But in the (pretty much) absence of content, I smell a power vacuum. And I’ve always wanted to be king. So guess who just became royalty? Patrick Ripoll, that’s who. I broke free of my stale prison they call “Friday assignments” and am now proposing something new.

You (all twelve of you) don’t go to this blog because you want to see where we stand on the big entertainment issues of the day (but, for the record, Semi-Pro is shit). You want us to share with you. This is a place where we stand on our little soap box (which would promptly tear and collapse, because it’s a fucking cardboard box that’s designed to hold soap) and yell “Hey! You! The funny looking one with the hat! Check this out! It is awesome!”. So that’s what I’m going to do every day. Sometimes it will be in the form of an album review, a rant about women in prison films, a retrospective on the career of Bill Duke, a comparison between stand-up comedy and 80’s cop films, whatever. Point is, I see some shit, I know some shit, I want to share this said shit with you. Because goddamnit, that’s what it’s all about.

I, King Patrick, declare that this blog be a place of sharing, from now until forever, cuz there’ll never be another better*. If this whole goddamned Collective is about people sharing music for the sheer thrill of it, then there’s no need to be as stingy as to limit my output to one day.

And I declare this: If you e-mail me (soybomb@care2.com) with a link to your music, your website, your blog, your short documentary about midget turtles, I will mention it here. People will hear about it. I’m not gonna lie and go “Oh my god, Long Necks, Little Torsos is the greatest short film about midget turtles ever made!” but I’ll keep an open mind, I’ll keep positive energy, and most of all, I will keep what I write about it entertaining so even if it sucks, at least a funny joke came of it.

I got several different e-mails recently from various blokes asking me to review their albums. On Friday (which will still be “Patrick’s Big Stuff Day”) I’m reviewing Chicago folkie James Eric’s new album Fire in the Mountains. Spoiler Warning: It’s good. The next Friday after that I’ll be reviewing plucky young upstart Big Round Spectacle’s debut misfortuneless, which is also all sorts of pleasant. But let me cover the two non-CLLCT folks who contacted me recently, AKA, “the less important”.

I got an e-mail recently from a Nadav Young promoting his curious site www.VIRV.TV I say curious because it’s purpose is not entirely clear to me. In the little e-mail press release thing I got, it claimed to be “a hand-picked, all-indie playlist 24/7, exclusively on the web. Our playlist includes Bright Eyes, Of Montreal, Spoon, Arcade fire, Xiu Xiu, The Good Life, Now Its Overhead, Architecture In Helsinki, Bloc Party, Shout Out Louds and many, many more..”. So it’s like a YouTube with super-limited selection and no easy ability to control what you watch? I’d like MTV2 to start playing all music videos again, too, but that’s cuz it’s on TV, so it’s easy to have on in the background while I do other things, like making gin in my bathtub. An online tv station just misses the point of why people choose to sit in front of the TV: It’s passive. So why have it online? Why would someone download an application to watch videos they could find on youtube? Well, Nadav’s job is a playlist manager, so I suppose the angle they are going for is “if you like X band, you’d like Y band!” Which I guess makes a little more sense, but not a ton.

Nadav, if you read this and you could clarify exactly what your site is and the needs of the consumers it fills, that’d be super helpful. As far as the music, I think it’s silly to limit yourself to indie, but niches are meant to be filled, I suppose. For once I’d like to see a radio station that plays Curtis Mayfield, Paul Simon, Captain Beefheart, Kylie Minogue, Daniel Johnston, and Leadbelly back to back. They could call it “97.5, The Hammer: We’re completely unmarketable!” Then I could listen to it for a week before I get all up in arms about it shutting down. Cuz that’s what happens to great things. They get replaced by Lite Rock mix stations. Fuck quality, we need another outlet to hear Rob Thomas.

The other fellas that contacted me were one of those musical rock ‘n roll groups you kids love so much. Their name: Springfactory. Their mission: to rock you. Or make you dance. Or make you giggle while dancing. Look, I’m not going to tell them why they do the shit, point is they make music and they want to share it with ya’s. They have a new album of old material, their previous released EP’s, coming out through Series Two records. Series Two records is based in Nebraska, the music capital of the world. I’ve listened to music via their myspace, and the tracks they e-mailed me, and I gotta say, it’s pretty nice (especially “No More”, which has a fun Georgie James quality to it). Go ahead, check it out, it won’t hurt. It’s some rather lovely definitely well-made indie/pop/rock/dance stuff. Look, I won’t do Springfactory the disservice of lumping them into the genre. You know why? Because I’m not a good enough writer to do that. You gotta be a DaveB motherfucker to do that shit. I’m just some college dropout.

Speaking of which, will Kanye West ever be interesting again? Just wondering. Dude can make fucking beautiful beat, but will he ever be interesting again? I wonder. But speaking of Kanye West and interesting, have you seen Spike Jonze’s video for “Flashing Lights” yet? Holy great.

Anyway, that’s about all I got for now. Keep in touch though, for real. BTW, if I ever say something stupid here, or just incredibly ignorant, tell me. That’s you sharing with me. Which is beautiful.

*I was the key grip on Chicago rapper Astonish’s music video, Hear Me. Look at that lighting and TELL ME that I’m not some kind of a genius.

MP3s:

Springfactory - No More