back in the late 2000’s, i played in a death metal band. at the time, myspace was the website for musicians and artists to promote themselves and network with people. i used it to get in touch with promoters and other bands, organize shows for our tours, and post our music and blogs. it was a very useful tool at the time.
around 2009, the band split up and our myspace page languished. it became one of those ghost or skeleton pages, a relic of something that is no more. one day after many years i checked in on it for some reason and found that it was still there but myspace had completely changed its format. it was now perfectly useless. the links that used to say ‘pictures’ and ‘bio’ now said obscure stuff like ‘mixes’ and ‘connections’ — wtf do those things even mean? so stupid. someone was trying way too hard to be cutting edge.
even worse, none of those links seemed to work. the only way i could actually access any of my shit was to log in to the site, which took a good while since i had long forgotten which email address was associated with the band’s page, and what the password was. then i still had a hell of a time navigating around and finding our old photos and whatnot. i thought, “what a mess, someone really fucked this up,” and moved on.
unfortunately, here i am several years later, looking for some recordings my band made. it seems the only known copies of those recordings is on…
…the dreaded myspace.
do i dare enter? it was so annoying last time.
so i have spent the last several days navigating their flotsam and jetsam — broken links, pages that display incorrectly, media players that don’t play anything at all, ‘report a bug’ forms that don’t work (how perfect) — and while i am incredibly frustrated right now, i am also saddened by the whole mess. if myspace had just left the site as it was, it would have continued to work, possibly in perpetuity, and our old ghosts could have lingered on to the amusement of the few who stumbled across those dusty, otherwise forgotten pages. but no, some delusional idiot had a bright idea to reinvent myspace, as if it could ever compete again with giants like facebook and instagram. shit, it can’t even compete with the current band sites like reverbnation, last.fm, or soundcloud! besides that, once a website has been deemed by the general public to be uncool (like myspace is), there is simply no hope for turning back. myspace has already long been relegated to the sad “remember when” joke pile of websites so this is really all quite pathetic.
that about says it all.
there is no happy ending to this post. i don’t know if i’ll ever get copies of those songs my band recorded and foolishly entrusted to myspace. what’s equally sad is that one day, wordpress will likely fall to a same fate, and this blog may become inaccessible to me. as long as it’s still up when i’m on my deathbed, i guess i’ll be ok with that. i just want to be able to read this diary-esque shit then so i can reminisce about my life and have a laugh.
one last thing: last night i stumbled across someone’s dead blog and i noticed that they, like a lot of other people, bid adieu to their blog with a short final post like, “i’ve grown tired of my own voice.” i don’t like that. it’s irreverent of something that obviously once meant a lot to them. when i get sick of blogging, i hope i celebrate what i’ve done a bit more than that. i’ve really enjoyed writing and revisiting this junk and been surprised at what i’ve been able to learn about myself through it, so i want to acknowledge how valuable it’s been to me when i pull the plug on it.
crimson highway 