i’ve been engaged in something of a social networking spree over the last couple of days, where time has allowed, going around sprinking fairy dust into the crevices of the various places on the net that say “faux pas” in big bright letters, the places where in my dreams i imagine cool people hang out online, saying “gee what a lovely chap, what fine muzak to enjoy with my nightcap”.

most immediately obvious would be that this blog has had a long overdue makeover – behind the scenes, an upgrade to wordpress 2.6.2 WHAT A NERD and a new theme courtesy of some warhammer gaming dude (seems fitting). but also various other places round the net getting a spit and shine and its making me wonder about how cool (or uncool) it is to be spread so keenly across the informatic superhighway.

i mean, this is something i genuinely, straight up, enjoy doing, updating or maintaining my web presence. providing a little internet playground for the faux pas fans i imagine in my dream-fantasy-land to wander around in. communicating with people who have an interest in the music i make is something i enjoy almost as much as making the music, and the internet facilitates 99% of that, for me anyway.

its a funny thing. i think there is definitely a thing with indie music, where to be inaccessible is quite fashionable, quite cool. its one thing to be a myspace featured band, but its WAY cooler if you don’t even have a myspace profile. shit, you mean you don’t even have a gmail account? you don’t even know what gmail is? woah, so cool! i suppose with this medium its so easy to over-promote yourself, even when you have the best of intentions; put everyone on the back foot about what you are doing by emailing them too often, spamming them with myspace fliers, hounding them on facebook et cetera. it makes sense that people who remain distant from the internet are in many ways taking the safer route in terms of not alienating dudes.

its cool to be ‘mysterious’ but its uncool to let too much yourself out there. people lost their shit about burial, for example, and it always bugged me that so much of a fuss was made about the fact that no one knew who he was. staying behind the curtain like the wizard of oz is so much more fashionable i guess than putting yourself out there.

i suppose more generally this relates to the idea that, particularly with some forms of music, it makes sense to try and abstract it as much as possible. not just taking it easy on the internet presence, but more than that – give your songs names that mean nothing so that people can attach their own meanings to them; make your album cover just a splatch of blue lines and a red dot; give yourself a non-committal band name or whatever. perhaps this train of thought applies to instrumental music the most – once you put words in the mix, you are (unless you are ranting a sort of inane drivel in your lyrics, heaven knows how rare that is) committing yourself to meaning… something… but its the same reason why songwriters whinge about explaining their lyrics to people, they don’t really want to commit to something because they don’t want to take anything away from the listener. whether you say thats because they genuinely value the listener’s experience of subjectivity that highly, or because they just don’t want to alienate potential customers, that depends on how cynical you are.

listening to music is so much about escapism, and people like to embue music with their own dreams and feelings. finding out too much about the person behind the music – and learning, perhaps, that they might be the kind of person or personality that might grate with you in the ‘real world’ – even something as simple as “oh what? you mean, this guy doesn’t even use capital letters when he blogs? what a douchebag” – can sometimes really taint that escapist experience of letting music carry you away. like when i realised daedelus dresses up like he’s going to a bad fancy dress party in every press shot (its ok, i got over it). its like meeting that hot dude at the party, and making out with him, and next day finding out he’s a family first voter. you don’t look at him the same after that.

when you make music largely without words, you really are leaving it open for people to attach their own emotional or intellectual or whatever type of symbolism to your music – sometimes i wonder whether blogging (in so much that me posting youtube clips of robert palmer and whinging about negative ratatat reviews constitutes ‘blogging’) might taint the experience of my music for some people.

ahh this is simply more thinly veiled narcissism here from me i guess, but yeah, i’m a web coder and a social networker myself, so i quite like wandering around myspace, facebook, youtube, changing the colors of things, redrafting bits of copy, all the general maintenance. i’d like to think its not just pure ego, but primarily to do with wanting my music to get heard, and also providing a little faux pas sandbox for people to play in, alongside whatever they might get out of the music. but sometimes i catch myself thinking “would faux pas seem ‘cooler’ if i just shut it all down and left an empty black page where everything else was?”

in related news, here is jens lekman’s myspace profile.