Beirut On Blogs
In which Zach Condon is forced, again, to talk about the blogosphere.
Pitchfork: How did you become aware that people were listening to your CD?Bullshit Zach. Blogs aren't serious! Blogs are your friends! Plus, it could be worse: you could be K-Fed.Zach Condon: Almost entirely through Ben [Goldberg of BaDaBing Records]. He would just send me e-mails. And I remember thinking, "Wow a lot of MySpace blogs like my thing". But Ben was like, "No, this is serious."
Pitchfork: He said, "This is serious?"
ZC: Yeah. Like, this is a real thing and I don't mean to sound like an asshole to the blogs, being like, "Wait, blogs are serious?" But at the time I didn't know.
Pitchfork: I went to your first show at the Knitting Factory.
ZC: Oops.
Pitchfork: I noticed that there were a lot of people who were obviously there to take pictures of you and put it on their blog so that everyone else could know that they saw you play.
ZC: We played a show in Santa Fe [the night before], and all these people came to see our show and the audience went wild. At that point I wasn't just that dude Zach that dropped out of high school. [The Knitting Factory] was our next show in New York, where suddenly the audience is stony and cold and snapping photos of us. Most of the people in the audience were there to make their final judgment call on the band, which was a really scary thing.
Full interview here.
Posted at 3:42 PM
Tags: Beirut
isn't pitchfork really a blog too? And, speaking of judgmental...
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i still can't believe pitchfork didn't slag him.
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Anybody catch the irony in these two sentences:
PFM: I went to your first show at the Knitting Factory.
PFM: I noticed that there were a lot of people [including me] who were obviously there [...] so that everyone else could know that they saw you play.
Oh PFM, you're hilarious...
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I tend to avoid the blog hyped bands, if only because everyone I have heard (from CYHSY to Tapes n' Tapes) has been a boring and/or cheap imitation of something better.
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Well, if everyone is going to the show just to announce that they went, regardless of whether or not those people actually like the band, then no, those bloggers aren't serious.
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You going to link to the actual interview, or just to yourself?
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Pitchfork: "I noticed that there were a lot of people who were obviously there to take pictures of you and put it on their blog so that everyone else could know that they saw you play."
What an arrogant, hyprocritical and misinformed thing to say. The music bloggers I know are in to it for the music and for turning other people on to good music...most of them do it for little or no money, or for far less money they could make if they wanted to.
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Oh, this ought to end well. The only thing scarier than a blog-hyped band is a blog-backlash.
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Dammit. . .I stumbled across Beirut through a chance mistype on itunes and loved it. And, of course, its already overly hyped. . .still a great album though.
PS: I still love Andrew Bird and Arcade Fire.
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I've never understood why people care if something is overhyped in the "indie" media. It's still not to the degree of Green Day in mainsteam media.
You know what's overhyped these days? "Little Miss Sunshine". What's the deal with that--a commercial during almost every break on any show I bother to watch. Now that's annoying.
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