Why I’m Doing This Blog

Most of us have facebook and instagram accounts, a lot of us have twitter accounts. I started my relationship with social media in a pretty healthy way. I’m 40 years old. So before any social media platform had come along I had made lasting friends, had girlfriends and even gone on tour with a band. I joined friendster first, and loved it. People I knew said nice things about each other. I laughed at jokes and I spent maybe five hours on it a week. A fan of Heiruspecs from Chicago named Jenny Fujitsu told the band we should get into Myspace. I loved Myspace. I kept a blog. I made friends. I got laid off of Myspace. Heiruspecs got “big” on Myspace. It was a good time. Myspace was good for musicians, it gave you an incredible level of freedom to do your thing and push your music.

That same Jenny pushed us all towards Facebook and it was clear to me that it combined the clean design of Friendster, the elitist history of starting in the Ivy League that credentialed it as where the cool people already were and the ambition of Myspace and it was off to the races. I was team Myspace, as mentioned, I had gotten laid off Myspace and was reluctant to leave such a platform. So I came on Facebook with a real clear mandate: I’m on here to get more people to come to my shows. This is where the people are, and I want them to come to my shows. Walking into social media with a clear mandate makes the whole thing pretty logical. That worked for Facebook. My willingness to add “friends” who I considered fans worked for me. I was able to make sure that fans of Heiruspecs might become fans of Dessa (back then we had more fans than her), they might start playing Trivia Mafia. Facebook functioned as a way to take someone who liked one part of the what I offer publicly to connect with the rest. Mission accomplished.

I remember my first night on Facebook: working at a group home in Anoka, invited to the service by my friend Josh Peterson, sitting with my laptop on the other side of the sink to steal the neighbor’s WIFI. I add friends, I create events. I promote my shit. Besides for a couple years of dumb scrolling I didn’t fall in to terrible ruts with Facebook. I knew why I was there, and the products/events/bands I was there to hawk were good enough that people stayed connected with me.

Twitter was different, better and intoxicating. It’s probably mostly cause my brother was really good at twitter. My life in general is just me following wherever my older brother Steve goes. Steve played guitar, so I played bass. Steve liked basketball, so I liked basketball. Steve was good at twitter, so I wanted to be good at twitter. What do I mean he’s good at twitter? My brother is brilliant in long doses but he has a special gift for taking the 25 word joke and making it the three word joke. He has an uncanny ability to drop into someone else’s moment and say the thing everyone was thinking but no one had thought to say. If you are still on that twitter narcotic (and I am!) you should follow him. But twitter was this service I heard about from cool people: my brother, NPR, the woman from DC who got hired at Minnesota Public Radio who said she “connected with new people in new cities on Twitter”. What? Really? Amazing. Twitter was and is a place where cleverness was celebrated and brute promotion was useless. I couldn’t hang and that made me want to hang so bad. Twitter was also great for something that I’ve been all about since I was in fifth grade: asking random ass questions. Suddenly I could ask some question about something dumb and some pseudo-celebrity like A.C. Newman is in my mentions.

Everything I’ve said in this blog has been said by other people, but I need to set up why I’m where I’m at with social media and why I have this blog that at least Andrea Swensson, Chuck Terhark and Bill Caperton read from time to time (hi Andrea, hi Bill, see you tonight Chuck).

I couldn’t be on twitter just to get people to come to my shows. That is, if my desire was to get people to come to my shows, the effective way to do that was to be on twitter about all sorts of other shit, and then jump in authentically and organically with your promotional materials. At the same time I’m realizing this, the trivia company I co-own has to start advertising to keep up attendance at our events. And Facebook is the behemoth in online advertising and somewhere around 2015 we are starting to spend hundreds of dollars (and now probably over 5k a year) on FB advertising. I hate the feeling of typing in the credit card number and giving money to the blueprint-for-all-future-little-shits Mark Zuckerberg, but it’s where the eyeballs are and it owns Instagram where the other eyeballs are.

All of this isn’t enough to make me quit social media. It is still legitimately valuable to my career prospects, to getting people to the things I am promoting. But I’ve fallen for the twitter thing. I’m not there to make money, I’m there to see the responses, I’m there because it’s an incredible place to be. I follow brilliant people who say brilliant things, but I also get to know about the mundanity of their life and I love it. But why am I giving my eyeball dollars to these companies? I love the community, I love the news, but I miss the Wild West of the internet, reloading blogs, laughing about videos, having weird URLs you had to remember just so to share with friends at actual in person parties? I miss those things, but not enough to depart from the zeitgeist. Everyone I’m into is on twitter so there I am.

The whole time this is happening the best things on Earth are happening to me professionally. I used to come to the Current  as a musician and think all my problems in life would be solved if I had a desk here. I thought it was so cool, to be in this physical space that is dedicated to sharing great music with the world. And I’ll tell you, I was right. I have a desk here and I love it. Right now it kind of sucks cause I’m usually the only person sitting in the entire floor, but I still love it. I’m where I wanted to be. I’m doing what I wanted to be doing. Did twitter get my foot in the door at the Current? Hell no. Trivia and being a member of Heiruspecs got my foot in the door. But amassing a following on twitter suddenly seemed like a hurdle that was worthwhile to jump over. In this era you can go check out the stats on the people you admire, and I start to see that they’ve almost all jumped the hurdle of amassing a following on twitter, with some notable exceptions including kick ass music radio jocks in all sorts of markets across the country. But for the most part, it looks like a hurdle the people I admired had jumped over. It reminded me of pre-social media success hurdles.

Time Travel with me to 2003 for this paragraph please: Heiruspecs’ manager was trying to lock down the support of a more elite booking agent at one point, Tom Windish. Tom Windish came to our show at the Abbey in Chicago, dug it and told our manager Vickie, call me when they sell 10,000 records. BTW, not a dickhead statement from Windish, 10,000 records was a doable amount to sell from our infrastructure at that point. Heiruspecs did sell 10,000 records in the end, but by the time we had, we weren’t really in need of an elite booking agent as we couldn’t figure out a way to stay on the road with the money we were making.

Time Travel to 2011 for these next couple paragraphs please: Me and my guy Mike Fotis wanted to do a podcast with APM when Steve Nelson was running the Infinite Guest network. Sat down with Steve and Mike Fotis at Amsterdam Bar and Hall. Nice meeting, love how Steve thinks, but the basic question he asked was as follows, “why start a podcast with two schmos who don’t have 10,000 followers on twitter between ‘em?” I start realizing that twitter is a thermometer check to let you do other cool stuff in life. You get that number far enough up and you don’t have to keep on hawking your value inside the 280 character limit, the doors open up.

All of this thinking still didn’t get me to buy in deep into twitter. It was being on the road with Dessa that sent me towards being oriented towards twitter. Why? Well, first of all, tour is boring. And in the early 2000s when Heiruspecs was on the road we killed time by reading magazines at Borders, listening to records and throwing phone books at each other in hotel rooms. With Dessa, only one of the speakers work in the van so we never get to really listen to music together. Everyone wears headphones and everyone tweets. I still wasn’t personally bought in. Dessa told me, “just tweet twice a day for a month and see if you like it”. I did, and I did. People laughed, people commented, I felt connected. It did all the good things social media was supposed to do.

But, connecting to twitter twice a day and more created an obligation that I carry to this day. I feel the need to see what people are saying about the world and what people are saying about me. I feel compelled to make a comment about any big event happening in the world. Not a statement, not an action, just a comment. I don’t have my brother’s gift to say what everybody’s thinking but nobody’s said. My gifts involve speaking from my heart, being vulnerable in public and crafting ways to get people to attend events and moments I’m a part of or believe in. I am good at asking seemingly stupid questions. They aren’t actually stupid, and we all know that, they just help people think about choices differently than they did before they asked. But I’m trying to fit into this twitter box of success so that Steve Nelson walks to my house with flowers, kisses the ground and says “I was wrong about not giving you a podcast, how many do you want now"?”

But I sat there busting my ass on Facebook creating groups, invites and advertisements hoping first that Heiruspecs would blow up, and then that Trivia Mafia would become a force in the nightlife industry. And I created a non-promotional identity on twitter so that places like the Current and City Pages could see that I had something to bring to the table, not just the amount of followers, but a viewpoint on the world that would fit well with their brands.

Welcome to 2021 again: I’m doing this blog, cause social media has done what I need it to do for me and I don’t think there’s much else it can do. I can’t get laid off of Myspace or any site anymore; I’m in a wonderful monogamous marriage with Rachel. Heiruspecs’ amazing fanbase seems to accept that we will be purely advertorial online. Heiruspecs’ amazing members certainly are not chompin’ at the bit to create some sort of online identity for ourselves beyond “we have shows, we have music, we have videos, please consume”. I have a full-time job at the Current. I have a desk at the Current. I have some modest amount of impact on where the station is heading as a whole, I have a large amount of impact on where the hours of programming I’m doing are heading. I play a role in celebrating and broadcasting Minnesota music. I am beyond humbled by this opportunity. I want to do more, DJ more, do more work in non-music spaces, but I don’t think there are any doors that would be busted wide open for me if I tweeted more.

I listen every week to a podcast called “Political Gabfest”. David Plotz from the show succinctly stated some months ago “social media was a huge experiment and it’s failed”. The words stuck with me, reading Cal Newport’s work has stuck with me. I have goals in life, I have goals for my career, and I think I got a better shot of hitting them if I start relating to social media differently. There are things I want to say about the world, about music, about my friends that I can’t put on to twitter. For many of the hours of my week there are better ways to spend my time than hopping on twitter to join a conversation. I will miss things, I will be misinterpreted, but I believe I have the compass to make sure that across a longer period of time, I’m delivering something better for myself and for the people who care about what I do. I also want my children to see a man who has a good relationship with social media, who handles his involvement with it in such a way that he’s still present with them, present in meetings, present in rehearsals, present at dinner.

It scared me when I realized I was metabolizing my life in twitter. Something bad would happen to me and I’d think about the tweet I could say to have my followers make me feel better. I would view raw injustices happening and I would think about twitter, not about protesting. I thought twitter was all I could do. But, when other organizations would ask me to write something I would take that invitation to think for a longer time in a longer format. I wrote something shortly after Philando Castile was murdered that I’m still proud of. I wrote a commencement address for Slam Academy that I ended up being really proud of. Why do I have to wait for these other organizations to ask me to think? Why do I stay in my twitter box waiting for some company to invite me out to write my thoughts? It’s dumb and frankly, I don’t think tweeting keeps me in good shape to share the longer thoughts I have when I have a larger platform. This blog does.

Also, I want a way to look back at the things I’ve thought in a way that I can digest. I do a very strange IG live video series with my wife on Mondays called Tilapia Mondays. Rachel has archived them on my IG page, so we can watch them later, when we’re older. Right now we are snapshotting our Mondays with a humor and diligence we could never muster if it was on a camcorder. But I can rewatch those, sometimes Rachel does. Years from now we’ll get to see our daughters grow up a week at a time. I’m not doing that with my twitter feed. When I remember how I was doing in 2021 I don’t want to give Mark Zuckerberg my eyeballs. I want to read this blog, I want to read my private journal, I want to listen to the records I made. I want to listen to the programs I did on The Current. I’m not quitting twitter, I still think it is an indispensable way to let people start a journey of connecting with you. But that’s how I’m using it now. You won’t be able to get to know me on social media, and that’s great news for you and me.