Coerce You sat untouched for many years on a self-hosted site. I couldn’t bear to shut it down, and I couldn’t think of anything worth saying on its pages. There was grad school, there were life changes, there was the simple march of time pushing the particular fervor I associated with writing this site ever further into unrecoverable irrelevance. The Internet of 12-15 years ago seemed like a more accessible place, where by simply feeding one’s compulsion to write about the manic obsessions that tore fault lines in the grey matter often enough, and with enough style (and with a few friends doing the same), one might actually make the search rankings and reach someone.
My topic was always first and foremost music. At least, that is the vector by which I was able to talk about everything else. I was never just talking about music, and I was never just talking about something else. OK, there was the excellent, if I do say so myself, essay about film I sort of tried to resurrect the blog with a few years back, but film has its own referentiality, pacing, and auteurship. It is a lot like music, and the two things are intimately bound.
I have never abandoned music, whether always and ever trying to figure out how to make it, or let it have its way and make me. I listened to a lot of it while I was keeping my opinions and impressions to myself. I wrote a dissertation about it as I was learning the bad habit of shutting the fuck up.
Consider this a ginger foray into talking about things again. The world has revealed itself to be what it always was, and in such a place the only thing made worse by silence is the life of the person who holds fast to it. There is no harm to the irreparable in a cry in the wilderness for a little human kindness.
The world’s address
They Might Be Giants, “The World’s Address”
A place that’s worn
A sad pun that reflects a sadder mess
I’ll repeat it for those who may not have already guessed
The world’s address
COERCE YOU 