Honest question: When was the last time you really cared about a band?

Gathering dust on shelves and in i-Tunes music folders everywhere.

So, this is not meant to be one of those frustrated outbursts, it's meant to be an honest question about the state of music right now: Doesn't it seem like we (and I use that "we" precariously, to represent the more web-culture addicted among us) have gotten pretty fucking easy to manipulate? Enough bloggers post about a band and I suddenly find myself just itching to get their CD. I'm one of probably a few hundred hundred thousand blog-rolling hipsters who haven't played that copy of M.I.A.'s "Arular" purchased at a Best Buy last Summer since, like...September. My i-Tunes is a goddamned ghost shipyard. Diplo. A bunch of screwed and chopped shit. Grime. Cuizinier. I don't care about any of that bullshit. For about two days I thought it was the shit, and it was all over blogs like some leaked Elliott Smith or a Jay Dee eulogy. Now I'm sitting there with it highlighted, pondering the fatal right click. And how? Marketing, dudes. I can't name the last album I bought, took home, unwrapped, and sat listening to like it was a message from another planet, then picked up the phone and called everyone I knew to tell them. I remember sitting in a dark room full of weedsmoke (don't worry, it wasn't mine) playing that TV on the Radio album for someone, going "Do you hear this? Do you hear this?"

I just want that to happen a couple more times in my life, you know? Please tell me that it is not a being young thing. Something that good can't have an expiration date.

My head is full of dark matter tonight. I'm that fuckin' black smoke blowing up out of the ground on the LOST island. And I'm here to tell you, THE ARCTIC MONKEYS ARE THE WORST BAND ON EARTH. Don't believe the hype. It's the same people selling us this bullshit, they're just getting their interns to e-mail Bloggers instead of buying a $10,000 ad. Even Robert Trudeau's on the monkeydick. My assistant at work looked over the cubicle divider yesterday and asked me if I'd ever heard them. How does something become unavoidable? Culture is like a virus in more ways than one.

Coming to a cut out bin near you.

Coming to a cut-out bin: you. Me. All of us.

And speaking of me coming: I'll be back in this big fella. I need an outlet right now, like real bad. No, like real bad. So swing by for your dose of emotion, throw ropes in the ocean, hope the smoke is the potion and walk back across the tightrope, slowly.