Like tears in rain

Sometimes I use that Blade Runner dialogue from replicant Roy, y'know the one, the 'tears in rain' one, to make a point. Or to have a laugh, depends on my mood.

 

Thinking about twitter's slow, gradual slide into a sludge of nazis, weirdos and grifters got me thinking about it again. Imagine, if you will, a time before twitter, a time before Facebook, youtube, etc. It was a real wild west, a real 'fuck knows how any of this works, but just press up some CDs and jump in a car and let's go on tour'. It wasn't any better in truth, just different. I was young, life's always fun when you're young because you have youth, you have energy, you have that wide eyed optimism that things will somehow turn around for you at some point. The gigs were shit, and the CDs never sold, but you had fun.

I'll be 40 next month, which scares me shitless, I'll not lie. Only seemed like yesterday that EP02 got a magazine review and I was like 'yes! surely I'll get signed to a label now, right?!' - nearly 20 years later, I'm still waiting lol. But y'know, I had fun. Whatever.

The real kick in the teeth though, is thinking back to all that time, money and effort the whole music industry invested in stuff like twitter and facebook. To watch it all slowly disintegrate, like Myspace before it, would be hilarious if it weren't so depressing. I know managers and labels that spent ungodly sums 'boosting' Facebook posts, and trying silly little angles to get followers on twitter and stuff like that. And for what? Fuck all, it seems like at the moment. What a waste.

I came off Facebook a few years ago, and felt great. Never once felt the urge to return, even for the band. Twitter's impending doom is a little more depressing though - it really was a better network for stuff before you-know-who took over and tanked the whole thing. Was never perfect, obviously, but still. It rankles. Like, what else is gonna go down anytime soon? It's hard enough for DIY musicians at the moment, without these billionaire dorks fucking things up for us. Prick.

Anyway, rant over. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe - managers who said we couldn't get a booking agent until we had 10k fans on Facebook, actual bands spending real money to boost funny videos of pandas to try and game the algorithm. all these things will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.