Where My Head’s At

I started my last blog with a declaration of my loyalties, all of which seem to have changed since I wrote them down. Back then I was obsessed with this brilliant new music that no one had ever heard of called dubstep. Now dubstep is a fairly well established sub genre of electronic dance music, then it was couple of nights in London and a bunch of online music nerds getting excited.

When I started my last blog I was living in Wisconsin, I’ve since moved a state over and seemingly into a completely different political and cultural landscape. Southern Wisconsin, Madison my home town in particular, is a fairly wealthy and liberal area, Central Minnesota on the other hand is solidly conservative and religious. Also very rural, which is where I’m currently located.

You have to love the rural broadband, keeps me sane even if I do live across from a corn field. Ask most people living on the coasts and this is all flyover country anyways.

So yes, I’m far from typical when it comes to my musical tastes and values in my area. There is some local hiphop (mostly of the extremely white variety) but if you are looking for anything interesting you are better off looking in the Cities.

I live about an hour away from the Twin Cities that Prince made famous, a town where Rhymesayers is still a major draw.

Most regional and national touring acts stop through there, so its not as if I exist in a total vaccuum culturally.

There is even a fairly decent Techno club where I’ve seen some pretty impressive DJs roll through. Audion and Derrick May were both memorable, if for very different reasons. But mostly in my day to day life the music I’m exposed to is Top 40 Pop and Modern Country. Which isn’t that different from your typical rural experience anywhere in this country.

I work a blue collar job and intermittently attend classes at a local university. I’m 23, partially college educated, and single.

(In case any of you were wondering.)

In this blog I intend to write about the musical and cultural curiousities that excite me, and a little bit about my life and interests in critical thought and philosophy. I tend to be very inconsistent though, so if I get all political here and there you’ll have to forgive me. Musical cultures don’t exist in a vaccuum and no matter how much I would like to use the Internet as a source of escapism it just isn’t feasible.

Reality is painfully hard to ignore.

I would like to think of myself as a working man intellectual, but I am largely a product of a middle class upbringing and an upper middle class education. So I stick out, I dress conservatively but I still stick out. I like where I work, like working with my hands so that my mind remains free to think, but it doesn’t always work that way.

That is my situation.

My aesthetic will take longer to elaborate.

But this should serve as an introduction.