Any significance is arbitrary, or is it? What ever did happen to the once buzzing-with-life fanzine-powered alternative music media anyway? Why hasn’t it evolved? They said we’d have jetpacks and moving pavements to ride on by now? Where are the exciting new music websites alive (with typos) and that defiant excited ‘zine you-gotta-hear-this attitude that enthused us so much back there? Why aren’t there the webzine equivalents of the paper zines that excited us so much and made us want to start this damn Organ thing in the first place? It was twenty-two years ago next week that we were sitting there with Pritt sticks and scissors and broken typewriters and spray paint and silk screens and demo tapes and getting ready to launch the first handmade messy issue of Organ. We were excited, inspired, enthused, the underground was alive – a whole other world. We never considered it as a business option, we didn’t know about PR companies, it never occurred to us that people would send us stuff. We were excited when someone posted us a demo in the post without us sending them money first, and when the first free album turned up we were genuinely shocked – f***! We got a free album in the post, never expected that to happen (a Pretty Maids album if you’re wondering). We didn’t start this with a business plan, we didn’t call ourselves things like the Managing Editor CEO at the foot of our slick letterheads, that’s not what we were doing. It still isn’t. 

So where are the exciting 2008 alternatives that should be alive and busting with all the great music that’s out there? Where are you new children with your broken keyboards and fractured monitors? Contacting and switching the other? Here’s a keyboard, here’s a website, here’s another, now start your own. Surely with all the opportunities that are out there with all the cheap webspace in these wonderful web-based instant information fuelled times there should be so much more of it? Surely the web should be alive with the possibilities, something a little more than all these slick boring music websites that all look kind of boringly good and all say so very very little? Where are the defiant zine powered exciting webpages alive with news of the real musical alternatives? Alive with excited opinions and views and links and hey! You must hear this! And check out that and! Where is that excitement? That energy that was there with the zines and the tape trading and flyer swapping that made us want to do all this in the first place? Where has the underground media gone? Why hasn’t the alternative media that should be revolving around all the exciting underground music that’s out there evolved in all the exciting ways it should? When did the boring corporate wannabes take over with their shallow nothings? Why isn’t the internet alive with news and reviews and web-based magazines telling us of all the exciting music that’s being made right now? 

And yes, that music is being made! It certainly isn’t for the lack of life changing exciting must-hear music right now, so many good exciting bands out there. The music really is better than ever if you go searching for it, these are rich exciting musical times, we’re more enthusiastic than we ever were and that’s because the music is so damn exciting! And surely that music is so much easier to find and write about now if you really bother to go look? So why are all these sites so damn boring and uncommitted? Where are the exciting alternative underground music publications with their signposts and those wonderfully convenient instant links? Why isn’t there a whole raft of enthusiastic webzines and on-line magazines pointing you at all these exciting bands and their web pages? Why aren’t they there cherry picking the excitement and linking you instantly to the websites and the band’s My Space pages and their gig news and their mailorder pages? Where are they? You don’t have to wait three months the next issue of Phoenix Militia or Urban Guerilla to hit the streets these days, you don’t have to go get a stamp and send off a letter with a postal order. No more soaped stamps and waiting weeks for the tape or the next zine in the post, you can read it and hear it all and get involved straight way - mailorder it if you like what you hear and have it in your life a week later (or a day if downloads will do for you). 

The underground alternative media should be more exciting and alive than it ever was, so much easier to do it all now – so why isn’t it? 

Right now we really need some exciting alternative music websites that excite us enough to want to bookmark them and read them and hit the links at the end of their reviews, that make us go hunting the exciting music they talk about down and crashing on the Paypal buttons. Where are the real exciting alternatives? Why have we got hundreds of same old slick-looking boring-as-hell nothing different to say corporate wannabe music websites telling us the same old narrow sameness in the same predictable safe boring way and why do they all just want to be nothing but another Kerrang or NME? All of them all very slick and nice to look at and pretty much all the damn same, with very few exceptions. Pale imitations of those mainstream publications? Poor versions of the Kerrang/NME model all telling us today’s same bit of corporate music news and reviewing the same narrow band of music that they all got free from the same handful of mainstream PR companies who send out the same freebies to everybody? All set up by tedious people who sign themselves “managing director” or “head of marketing” or “CEO” at the foot of their bedroom e.mail spam? All clearly wanting to be nothing more than to be offered the job at Kerrang or NME, all covered in Fly-poop, all slick and all telling us nothing that we couldn’t have already read on the NME site if that’s all we wanted. 

They’re not bad actually, the mainstream magazine sites I mean, it really is getting to be that the NME is one of the better options out there - they do what they say on the tin, they tell you what’s happening in their world and if that’s all you want then fine. And it really is getting to be that I’m actually starting to think of Drowned In Sound as one of the better options – well at least they seem to have an opinion and little hint of excitement there, at least they move me in some way, not always the way I want to be moved but at least they do something. Not enough though, we need more! Why are there not a hundred exciting alternative music sites out there alive with what’s really happening? Why haven’t we got twenty bookmarked, why aren’t they there? Why don’t we need and have to check them out each day? Why aren’t there as many real life changing vital alternatives as there are bands (Okay, that would be far too many, but you know what I mean). Why aren’t there websites that must be book-marked and logged on to every couple of days, music websites that send you in off in an adrenaline rush to this week’s exciting musical alternatives? 

Why aren’t there more webzines alive and buzzing with the eighty percent of things that the mainstream don’t bother telling us about? When did the alternatives to those mainstream sites become so boring and predictable? So safe and unadventurous? So damn corporate and clogged with crap. Shouldn’t they be the cutting edge zines of the 21st century? I mean things are so much easier now, back then it was tough to even think about starting a zine, banging away on broken typewriters, paying those photocopies bills up front, sitting there for hours folding and stapling, dragging bags of them to gigs and selling them by hand, it should be so damn easy now! Where are the real alternatives? Why and the ‘alternatives’ that are there so clogged up with their own boring important impotance? So happy to just be part of the machine and part of the damn music industry? I mean, if you look, then the music is more exciting than ever, every week our post sack is alive with cutting edge life changing musical options that we need to shout about - so much of it that we’re almost swamped – too much good music!! Where are those sites telling us about all this? Why are there not twenty British music websites that I want to click on for my morning news? I can think of two or three worth bookmarking and dropping in on now and again? The rest at best are nothing more than not so good versions of the mainstream major magazines’ sites. I mean it comes to something when Drowned In Sound is one of the better options. Where are you? Where’s the fight? The energy? The Excitement? Where and the alternative underground British music websites that have the spirit of those great zines from back there? Why do they all come with slick business plans and marketing options these days? Why do they fill our inbox with spam about the business of music journalism and website marketing and the commercial aspects of their tediously bland creations and not with spam about all the exciting new music that’s out there? Why do none of them write about all this exciting music? The music really is there, the music is better than ever, so why are so many of the so called alternative music web sites happy to just be pale imitations of the mainstream? I’ll probably go click on Drowned In Sound later today, I’ve got their new site bookmarked, I’ll have a quick look at the NME headlines, won’t bother with their reviews, quick look to see what the news is though Not enough – where are the real exciting zine-powered attitudes and alternatives?  Enough, I got to go write about this great new album from The Process or that demo we have other there or that gig from last night or... 

Sean