When Digital Ocean unceremoniously deleted 15 years of this website in 2020 without so much as notice (and then had the temerity to act sanctimonious about it when put on blast), all of the hard work I’d done disappeared into the ether. I still have backups, but backups of a 15-year-old Wordpress-driven site that was highly modified just isn’t the easiest thing to restore.

I realize that I haven’t made it easy for people to review any of that content & that poses an issue to some people who may be visiting.

Thank you to the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine. If you’re wondering what used to be here, click here and take a walk through the glorious past of this once sturdy music blog.

William Eggleston’s “Untitled” (c. 1970-73).
© Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy of the Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner

4hero - The Action (feat. Ish aka Butterfly aka Shabazz Palaces) (Visioneers Remix)
© 2004, Raw Canvas Records

It was always easier to write a tweet than to write a blog post.

Using Twitter became a mission. At first, the mission was to draw people to the website to read my long-form raves about music I loved.

For a decade, I had hacked and re-hacked, cobbled and re-cobbled so many pieces. I had stayed up nights and days and long weeks editing code, asking for help on forums, on IRC, anywhere and everywhere.

I looked for plug-ins and specialized items and ways to boost my signal. I create a Frankenblog full of code that eventually quit working nicely together.

Even so, my site did very well in terms of numbers. Getting people to read my blog was nice & it was validating to some degree; but I was never in it for the most traffic or the biggest presence. I was always in this for the fun it presented. I was here for the joy.

Then Twitter happened. It became the place to be. Suddenly, it was a giant chat room filled with people I liked, people I didn’t care about & people I had always wanted to connect with. It worked really well for me because I had another signal boosting what I was trying to say about all this music I was hearing. Those were great times.

Then, I decided to nurture really talented musicians. Suddenly, this was about telling people about the bands and artists I was working with.

Eventually, doing both management and hands-on web development along with regular life became much too time-consuming; I kept having to develop these tools with cobbled-together pieces of the old web to automate processes so I would actually have time to listen to music. I blew a gasket. I got sick. I became frustrated and confused with everyone and everything. I made a lot of questionable decisions, none of which I regret.

And then, life happened again and again. Life kept happening, and eventually blogging and managing artists (one of whom lacked any interest in being anything except underground) became endeavors that didn’t pay for my life or give me joy. At some point, it became an ugly competition for other people who wanted to mark their territory. I had no interest in competing with anyone. I just wanted to put beauty into the world & I no longer felt like I could.

This was always a labor of love, anyways, but I had no ergs. I was spent I couldn’t look at Wordpress for ten more seconds.

When it stopped giving me joy, I started tweeting more feverishly.

For years, I have tweeted a lot. I have tweeted with reckless abandon, without concern about “my brand” or any of that corporate narcissism that drove others. I did this to the point of exhaustion because, ultimately, I learned how much more I could say by improvising my thoughts interactively with people.

Years went by. I got older.

One day, I saw a Threadless t-shirt design that said “I’m not a blogger, I just tweet a lot” and I thought, on that day, “Oh shit… this is who I am now.”

And so, I embraced the Twitter platform. I put a lot of effort into developing a presence, a profile, an image as a trusted voice in music, art and politics.

I didn’t figure on Elon Musk coming along and buying up the building I’ve been living in since 2007, but here we are.

Now that Twitter seems destined to die a horrible death at the hands of a very rich troll whose intentions change daily, I’m going to have to move back to my old house here or move on to greener pastures.

Anything that is not evolving is dying. Here’s to our collective evolution.

Find me here, find me on Mastodon: https://mas.to/@loudersoft BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/loudersoft.com

We can’t control whether we end up living the life of a t-shirt slogan, but we can control what we do once we get there.

long live loudersoft.

it’s been a long time, i shouldn’t have left you / without a dope beat to step to — Rakim