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to get somebody from the inside to write a story about how it does control the Austin media. Excepting Rich Oppel.
We do spend a great deal of time every week viciously arguing about music, because whoever's house it is plays music, and we're for the most part really like-minded people and how many times we've argued about the Greatful Dead I couldn't tell you.
Are you pro or con?
I'm mostly con. I'm pro the idea, I'm pro the community for the most part, but it's something that I've tried- I feel like it's my shortcoming at this point, that I should see more value there, but I still hear mostly poeple improvising that can't play very well. Giant Sand will do that same kind of free form, psychedelic thing and Giant Sand has worked for me and they're great. I saw the Grateful Dead a couple of times and I've listened to Greatful Dead records, I did the drugs, multiple times. It would be really great if I could find that avenue that would suddenly make me a fan, because there's tons of it! But I've never found that. Instead I go, "Aw, man."
No, no, no. I'd like it. Access to more music to listen to would be a great thing. There's very little nationally that I've been enjoying. What is there that you like?
I think that part of it is that there are so many more records put out now than there have ever been, so you can't keep track, and it's all really gragmented. In the mid 80's I had a sense of really being part of the "scene". And there were bands that knew about the bands I was working with everywhere I went and we kenw about them and the audiences weren't really big, but we all knew about each other. There was a good sense of how everybody fit together.
It has gotten a lot more diverse. If you think about college radio in the 80's you think about college radio as one thing and now it's very cliquey.
And now, the things that I see that is the most creative and that I do feel left behind on a lot of the time but really does fascinate me is a lot of the electronic music and a lot of the hip-hop. There's genuinely creative- there's a real scene around both of them and there's a real overlap with both of them and there's a lot of really interesting music being made and music that still challenges me that makes me go, "Now, what is that?" I was just last night having an argument wiht a friend of mine and he was saying how offensive he found all hip-hop. Gangster hip-hop in particular and hip-hop as a genre he just had no use for. I swear, it sounded like the stereotype of the 50s parent when they first heard rock'n'roll. "It's just noise, it's vulgar and it's offensive!" And I'm thinking, "Doesn't a lot of art strive to be offensive? Yeah, it's offensive, it's striving to be ofensive! Do you think that somehow they're stupid about it, they don't know they're being offesnive?" Especially when I hear it related to African-American based forms of music. I always think, "Hmm, better get my radar up". That sounds like veiled racism to me. "Their vulgarity is really vulgar."

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Geek Weekly #9