About Me
This happens to everyone. You find a band no one knows about, you listen to the CD nonstop, you tell all your friends and no one cares or likes them, and yet you carry on with your passion for their music. You attend every show, get autographs, shirts, stickers, find bootleg CDs of live shows and go on eBay for everything you can get your hands on. And then the inevitable happens, the band gets signed to a major label. The album gets recorded, the video shot and People magazine writes a glowing review of their "freshman" album. You can see their future and it looks good.Two months later you're driving to McDonald's with your homey. He turns on the radio and your favorite band's new single is being played. Your buddy looks over at you and says, "Man I love this song, have you heard of this band? I'm going to see them next week at the Palladium." You really can't believe he just said that. You want to punch him or throw him out of the car because the single is the track you like the least on the album. You know this song from two albums ago and you tried to get your friends to like it then. And now that they've gone mainstream they sell the shirt you bought on eBay in Hot Topic. Then there is this feeling that is so hard to explain. A feeling of disgust, "I told you sos", and "damn the man". Then biggest of them all, the "I love the band but hate that everyone else likes them from the radio not from Amoeba Records where I found their demo; dirty, stepped on, discarded in the $1 bin, left for the rodents to chew on."Then comes the animosity towards the band for doing what they have always wanted to do, for making a future for themselves, for being liked by a lot of people, for finally making some money for what they were born to do. But you still love the band as it if it were your band but wish everyone else could of loved them a long time ago before popular radio got their hands on it. You just wish that someone on the radio would say "this band has been rocking for years and finally broke through" but they don't and you know they never will. So onwards you go, watching their progress from what feels like afar while your passion for the band, although it does not subside, finds a new place on your shelf, not in your CD player.
About at the same time you find yourself drawn towards this new singer/songwriter from Sweden and your blog on the message board is the second one, right after the artist himself. Suddenly you find yourself entranced in a whole new group of songs. Songs that remind you of the girl you lost over the summer, songs about separation, anxiety, loneliness, and songs about being broke when the world seems rich. Then, there is the lesson learned on track nine which simply states that everyone likes to be loved and don't hate success, just know how to manage it. You see now what you couldn't see before, that you, too, like to be liked and that you didn't get popular in high school until you formed your fist band.
What does all this mean to our site? Well, we have plenty of those bands here that were found early on before they hooked up with any major label. We also have bands that have already gone on to succeed and we will continue to play them. Everyone here in the music department has a great passion for music and what they do. We all know "the feeling" when one of our underground favorites goes big. Yet we keep pushing to help those bands get through the first stages of the battle, the whole time with our ears still to the ground for the next big thing to come through. So please enjoy our music section, let us know about cool bands you know of and please let the angst rest where it should, in the frustration that some of the best back catalogs of the all time have yet to be released.Dave Stone
VP of Music at BMP
