Yours Truly
My name is Katie. I’m 21. I like to listen to and talk about music. I do many other things as well, like attempt to keep small potted cacti alive, and pretend I’m going to work for Pixar someday drawing characters for Finding Nemo 5. I enjoy translating depressing Spanish poetry, sporting my llama scarf, watching How I Met Your Mother, and sipping the occasional glass of whiskey. I owe everything to Jesus my Savior. I love being alive.
The reason I started this blog was because I believe that music is integral not only to our culture at large, both now and through all of history, but to each of our individual human experiences. There is nothing that bridges the vast expanses of universe between the small bright specks of soul we call people (pauses to sip tea) quite like a few notes played one after the other, or some words put to a tune. You find out that you and that exasperating co-worker of yours share the same favorite U2 album, and suddenly she doesn’t seem so irksome anymore. You’ve found a common ground in music, and that made you remember that you have a common ground as human bein’s.
Sounds great, right? Well, somewhere along the way, as it goes with all that is good and lovely in this broken world, things went awry. People got caught up in pinpointing genres, in the bunny-trail pursuit of convoluted trends, in the mad rush to claim that THEIR favorite band was the next big thing. And, as Jack Black so excellently puts it, they “forgot about one thing… One little thing… It’s called the MUSIC!”
Yes, friends, in all the meleé about selling out, buying out, and signing on, all the downloading and uploading, all the merchandise and labels and fanpages (and, yes, blogging…sigh), I believe that something was lost in the basic connection that people in America have to music, and the resulting connections to others. Blame it on Napster, blame it on Indie, blame it on Daughtry - blame it on whomever you like; at this point, at this late hour of civilization, it makes little difference who got the snowball rolling - all that matters is that its theoretical diameter increases with each passing day.
So what was an idealistic college student with her head in the clouds to do when faced with a harsh, unforgiving world where the tyrannical dictatorship of Cool has forced its less clamorous neighbor, Beauty, to go underground? What to do in a culture that insists that only sombre, grungy hobo imitators have a say over which abstruse, esoteric, new-wave electronica is musically sound? What to do with regard to that same culture that demands that Ke$ha, a woman who spells her name using a monetary symbol and possesses none of that rare and brilliant quality to which some refer as “talent”, has musical merit? What was I to do? What is ANYONE to do?
Well, in my case, I started a blog. That is my story. And this is my blog. Welcome to Good & Good For You, and thanks for reading :)
