I can't remember if a thread of this kind exists on here but I think it would be useful for the forum to have a rolling thread for articles, essays, features, interviews etc. that people have read and would like to share.
I'll begin with a couple of obvious examples I came across this morning:
How much of UK dance music history is real?
Every era of British dance music has its myths and over-simplified narratives — hell, even little known local scenes have urban legends. Below, Matt Anniss explores how a tendency towards selective documentation of dance music culture in the UK has led to a widespread acceptance of reductive narratives, which only tell a fraction of British dance music’s complex story
24 Hour Theory People: Mark Fisher and the blogosphere
There’s been a lot written already about the work of the late English writer, blogger and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who died in 2017. Last year, a substantial anthology of Mark’s blog writing — together with interviews, reviews, and an unfinished manuscript fragment — was published as k-punk (Repeater Books), which was also the name of his highly influential blog.
But one thing has been largely missing from the posthumous attempts to grapple with Mark’s work, and that’s the wider context of the blogosphere out of which his thinking emerged. This is not wholly surprising: the blog ‘moment’ has long passed; many of the blogs — though not k-punk — have since been deleted, and several of the more recent commentators on Mark’s work had little or nothing to do with the nexus of online self-publishing that was at its most intense and generative for roughly a decade, from 2002 onward.
Hence this three-part piece, co-authored by six writers who each participated in the blogosphere at various, overlapping stages. We conducted this discussion of the blogs — and of the k-punk anthology — in September 2019, via Google Doc; the ensuing text has been edited for length and clarity.
I'll begin with a couple of obvious examples I came across this morning:
How much of UK dance music history is real?
Every era of British dance music has its myths and over-simplified narratives — hell, even little known local scenes have urban legends. Below, Matt Anniss explores how a tendency towards selective documentation of dance music culture in the UK has led to a widespread acceptance of reductive narratives, which only tell a fraction of British dance music’s complex story
24 Hour Theory People: Mark Fisher and the blogosphere
There’s been a lot written already about the work of the late English writer, blogger and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who died in 2017. Last year, a substantial anthology of Mark’s blog writing — together with interviews, reviews, and an unfinished manuscript fragment — was published as k-punk (Repeater Books), which was also the name of his highly influential blog.
But one thing has been largely missing from the posthumous attempts to grapple with Mark’s work, and that’s the wider context of the blogosphere out of which his thinking emerged. This is not wholly surprising: the blog ‘moment’ has long passed; many of the blogs — though not k-punk — have since been deleted, and several of the more recent commentators on Mark’s work had little or nothing to do with the nexus of online self-publishing that was at its most intense and generative for roughly a decade, from 2002 onward.
Hence this three-part piece, co-authored by six writers who each participated in the blogosphere at various, overlapping stages. We conducted this discussion of the blogs — and of the k-punk anthology — in September 2019, via Google Doc; the ensuing text has been edited for length and clarity.