Looking Back At The Orange & Black: Glorious Noise Calls It A Decade

Immediately after announcing their 10th anniversary, the website Glorious Noise stated that the online music magazine (or blog for you cynics) would go on “infinite hiatus” to take a breather.

I wrote some reviews and articles for the website as many of you may be aware of, and you could say that I’m a bit saddened by the news. It has little to do with losing an outlet that’s graciously published my poorly structured prose, but more to do with the declining amount of webspace that’s devoted to meaningful articles to those of us who viewed the internet as a nice place to match up those liner note readers with one another.

A few years ago, Glorious Noise co-founder Jake Brown made some offhanded comment of how the site could become (like so many other sites) just another page of links, publishing the bio sheets that the labels provide and giving viewers a heads up to free MP3s to newly released albums.

“We’d probably get more hits too.” He concluded.

The sarcasm was not lost on me, and it was obvious that the truth in his words stung a little too.

I know there’s a bunch of people like me who are still out there, who still remember the solitude of reading the liner notes to a favorite album-struggling to find a common soul to our fanaticism and then hoping their musical tastes somewhat matched ours.

The internet seemed like a good way to harness those people, but people like me are living among a younger generation of interweb controllers. Those who couldn’t be bored with the endless parade of no-it-alls who talk about music. Just put up a link, for christsakes, and let me judge for myself.

They’re immune to the clutter. They view the internet as something they must tame upon each login. To get to the goal is their task-like an endless version of Super Mario Brothers, they click, close and minimize until they get the advance of the new Decemberist album.

Are we a dying breed? Does anyone feel a sense of panic anymore when faced with the prospect that the album as we know it may have become completely irrelevant? Is the fact that a website that’s devoted to the ambiguous Mission Statement that “Rock & Roll Can Change Your Life” can’t operate as a successful business model?

I use “business model” in the loosest sense of the word, because it was obvious that nobody in Glorious Noise was out to make any money doing all of this, and I have no real data to support the idea that the site was losing readership.

But it certainly was becoming more of a burden, and with contributions decreasing or coming in the form of poorly edited material, the man-hours needed to clean up the shit and make it somewhat coherent and presentable became more like work than passion.

And then there’s the abundance of cynics, critics, and assholes that use the anonymity of the web to, for lack of a better word, just be mean. In a weird bit of synchronicity, a semi-regular troll at Glorious Noise commented on the message board’s White Stripes Announce Breakup topic how they wondered aloud, “You next?”

It was weird but, conspiracy theories aside, it was a perfect example of how the internet has turned from a Utopian platform of culture-bending community to a soapbox designed for assholes with nothing more than divisive words and angry opinions. In the case of the aforementioned troll, I believe his/her biggest gripe was that the contributors had failed to recognize the significance of modern pop music. In short, we were getting old and our fogeyism had clouded the respect that modern music was somehow owed.

While Glorious Noise may indeed have demographics that skewed older, does it make their opinions any less meaningful? I can speak with absolutely honesty that I don’t give a rat’s ass about what the kids are listening to because it’s not meant for me. It’s disposable. It’s there to shade in the memories of their youth, not mine. No matter how I try to convince you of how awesome Shalamar was, there’s little that I’d be able to say to get you to actually believe me. But aren’t I allowed to tell you how “Dead Giveaway” meant something for me during the week-and-a-half that it was the best song ever? I used to love hearing my Mom and Dad talk about how “The Stroll” was a big, high school dance song where everyone got together is a group and, you guessed it, strolled.

And while I cringe and bitch whenever I hear my 7 year old sing “Billionaire,” I know that for every Beatles record in my 7 year old 45 collection, there was also “Seasons In The Sun” or “The Night Chicago Died.” Can you make the argument that those songs were better? Perhaps. But you can’t do it without coming across a bit like an old fuck.

The point I’m trying to make is that, like the album, maybe a website devoted to finding a narrative that eloquently describes the power that rock and roll music can have on a person isn’t what “the kids” are into nowadays.

I look and see a generation of headbud-wearing youth who’ve navigated the web to personally sample what they think they like without considering what others are listening to, experiencing exactly the same feelings, albeit with different chord progressions.

The difference now seems to be that when those others try to intervene with new musical avenues, the dialogue now trends a bit nasty. How dare you tell me what to listen to! Who are you to tell me when you don’t agree with my preferences?! Who the fuck made you so special that you can call yourself a critic?

I’m not, dude. I’m just a father of two kids that writes because a therapist told him to do it (he also told me to go to grad school, but who the fuck made him so special that he could call himself a therapist) and writes primarily about music because that’s where my passion lies.

Ask any “real” friend this, and they’ll confirm it. They’ll tell you that I bring up music in conversation as allowed. They’ll tell you that I can be a dick sometimes, opinionated yes, but occasionally overzealous in my hatred of Kiss, the current state of Album Oriented Rock (what’s that) and why I don’t understand why Royal Trux got so revered. They’ll tell you that I obsess over ridiculously trivial things, like the isolated John Entwhistle tracks on The Kids Are Alright, the missing Hendrix recordings on the night MLK was assassinated, or the suicide fountain drink that Joel Gion conjured up in Dig! I mean, who does this?! Don’t these kinds of freaks deserve a website, too? And don’t suggest the Steve Hoffman forums or some other web corner that caters to those who go beyond liner notes-the completists that check off catalog numbers and who read the script on vinyl record’s run-out grooves.

Glorious Noise rather fit that bill for me. I learned about it from a link a friend sent me once, the article of The Nuge-where Uncle Ted goes off on a ballsy interviewer to the point where the two are yelling at each other, with Ted growing more and more animated as the Q&A progresses.

It was awesome. I appreciated the link and the other articles the web site provided. I enjoyed the comrade that the message board had. I created a username of what was to be a musical project-Worpswede-only to watch it and my marriage crumble at the same time.

They were cordial there. One of the other founders used to use a nom-de-plum that just happened to be the name of my Father.

Clearly, it was a sign.

I emailed Jake, he replied back and cc’d Derek. They sent vague instructions, assumed I spoke HTML and asked for a few samples. They accepted some reviews, poked for some personal tales, and were genuinely cool about it all.

It was fun, but I was surprised at how little support they received. It seemed that the two of them were doing the bulk of the behind-the-scenes shit, the thankless tasks that really don’t amount to content, but site matenience.

And while they may have thought that they found someone who would be entirely self-sufficient in terms of content and making sure it was ready for publishing, they got someone different.

Imagine a man who gets the kids to bed, provides the wife with a modicum of attention and then retreats to the man cave to write some silly record review.

That was me.

I’d write until I grew tired, sacrificing sleep and sometimes sex for some silly little record review. On occasion, I’d catch a bit of grief from the old lady, but then she got a Kindle. I’d post the review only to have Jake review my sleepy words and point out what sentences didn’t make sense or what other grammatical errors I had made in my late night haze.

What a drag it must have been to clean up that shit, but I figured there was enough passion behind everything that the site professed that it made the shit-work worthwhile.

Clearly, this wasn’t the case.

I have no idea about the technical stuff that Jake was speaking of in his anniversary post, but I can tell you that when it comes down to making time for your family and having to edit content just to make it presentable, you inevitably ask “Is this worth it?”

And when you start to wonder if readers are asking the same question, then the answer becomes easier to find.

I still believe we’re out here, quasi-relevant and stubbornly adhering to the idea that our collective memory deserves to have good music behind it. I honestly believe that we can talk shit about music without having an ulterior motive (unique site hits, ad click revenue, ego, etc.) and merely writing from the same, deep emotional well that makes music so important to us to begin with.

If Glorious Noise ever does manage to come around again, I encourage any real fan of music to embrace and cherish it, because it’s a rare commodity within the stringent confines in this rapid-click world of the internet.