After These Messages…

I think most of our readers remember Saturday morning cartoons, regardless of what incarnation they took. Often they were legitimately silly: I recall shows based off MC Hammer as a superhero, for example. I don’t remember all the exact shows I’d watch on which day, but I was a classic 80s kid in a lot of ways: plenty of Masters of the Universe, Thundercats and Silverhawks when I woke up early enough, later years featuring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, tuning into the half live-action Super Mario Super Show. These were the bricks of my childhood. I could sit here all night rattling off the old cartoons (Bullwinkle, Wacky Races, etc), or the literally terrible shows I ended up watching too often (Zoobilee Zoo, why were you literally always on?). I still will jam to old Danger Mouse cartoons on occasion. There is something about nostalgia that is frighteningly linked to my generation. We live in the past, and in the truly irrelevant past. Still, there’s something comforting in shared memories of a time when things weren’t so bad.

Perhaps part of this was the reliability of TV. Watching Nickelodeon as a child, we children of the 80s would get excited as favorite tags came up. You never knew exactly which it would be. Sometimes it’d be a “nick-na-nick-nick, na-nicknicknick” style one, other times it’d be the tag where the cloche was raised on a dinner plate to reveal an opera singer, who would then have a Nick themed weight drop on her. On Saturdays, though, we got the classic ABC tags: After these messages, they insisted, we’ll be right back. It was comforting, in a way. There were a number of different tags, so you never knew exactly which you’d get, and it reminded us, dumb little kids that we were, that there was more programming in the future. It was OK to wait. We would be rewarded.

As the years have dragged on, I cared far more about music than TV. I always cared about music, really, but at this point, I live with a TV that barely gets local channels, and I use it incredibly rarely. I enjoy certain shows, but don’t make it a point to follow along. Music still means something, even if I am rarely on the cutting edge anymore. My nostalgia is charged into the music I love more often than not. That’s a big part of this blog coming to be: we are people who live and breathe by the music we share and love.

You may have noticed a small commercial break. We didn’t put up an appropriate tag line then. Let’s do so now.

Right now we are in a period of transition. The goals of the site have perhaps fallen behind, and we want to redirect our efforts. There are usability issues that we need to fix, from ease of reading to what happens if YouTube really does go through with their threat to cut indie artists out of their service. There are shake-ups in staffing and positions. There are life events which have sapped into the time and energy needed to create a top notch blog. We don’t want to jump right back into things from nowhere, though, so we’re asking you to bear with us as we build back up. We’ll be right back, guys, after these messages.

We plan to be a fully functioning blog again by September 1st. We hope you’ll keep checking in between now and then, and browse the music and stories you’ve missed over the course of our first year. We’re excited you’ve spent time with us til now, and we look forward to getting back to the action.

After all, when the commercials ended, the excitement always ramped back up from the cliffhanger before those words from our sponsors, didn’t it? We hope we can deliver!

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