Gawker Media launched a new blog today called Idolatr, seemingly penned by bitter music fans who lament the corporate co-opting of online indie music kultchr. They have a manifesto:
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you love music, you love blogs, and you especially love watching YouTube clips of Steven Seagal warbling old blues songs. And because you love all those things, we’re also willing to bet that you think music blogs are the best thing to ever happen to rock-and-pop nutcases such as yourselves since, well, ever. And we at Idolator are here to tell you that you’ve been had.
Like Vioxx and the Patriot Act, music blogs were supposed to improve our lives: At a time when only a handful of carefully manicured acts could sleaze their way into the top 10, the music blogosphere was going to serve as the great equalizer, deflating the MTV-assisted hype machines and giving the asleep-at-the-wheel music mags a run for their ad money. They were as DIY as the zine movement and as musically savvy as the college-radio jockeys of the ’80s. Finally, the power was in the hands of the people–very nerdy people, mind you, but they were a lot better than the record execs whose biggest claim to fame was discovering Crazy Town.
For a while, it seemed to be working–without Internet support, it’s doubtful that bands like Cold War Kids or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah would have ascended so quickly. But in the last year, the music-blog netherworld has become as homogenized and indistinguishable as the record labels themselves.
Link. Idolatr is edited by Brian Raftery and Maura Johnston.