The Umpteenth Journal Attempt (Version III)

Been listening to The Strokes’ new album, First Impressions Of Earth, quite a lot since buying it last week. Been listening to it more than I’ve listened to their first two records combined, though just about every review I’ve read for it range from poor to above average, maintaining that it’s inferior, especially compared to Is This It. Personally, I’ve never got the hype regarding that album, which had them hailed as the saviours of rock & roll or whatever. I just wasn’t sucked into all the hyperbole, or maybe all the raving got my expectations too high, as if listening to that album was going to somehow change my life.

Like hell it did. It was a decent enough album, and perhaps if I listen to it now I might find more things to like about it. But if Is This It affected my life in any way, it’s more down to it making me put on my bullshit detector whenever NME or whoever touts their next big thing (I’m looking at you, Arctic Monkeys). It is kind of nice when you eventually find yourself agreeing with what the hype-mongers say, because it turns out to not be a huge waste of time and money, though it’s definitely a hit-or-miss thing.

Back to First Impressions Of Earth: there’s a song on it called ‘Ask Me Anything’, in which Julian Casablancas keeps singing "I’ve got nothing to say" in the chorus. I haven’t figured out what that song is really all about, but those five words pretty much sum up how I feel much of the time when it comes to expressing myself. This is not a good thing, as expressing myself (through writing) is how I make a living. In short, if I’ve got nothing to say, then what good am I? Deadlines, especially, become the bane of my existence as articles must be submitted while I’m still trying to figure out what to write, and yet I don’t want to just hash stuff out just to make sure it gets in there. It’s the old Catch-22: I want to write something decent, but inspiration doesn’t arrive when you want it, or even need it, and I’ve still got to make those deadlines because this whole magazine is a team effort, and I don’t want to be the malfunctioning cog that screws up the entire machine.

It’s something to work on, obviously. This blog is intended to help, but I’m still trying to figure out how. It’s supposed to be an outlet for me to be productively creative, but I fear that I have a limited well of creativity, and given my priorities, that limited creativity is best allocated elsewhere. Hence the lack of posts. If I wanted to push myself and blog at every opportunity, I could. But like I (and Julian Casablancas) said, I’ve got nothing to say. Quality over quantity. Not that I’m saying this is quality. Sigh.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2006 at 2:31 am and is filed under Ramble mode on. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.