The 2008 Plug Awards have been announced, so go along and vote. They are pretty much the best awards going if you ask me, but I am not particularly excited by the nominees this year. That album list, for all it contains an awful lot of very good albums, is pretty lacking in imagination. There are no nominations there that didn’t make me think ‘ah yes, them’ when I read them. The list of best blogs is largely the same. It’s like someone Googled music blogs and wrote down the top five results. That’s not what happens, but you get my drift. Half of them are on the Wikipedia mp3 blog page, which pretty much sums it up. Not much from the old Song, by Toad blogroll, sadly.

Be careful where you say this, though. I stirred up a right old episode of handbags on the bloggers’ message board over at elbo.ws for saying that I thought it was a crap list. I must confess I didn’t express myself very well when I first said it – accusing the nominees of by and large lacking a personal voice, when what I really meant might have been better said thus: they tend not to have that personal journal aspect that I like about my favourite blogs, which makes them as much about the person doing the writing as it does about the music.

Either way, the ensuing kerfuffle would have done a bunch of twelve year old girls proud: the next time I logged in I was ‘the worst poster on these boards’ and ‘retarded’ and found myself fending off the rather pompous, and not a little bit comical, outrage of half a dozen premium bloggers. So I got stuck right back in myself, as I’m sure you can imagine, and the whole thing descended from there. In any case, if the hierarchy of bloggers counted for anything, which it fortunately doesn’t, I would be entirely finished in the blogging world as of this morning.

It was a bit silly really, as there was a perfectly useful discussion to be had in there somewhere, but the ensuing nonsense was classic internet message board: absolutely everyone over-expressing themselves and calling each other ‘tards and so on and so forth. I called someone a cock smoker at one point myself, which I think is one to be particularly proud of. The Aussies really do bring a panache to the world of the casually vulgar insult that the rest of us can only aspire to. I told another gentleman what his writing tended to substitute sincerity for writerly knob-cheese, which perhaps mightn’t have been the most diplomatically adept way to get the discussion back on course. And, almost inevitably, I think I called them all a bunch of whores at one point as well.

Either way, without going into the rights and wrongs of the actual argument, it’s amazing how easily this sort of thing seems to happen on the internet. People just don’t seem to have quite evolved the means for preventing this sort of cycle escalating far, far faster than it would in the real world. Sometimes I think people get a bit carried away coming up with a neatly phrased put-down and rather forget the discussion they’re in. I know I went a bit over the top at the time, but then again, I did do some excellent work, especially towards the end when I got a little irritated.

I suppose what it really comes down to is the fact that it is incredibly difficult to be sensitive on the internet. I knew that half those bloggers, whose work I was about to publically declare not all that interesting, use those boards. In a direct personal conversation you can convey a lack of desire to be confrontational and directly hurtful with body language, but it is pretty bloody tricky to do so when writing something down, especially when the content itself is really quite touchy.

The Wedding Present – Getting Nowhere Fast (Live)
Shout Out Louds – Ill Wills
Art Pedro – I’m the Greatest