The Fight Against Passivity

Technology is a strange thing. When we founded The Big Takeover in 1980, I’d never even seen a copy shop let alone a Xerox machine, with the exception of the one at my local public library. (And for a dime, it would spit out a poor-quality copy in around 40-50 seconds. You could actually hear the gears cranking and see the light beam going back and forth six times over the sloped glass underneath the leather cover per one image. And yes, our mag first "sprang," err, lurched, to life on that dang thing, via 100 copies of a single typed page that took freaking forever to complete.) And given the time and effort it has taken to do a much longer publication, for the last 23 of the our 25 years, our magazine has appeared only every six months, a long time for sure to wait to address a readership.

Any of you who have been familiar with the magazine and my work as its founding editor and (to date) chief writer should expect more of the same, only obviously 182 times more timely and faster, I guess. (And if you haven’t seen it yet, I hope you’ll check one out. It’s close to 300 pages.) I expect to pass on text that I didn’t or don’t have space for in the magazine, along with fresh musings and reporting on the music I hear and see, the issues that surround it, and the people who I know or admire who are involved in it. There will also be tips on what is upcoming that is worth checking out, or what just happened that is worth recounting. And where it feels appropriate, just like the in the magazine’s editorial pages, I may include some non-music related topics; though for now I don’t know if I have a real comfort level for doing that in the context of BigTakeover.com as opposed to the print mag. Maybe just a little. Maybe not!  

We could debate the merits and ultimately more-appreciated worth of that which you can’t have all the time, any time; and how our culture now, more than ever, fails to fully value what it has until it loses it. It’s been a running theme of my writings for a quarter century now. But be that as it may, now that informational technology has made it possible to "beam" the printed word to all points of the glove at the speed of light (imagine if the stressed-out riders of The Pony Express could see this), I intend to post here the news, views, and some reviews that I formerly couldn’t on a frequent basis. In any case, I intend my blog (what an awful sounding word that is, by the way. It sounds a lot like "blah blah blah," i.e. mindless self-centered spewing of no import, and that’s precisely what some blogs I have read have been like! What a turn off. I will make every effort to avoid that!!!) to be completely in the spirit of my writings in Big Takeover and other journals. I hope it is useful, entertaining, educational, informative, and with some luck, humorous when the opportunity is there. Hopefully, it will partially document one person’s life consumed with music and art as the expressions of a thinking, feeling, and creative life, in the hope of inspiring more and greater involvement.

If watching TV is the ultimate passive activity, and if in my view too many use the Net to just reinforce their enforced passivity rather than inspire greater participation and knowledge, then I want to do the opposite and make readers more interested and more curious and more desirous of more and greater experience. And I want to encourage readers to take more plunges into more artists that aren’t always the most seriously marketed, but perhaps deserved to be. I hope that a lot of you get that and more out of what I post here – wish me luck!