It is always a sad day when you have to lay to rest one of your friends, whether it was someone you grew up with and knew forever, or someone you just recently met but had an instant rapport with. Today we find ourselves remembering the latter of those two situations. It is with heavy hearts that we lay to rest Old Yeller’d – our weekly column where we take an artist we love(d) and head out to the woods to put em down Old Yeller style. Today we had to turn the shotgun on ourselves and send the column to the big farm in the sky with such other luminaries as Jay Z, Metallica, Portishead, The Grateful Dead, Generation X and most recently The Boss, Bruce Springsteen.
Sure we could have kept on sending these artists to a merciful death, but that isn’t us. We didn’t start SYFFAL to cast judgments or tell people what they shouldn’t listen to; seriously who the Fuck are we to assume that our tastes should be parroted back by our readers?
No, we started SYFFAL as an expression of the joy we feel from the music we love. We looked out on the barren landscape that was the music media and realized that these fuckers were some sociopathic pricks. We decided to go against the grain and only talk about bands we adored. Albums that moved us and songs that moved “it”, oh and we talk about our junk quite a bit.
With the creation of the Old Yeller’d column we were becoming more like the grating buzz of music journalists and pundits who create controversy, personally attack artists because they didn’t like a song on that one record and generally behave like the kind of smug, know it all pricks that they are.
We strive to rise above that. We strive to spread the word of the bands that are struggling in the wilderness and do not have the cosign of a major PR company, the indie labels that do not have a budget for shit, but some how get 15 quality albums out a year and the young artists that are dying out there and get the will to go on a little longer when someone tells them just how amazing they are.
Piling on Metallica for getting old and in turn showing us just how old we are, or on Jay Z for not rapping about shit that 16 year olds rap about is counterproductive and quite frankly something that virtually everyone with a facebook page and/or self important opinion of themselves does anyway. We don’t need to add to that mix and we no longer will.
As with all things, one end signifies a new start and with that we would like to introduce our new Tuesday column – The SYFFALIST – A weekly top 5 of all things awesome, which will start next week with our inaugural column – The Top 5 Songs of Q1 2012.
In the meantime maybe this will hold you over:
Top 5 Things That Are Awesome About Music Right Now:
5. Crash Symbols Records – These adorable scamps put out short run cassettes of some of the best and most innovative electronicy artists out. Plus they have a really cool dog name Carol.
4. The song The Abyss by Pinkunoizu – The guitars on this fucker have impregnated me with twins named Donnell and Sarah.
3. Danny Brown exists - Seriously who would have thought that one of the best rappers alive would look like Jermaine Stewart.
2. The Black Jaspers new video – it is fucking retarded awesome.
1. EARL fucking SWEATSHIRT IS BACK!