Musos
I, quite simply, love musos.
Despite having a very broad ranging music taste myself, which (on a good day) includes country rock, singer songwriters of various persuasions, jazz, funk, reggae, blues, house, hip-hop, dubstep, drum & bass, broken beat, UK Garage, stoner rock, punk and bleepy electronica, I loathe those people whom go, “Oh, I like a bit of everything really” and then, when pushed, seem utterly unable to name anything outside the current top 40.
In the Nick Hornby book, ‘High Fidelity’, the character Barry states that a person can’t claim to be a real music fan unless they own 500 albums and I’d be inclined to agree. (Or in my case, has owned over 500 albums historically. I have a terrible habit of lending people things and never getting them back, moving and leaving records behind and giving albums that I’ve ‘grown out of’ to my peers. Much of my awful 1990’s indie/grunge record collection is scattered around the same friends that I associated with when I listened to those kinds of bands).
I do have a very soft spot however, for those monomanic individuals whom find something they like and, at the expense of developing normal human relationships and other things to talk about, develop a level of knowledge of their specific genre that would put the average Mastermind contestant to shame.
These are some of my favourite websites and blogs by such individuals:
http://hardcorewillneverdie.com – I was very resistant to dance music pretty much right up until an evening that was referred to by my friends as ‘the Mitsubishi incident’. If I understood how truly geeky many dance fans (and a large proportion of DJ’s) were, I’m sure I would have appreciated it sooner. This is a large selection of old school mixtapes and flyers with some truly amazing (and a fair bit of laughably awful) music available to stream, should you be feeling nostalgic. (Carl Cox playing breakbeats and Grooverider playing 4/4 at the same party? How things changed.)
http://www.disco-disco.com/ - like Northern Soul fans, disco fanatics are a breed apart, even from the average muso. This site has an absolutely exhaustive history of disco listed as well as information on artists from the obscure and influential, through to the biggest chart-toppers of the day. I’m a particular fan of disco-disco as I used it extensively as a resource for information on Larry Levan (one of the forefathers of the whole ‘DJ’s as celebrities’ culture) whom a character in a short story that I wrote was an obsessive fan of. This research ultimately led me to developing a bit of a thing about disco as a whole. (Life imitating art imitating life and all that).
http://voodoofunk.blogspot.com/ - African funk (or Afro-beat) holds a special place in my heart because of a night when I had the misfortune to play alongside a fairly well known Bristol based turntablist. This somewhat sleep deprived and egotistical individual and I were playing at a Sunday night ‘chill-out’ themed affair. On arrival he announced that my allotted rare groove/funk set would be an excellent backdrop for him to have what he referred to as an ‘expression session’ (doubtless to impress the two somewhat ‘refreshed’ looking teenage girls that he had brought with). I kicked off with two fairly hectic pieces of polyrhythmic weirdness, thanks to the awesome reissue imprint Strut (http://www.strut-records.com/) and he immediately thought better of it, sulking in the corner for the next two hours until I finished. This website is a great starting point on African popular music as a whole.
