Damien Is Listening To… Crap
A blogging practice incorporated in various niches usually involve calling out other bloggers or at least making a point of poorly written blogs that seem to be popular for whatever reason.A lot of conversation between other bloggers and myself sometimes refer to the bloggers who simply post mp3s/videos without much text accompanying it as the lame part of mp3 blogging. It is true, a lot of the traffic comes from providing mp3s and not what is written though attempts on MANY great blogs still continue even if they had periods of lagging traffic. They have a very constant audience because they’ve been in the game longer and they don’t blog about what’s hot but more to what their interests are.
However, with the Hype Machine and Elbo.ws being quite popular and a resourceful source of a traffic, there are certain methods and ways in order to get traffic from these aggregators (you could argue that my playlists do this but I definitely don’t do it to the extent of some of these other bloggers.
From my experiences of talking to other bloggers, they seem to be all genuinely nice with the occasional rib but never anything to the extent of calling out another blog on their own blog. I figure I’m not a nice guy or I’m an asshole or dick but it needs to be said. You may think I have no right to call out another blogger that works “hard” however the blogosphere needs someone to step up and start calling out some of these bloggers 
.
The first blog I’d like to call out is “Damien Is Listening To…”. Damien is currently considered one of the hot blogs on Elbo.ws and has been for awhile. No, I’m not jealous. I know how to get on that list but Damien’s tactics seem to be following “whatever else is hot, I’ll blog about it myself”. There’s very little original content on his blog, just a lot of regurgitating whatever the other blogs are talking about when it comes to new singles.
His English (if it is English) is intentionally bad and he writes nothing about the song, other then a few words that really don’t tell you anything. Do you review believe a guy would be listening to Mogwai, AC/DC/, Rihanna, Nelly and Metallica, Of Montreal, and Okkervil River. It’s painfully obvious.
Damien Isn’t Really Listening To… is a more appropriate title. He posts about 5 times a day, regurgitating everything that other blogs work hard to write and watering down his content with whatever everyone is talking about it which goes away from music blogging in the first place. –It’s to point out what is good and what is not and what you like and you dislike. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was just some nerd that doesn’t get out much and just looks at the what’s hot section of Elbo.ws to only rewrite the post again but with crappier writing. (150 posts per month would be a tough task… if there were a ton of content written…)
There are many blogs that are great, I’m thinking about highlighting them eventually but I find it more important to point out these “popular” blogs that are more of a disservice to the blogosphere. It won’t be the last blog I personally attack.
Flame Away.
Tags: opinion
First up, thanks for the review, Allan. It’s nice to be personally attacked by someone I’ve never even spoken to, nor met, and whose blog I’ve linked to in the past as a great source of musical reviews. I find it a bit upsetting that you have no qualms about posting an entire eight paragraphs directly attacking both me and my blog, and then accuse me of having no life.
Let me just say I agree with pretty much all you’ve written. I’ve never denied posting the hottest tracks on elbo.ws, Hype Machine and elsewhere – in fact, most of my regular readers come to my blog solely for that reason. They want to be kept up-to-date with only the hottest tracks of the moment, be it hip hop, pop, indie or even metal for that matter. Similarly, I’ve never labeled my blog with a specific genre – it’s a general mp3 blog with the slogan ‘you heard it here first’ – and I deliver on that promise every day.
Where I do disagree with you, though, is in your claim I don’t listen to anything I post. Any mp3 I upload I listen to at least 5 times before I do. Furthermore, I never use what other blogs have written in my posts – it’s all my content.
Anyway, to round this off, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion and I’m not going to attack you for having yours. If you don’t like my blog, that’s cool. No hard feelings on my behalf but if you have an issue with me or the blog it might have been more noble of you to come directly to me with it. Still love your blog and will continue reading it.
Take care, D.