Hi! I'm Holly. This is my blog.
I've wanted a low-stakes place to self-publish my thoughts for a while, and now that lots of music and culture writers are fully decamping to Tumblrs and newsletters and such, it felt right to boot up this domain that I've been sitting on for a few months. It is called things are getting desperate, both as a nod to this Tori Amos song and a general observation/mission statement. I might buy the domain proper at some point, or take another crack at the HTML experiments I've attempted (badly) since I was like seven years old and move it off Blogspot altogether. For now, though, you can find me here. The CSS is pretty threadbare atm but it'll improve, I promise.
As a longtime reader, I got into music writing myself, as a bored pandemic-addled high school student, through the world of 'SoundCloud 2.0', the eclectic, adolescent 'internet music' scene that generated lots of interesting culture coverage in its wake beginning around 2020. If you've read my writing at all, it most likely has to do with that stuff. As I've gotten older, though, I've felt limited by that silo of the internet—its insularity, its upcycling into the most frustrating parts of the entertainment industry, how alienated and socially-detached it feels despite its paeans to 'community', its reactionary impulses...
So now I want to go in the opposite direction, learning as much as possible about as much as possible and putting my good ear to better use. I want this blog to document that process. I'll still be writing elsewhere, especially at the cool blogs and publications that I think share some of my goals. But TAGD will be my home turf. Plus, since I've never really sought to make writing a real source of income, I don't see a point in building a real portfolio and chasing bylines unless I'm actually having fun with it, really need an editor and deadline to get something done, or happen to feel inspired by the challenge. I'm a big fan of the Terre Thaemlitz model of 'staying small', especially on the internet, where the context collapse seems to get more anxiety-inducing every day, and I'd rather focus on the hobby itself than its 'engagement' or whatever.
Some goals:
I want to write more consistently, and put into practice the idea that getting things 70% great is better than struggling for 95% and never doing anything. I want to expand my tastes, both for the present and the past, in ways that push back against the Wikipedia/RYM/social media canon-flattening that's ruined so much cultural memory for aspiring nerds. I'm trying to learn to DJ, so I'd like to feel more fluent in dance music specifically. I know basically nothing about film, which makes me feel deprived, so I'd like to fix that. I'd like to develop my voice to better reflect and refine my ideas. I'd love to get better at interviewing artists, which I'm terrible at. I want to interview more kinds of artists, too, because ultimately my overarching goal is to learn more about people and the world through art, and there's no better way to do that, or share that experience, than a good interview. I want to be more comfortable saying honestly what I mean, and not default as often to cliché or avoid taking risks. I want to write more collaboratively with my friends, because art is social. And I want to leave at least one person thinking in a way they haven't thought before.
