst moments, lived both. And thanks to years of academic deadlines and hedonistic distractions in university, I can type at an ungodly speed, an evolutionary adaptation to writing seven-thousand-word papers all in a single night. This very piece? Banged it out in around thirty minutes. Shoutout to my master’s degree for the Shao-Lin style training. I’m tearing up just thinking about it. Thankfully I shook this indolent bug off a few years back, time has taught me that maturing is being early for deadlines rather than just “on time.”

People occasionally tell me I’m a good writer. “You really put your thoughts on paper well,” they say. Which is, I suppose, the bare minimum for a writer, like telling a chef that their food is edible. But I’ll take the compliment. I am not going to get into what I believe makes a “good” writer because that is completely subjective. A “good” writer should be able to get their attitudes across well and challenge themselves to be better. I enjoy challenging myself. Case in point: my review of Kaiser’s “2nd Sound” was written in some idealistic attempt at epic verse for a few reasons:

1. I was bored.
2. I had the Kalevala on my desk and got ideas above my station.
3. I like a challenge.
4. Alliteration tickles my brain in ways I don’t fully understand or care to find out.
5. See point 1.

It wasn’t fully epic verse, but there were enough rhythmic flourishes and Homeric similes to make some of my more English inclined friends give me kudos for it. Unconventional, sure. But I want my writing to be more than just another charcuterie of buzzwords and cliches. I want my words to hit like a Robert E. Howard battle scene feral, kinetic, all sweat and steel. The English teacher who scolded me for being too “descriptive” can go to hell. For example, in the “Birna” review for Wardruna, there is a passage that goes something like; “The forest closes in and curls around as the melodies are invoked with hermetic precision. Every note, every whisper of sound is as the very order of nature itself - nothing wasted, everything in its place.” Yeah I know. It’s pretentious. It also probably has no place in a music review, or anywhere near any published material at all for that matter. But it’s different. It reminds me of what I enjoy reading, the epic descriptions and awesome set pieces that I enjoyed in works like The Lord Of The Rings. I like to combine the things that I enjoy reading, no matter how dissimilar to the subject matter, just for the hell of it.

The problem with a lot of music writing is that it is light on the atmosphere. A concert is not just “good” or “bad.” It’s a skeezfest of booze and blood being thrown about. It’s the beer that just went flying and landed squarely on that poor sod in front of you. It’s the security guy staring into the blackened void who definitely hates his life. It’s the goddamn miracle of a thousand people experiencing the same thing in completely different ways. It is chaos theory in action: a thousand tiny moments spiralling into either heavenly joy or hellish misery. As unpredictable as British weather. Your best concert was most likely someone else’s worst because some drunk ass poured overpriced beer all over their new sandals. It’s a thermodynamic miracle. And that’s what should be captured. Warts and all. Capturing the atmosphere of a review, at least to me, is the touchstone of what should be conveyed in a live review.

Take my Opeth review, for instance. I wanted it to feel like a Hieronymus Bosch painting - chaos, sweat, and swirling madness. Drunken hordes lost in the undertow of them Swedish boys, an entire crowd bound together in some glorious, parasocial delirium. They are a real bildungsroman of a band, and the more that a band grow the more parasocial the relationship with the audience will become. But they put on a hell of a show, and the people eat it up like they’ve been famished for days. That’s what a great live show does: it engulfs you. You’re trying to figure out whether or not you’ve got your money’s worth while someone next to you leaps onto their friends shoulders and is crowdsurfed into oblivion.

Writing, at its core, is a violent act. A bloody, desperate struggle with your own brain. Writers write what they know, not because they want to, but because they are doomed to. Like some ancient Greek punishment for peeping on a goddess at her bath, our experiences and obsessions transmute into ink whether we like it or not. And despite the masochism, we still chase the impossible dream: to write something that lives, that breathes, that matters. It’s called being a wordsmith for good reason. It’s a craft, a forge, an endless act of hammering crude words into something sharp.

And let’s be clear: natural talent is a myth. To those anointed from birth as literary wunderkinds, know this; we, the ones who bled for every half-decent sentence, resent you. Writing well takes time. Trial and error. Failure, revision, and an obscene love for wordplay. Because despite what the masses believe, puns never went out of style. In fact, they love them, secretly enjoying the pun-ishment. This is the wonderful thing about writing, that styles and syntaxes are dependant on the ones wielding them. Unlimited weaponry at your disposal to create something that can shake the firmament, or at least get a couple of readers interested in what you have to say. I didn’t write this diatribe on the written word as if I have any sort of claim to telling others how they should write, I am just trying to get across what my thought process is when creating.

I don’t know what possessed me to write this. Didn’t even get to half of what I wanted to say. But that’s writing for you. The nature of the beast. A wild thing, refusing to be tamed. The cookie crumbles, the words spill, and we press on, knowing only some truths: different is good. Repetition is death. And the best way to write is to read way too much, listen way too loudly, and don’t kowtow to no stinkin’ guidelines.

Let’s see where this goes.