Me, Yesterday.

It’s been a while since graced this dark corner of the internet with my presence. It may come as a surprise to you but I do have a day job, and these things have a habit of getting in the way of real life. I’ve spent the last couple of months being totally occupied by a project that has been progressively swallowing up my life for the past 2 years. It finally reached its zenith and now things are starting to calm down a little bit, hence my return to my ‘hobby’ – essentially talking shit to anyone who will listen.

There’s possibly an irony to be read into the fact I have a 9 – 5 (if only!) job, when many of the bands that I write about hold me in some level of contempt for doing so. Many a song has been written damning the ‘rat race’ – it seems to be a preoccupation for some bands. Cathedral damn me to the Corpsecycle, while Cancer Bats urge me to keep my chin up on Deathsmarch. Radiohead just want me to slow down.

I’m not going to defend the repetitive cycle of daily toil for an uncaring master, but it does have its benefits (like a regular salary), as does life in a band, however in the latter’s case these are often short lived or entirely illusory. The glitter and glory of life in a band is rarely what people expect. Layne Staley complained that his all consuming heroine habit “seems so sick to the hypocrite norm” while progressively removing himself from the gene pool – he was not a happy guy. Mustain’s and Hetfield’s foray into the rock and roll dream nearly destroyed them, and in Kurt Cobain’s (and countless others) case it actually did. These are just a few high profile cases shadowing countless others.

There’s glamour to these grubby tales, but for the vast majority of musicians a much more terrifying fate is to befall them: normality. Most artists don’t get to live the dream for very long, and when the fickle and unforgiving masses forsake them they more often than not have to join the merry rat race with the rest of us. Q magazine used to run (and may still do) a morbidly entertaining regular titled ‘Where are they now?” (or something similar) which tracked down short lived bands in their current purgatory. Cue quotes like “I haven’t seen John in a while, last I heard he was selling shoes in Birmingham”, or “I’m happy in my life as a full time mother and community worker, it’s far more fulfilling than being in a band”. However, there are countless stories of rock stars dropping off the radar to lead a mundane existence only to reappear decades later to pick up where they left off, a process documented in the gloriously deranged rockumentary Anvil.

Obviously assimilation into the rat race doesn’t need to be the end of a life in music, in many cases the day job exists largely to facilitate the music. As the money drains out of the music industry this will more and more become the norm, and certainly shouldn’t be shied away from. But is it possible to have a serious career as well as maintaining a fruitful career while maintaining a productive band?

Of course plenty of folks go on to have well paid and fulfilling jobs helping other bands pass through the music industry grinder.

I fully intend to break the shackles of the rat race at some point. At my age it’s probably a little late to try my hand at the rock n’ roll dream, maybe I’ll just take up cheese making instead, after all if it’s good enough for Alex James…

I stand (well, sit, slightly reclining to be more accurate) before you a broken man. But I laugh in the face of addiction and say to you all now I will fight this blight and become, once again, the man I once was. My name is Alex, and I am a scrobble-aholic!

It all started so innocently, I mean, what self respecting music fan wouldn’t jump at a service that logs all the music you listen to? We refer to this filthy habit as ‘scrobbling’ and it has the potential to take over your life.

I began my ascent into scrobble addiction on the 22nd January 2007 with just a few scrobbles, just to see what it was about and to feel part of the crowd. It took a while for the addiction to really take hold, but within 6 months, I was logging in daily, often several times a day to satisfy my cravings.

The scrobble addiction is a pernicious beast. My music is important to me, and what I listen to on a daily basis is an expression of this. Keeping a log of what I listen to, over time, is like keeping a diary – a little expression of my inner self, and a document of my moods and tastes. To have this for myself is a wonderful thing, but my last.fm playlist is public, and that’s where the trouble starts. The concept of someone knowing exactly what I’ve been listening to and appraising it is an uncomfortable one for me. I pride my self (rightly or wrongly) as being open minded and having a diverse music taste. I’m happy with this conviction/delusion and the last thing I want is for someone to barge in and scupper my self-satisfactory conceit. But my playlist is out there, and public, so that’s exactly what could happen.

You can see the levels of paranoia that this foul addiction has driven me to? Is there really an elite of musically diverse fanatics out there queuing up to take their shot? These people certainly exist (I am one of them), but could they give a badger’s testicle about me? I think not. But the paranoia persists. For this reason I don’t friend people on last.fm, I attempt to remain on a happy island – an island like the Galapagos, diverse and special and protected. Stay of my land!

So at this point, my addiction and the accompanying neuroses were under control. I had a manageable addiction that wasn’t affecting my daily life, but like all addictions it developed and spiralled. Here we come to the second stage of scrobble addiction: taste distortion.

While opportunistically lingering around the various widgets and stats generators that gravitate round last.fm, looking for a stronger fix, I happened across a nasty concept called AEP. The Anti-Exponential Profile is an unsophisticated statistical algorithm that propounds to calculate your musical taste’s diversity. This uses your all time top 50 bands and the number of listens that they have, and give you an indication of skew – are you a fanboy for a particular band, or do you tend to spread it around a bit? This is a number between 1 and 5, where 5 is really diverse (the mythical state of having listened to everything an equal amount of times) and 1 (or below) means that you’ve listened to a few artists loads and not much else. In the AEP world of musical snobbery, 5 is ultimately virtuous, and 1 or less is slovenly, narrow minded, low-brow and reprehensible.

I ranked at something like 3.5, which is unacceptable. Utterly and totally. Un-accept-able.

The scene of the crime

Part of the problem was that, at that time, I’d spent rather a lot of time listening to The Dillinger Escape Plan’s latest album Ire Works, which has quite a lot of short songs and bears repeated listens. It had totally skewed by AEP! So I banned myself from listening to TDEP entirely until I’d got to at least and AEP 4. Why 4? Not just because it’s a nice round number, but once I achieved this number, I could join the last.fm group called “We don’t have exponential profiles” which is limited only to that elite of folks that have AEP’s of 4 or higher. I had to be a member of this group, not doing so, as soon as possible, would constitute absolute and total failure.

Soon I was policing the very music I was listening to. “Hmmm, feels like an Opeth moment” I would think to myself, but then, “hold on, no, listened to too much Opeth lately, it’s starting to skew my list, need to listen to something further down”. On other occasions: “Why is my AEP not moving? I know, if I listen to the stuff at the bottom of the list, then that should help even things out a bit, and by bottom end will be nearer to my top”.

Crises would occur frequently. Accidentally not syncing my iPod before listening to something on iTunes (and thus negating my ability to scrobble the tracks recently listened to on the iPod) would leave me in a seething rage. On occasion, I would accidentally leave my iPod playing over night. Once, right from the beginning, so my iPod thought I was on an AC/DC binge. This posed a horrible dilemma – do I sync the iPod and have my profile skewed towards AC/DC (clearly not what I’m into at the moment!) and see my AEP plummet, or do I not sync, and lose the ability to scrobble all the other tracks that I really did listen to before? No choice really, the AEP is paramount.

I finally achieve AEP 4 and hastily joined the elite group of anti-expontialers. Heaven. But was my appetite sated? No!

The next escalation came when I discovered a tool that calculated my “long tail”. Basically, the percentage of your overall scrobbles that were generated by bands not in the top 50. This is a further indication of musical diversity, and thus overall righteousness. Subsequent to finding out that my long tail was less than 50% (unthinkable!) I largely stopped listening to anything in my top 50 (still at around AEP 4), basically all my favourite bands.

This didn’t seem like utter madness to me until I started to have anxiety about Opeth (now way out front on my scrobble count), TDEP, Radiohead or anyone in my top 10 bands releasing new albums. Should I listen to these and run the risk of liking them, thus skewing my AEP?

Every recovering addict has a moment of self realisation – the pure moment where cold, hard reality floods in on you – and this was mine. This had to stop!

So here I am today. My last.fm account is still alive, but I have resolved to stop looking at it. Is this enough to break the cycle? Maybe not, after all I’m still scrobbling. Baby steps, and over time I’ll conquer this. I feel a sense of relief, but the urge to take a peep is sometimes overwhelming.

But has this changed me permanently? What exactly is my taste in music? How will I know if the stuff that thought I liked was not just a product of my addiction? Only time will tell I guess…

This has been very hard for me to write, but at the same time cleansing and cathartic. I hope others reading this who have suffered as I have are able to take some strength from my words – brothers and sisters, we can fight this together.

Radiohead performed this hypnotic new track at Poelten Festival in Austria. It’s not a radical departure from their current sound, but it does stray into psychedelic territory with it’s repetitive reverberating groove. There’s probably a few more new tracks to come over the coming weeks on the European festival circuit and if they’re all recorded as well as this we’ll be able to piece the new album together! That said, you never know what they’re going to do with new tracks when they get into the studio. Compare the album version of Like Spinning Plates with the live version – they could be different songs. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there’s never a dull moment with Radiohead.

<Edit Alex 24/08/2009 12:20 pm>

OK, so apparently I’m woefully behind the times. My Twisted Words was actually first unleashed on the world last week and subsequently claimed and ratified by Jonny Greenwood. It can be downloded here. Ateasweb.com, known for their affiliation with Radiohead speculated that this is part of a forthcoming EP named Wall of Ice and referred their readership to this domain, which was originally pointed at radiohead.com. A message has now been posted on that domain apparently rebutting their claims:

Don’t just publish bullshit only to get hits on your webpage.
Don’t just create your own stories after reading one post on a message board.

Get your facts straight.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=us&q=wallofice.com
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=wallofice.com

Whether this is a dead end or part of a wild goose chase is anyone’s guess – I’ll let Ateaseweb.com sort it out. One thing is for sure, Radiohead have made a career out of confounding, and nothing would suprise me…!

A Thom Yorke played a new track and some rarities in a rather daring midday solo slot at Latitude festival according to NME.com. What possessed that mad pixie to play this usually mortuary like slot is anyone’s guess (perhaps he was hoping that no-one would turn up), but never-the-less he apparently played storming set including classic rarities True Love Waits and fan favourite Follow Me Around among highlights from his solo album and recent Radiohead back catalogue.

I’d love to see him tour with a set like this – which of course he won’t. He’ll more likely play a one off show in a supermarket composed entirely of Talking Heads covers played on a Commodore 64.