Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

MACS 02b. Blogstalgia (part 2). Enrico Veronese, known online as Enver, also had a bad temper. What was striking about him was his enthusiastic super-activism, both as a music journalist and as a left-wing pundit. He was famous as a columnist for Blow Up. He threw himself into many projects, almost always abandoning them halfway through. Or as he pointed out, it was the projects that abandoned him. Certainly the decline of Blow Up began with Enver’s departure, who is still on Facebook and Twitter, but above all there is all his precious archive of the Enoteca online and this one of his journalistic articles. I think the first to link to my Sunday blog in 2003, and thus get me into the business, was Rechargeable Battery, although in the early stages it had another name which I no longer remember. This was active until 2013. Among those who followed indie music, there were two particularly bright and straightforward ones. One was Andrea Girolami, who came from Senigallia I think, and was the first blogger I approached in person: it was at the famous Frequenze Disturbate festival in 2003, he had launched an invitation to show up, I showed up and through him I made friends with all the others. His blog was called Loser, then he started another one – Nonsischerzapiu – today he writes on Twitter and who knows where, but I think he doesn’t deal with music anymore. Another particularly brilliant one was from Rome and his blog was called shoegazer. Also on splinder. He knew a lot of people and had a lot of projects, some of which didn’t work out very well. One became the 42 records label, which launched Niccolò Contessa’s I Cani and thus played a leading role in the transformation of Italian indie (he was interviewed about this in 2017 on Pagina99). Today he still writes on Twitter. I don’t remember when I started following Francesco Farabegoli, who called himself Disappunto, and is another one who had many different projects, and late in life – from 2009 to 2017 – made the most beautiful Italian music blog ever. It was called Bastonate, today you can still receive his newsletter, and read it on Twitter. Also on Twitter is Michele Boroni, known as Emmebi, who was not so much interested in indie music as he was in pop culture, and politics. He also wrote for the Foglio, so even then he had a different kind of notoriety. But he still followed the indiebloggers sideways. And his historic blog, active from 2002 to 2014, is still online (even with its traditional layout). Then he writes about mainstream music on rockol. In general, it is curious to observe the different fate of those who were on splinder or blogspot. Except in the rare cases of those who migrated in time to another domain, as in the case of Pubblicodimerda, who was the ideologist and theorist of indiebloggers during their golden age, which we can say coincides with his period of activity, the incredible three years from 2003 to 2006. Among other things, he invented a prank award for indiebloggers (the Indieblog Awards) and idolised the journalist Fabio De Luca, who ended up joining the ballot by dint of being called upon: he’s still there, on Tumblr, the microblogging platform I still use. One who was a bit on the sidelines, and we never saw each other in person, was Elrocco. Still active on blogspot after all these years. Aurelio Pasini, a journalist with the Mucchio, was also part of that blog-ballot, even though he didn’t have a blog. His girlfriend did, the blog was A visible Sign Of My Own and she mainly published photographs. At the time it seemed a bit superfluous, then photoblogs came along and today that’s what we all do with Instagram. She was also ahead of her time. Luca Castelli, on the other hand, was an old name on Rumore, and started blogging a little later than the others: his was Ilpozzodicabal, and it still is. Then there was Akille, a very phlegmatic and nice guy from Rome who I never knew what his surname was, so now that he is no longer online who knows what happened to him. The only sign I have found now of his existence is this interview from 2006. A little further away from us was Ludik, historically one of the first Italian bloggers ever, who today is more active on Twitter than anything else. Also far from us was the volcanic Zoro, who later became a television personality and now hosts Propaganda Live on La7. In the golden age of blogs, I always remained Il Blog Della Domenica, until 2006 I think. Then I threw myself on the social networks of the time and on Tumblr. Then a lot of other things happened, I had another blog called Complotto e Mezzo and even in that I put a lot of effort, and it must have been around 2009 and 2010. After that I think even I lost track of what I was writing about. For example in 2014 I had a blog called The Sunday Review, it started out talking about music then ended up being a series of very intimate short stories. A few days ago, Polaroid relaunched a reflection by Matthew Perpetua, a historic American blog (or m-blog), who wrote: “Things were much better when there were blogs”. And in its naivety, this complaint struck me. I allowed myself to feel nostalgia, a feeling I normally detest, I always find it senseless, the sign of senility. And now I feel it too, nostalgia, or rather blogstalgia for that golden age, for those three years in which everything happened and blogs were a vanguard of expressive freedom and experimentation. More than anything else they were a community, albeit deterritorialised and unstable, but precisely for this reason magical and unrepeatable.