Six Hundred and Seventy

Here it is, the post I said I would never write. Funk knows I intended to completely stop, and I sort of did, for over a month.

Stopping gave me the excuse to take stock and go back over my past work, also to assess the impact that writing Blog of Funk had not just on myself, the personal journey, but also the almighty blogosphere. I admit I had become disconsolate and saw no point in continuing to write. So, I just checked in with my bad self, so to speak, and sorted quite a a few things out while I was at it.

I remember that once I gave up music. I stopped writing music entirely. In fact, it was just this time that coincided with my discovery of what was then called multi-media, which soon became internet media, back in the days of Web 1.0 when pages were grey and text was black and links were blue (not followed) or purple (followed). Netscape was the browser of choice. We delighted in the misuse of the BLINK tag. Tables were revolutionary when they arrived, much like Mr Chippendale.

During this time, I consciously wrote and recorded no songs. This, bear in mind, after a period of 14 years in which I did practically nothing but record, write, rehearse, gig, and pursue like countless other dreamers before me a life of funk stardom, which was to be, eventually, just not when and how I expected it to be. Out of sync with the times, my dreams fizzled and popped, and I found myself in 1994 sitting in front of a Mac, pointing, clicking, dragging, dropping, and learning the basic HTML which propelled me into a new world of design and the internet. Within six months, I had a business, within eight months, I was on national television, part of the brave new world of technology.

Six years later, when circumstances completely unrelated to the dot com doom which devasted the online world at the end of the 1990s stopped me in my tracks, I found myself going over my past work, much as I have just done. To my surprise, I found myself listening to the songs I thought I had not written. There they were, neat, orderly, as always, decently produced sketches, surprisingly emotional; and I could not honestly remember much about writing them.

I guess I had not valued them enough to play them to anyone, or bother to professionally publish them, even though I had enough faith in my writing and singing ability to record them. As far as I was concerned, I was not making music, ergo, they didn't exist. Except, they did exist, because I still have them.

I guess the music was making itself, and that, I think, is the way forward.