the OG internet(s)

The internet is out to get me. Not only does it constantly distract me, but it’s also one big tease. Dangling gorgeous, informative sites in front of my spiral eyes only to yank the content away fiercely without any warning. I will now elaborate.

So I’m researching drum booths because I know absolutely nothing about them (yet I know every line of dialogue in the movie Dirty Dancing) and we want to add one to our recording studio. I type in “drum booth San Francisco” to God, uh...I mean Google and somehow I am offered “the making of el oso.” Like I’m NOT gonna click on that? Next thing I know I’m reading this article/interview with Mike Doughty from 1997, which immediately reminds me of how deep my love is for Soul Coughing and how very gone they are. Mike Doughty used to explain all his Soul Coughing songs on their now defunct web site www.soulcoughing.com. There’s this one song called “Chicago, not Chicago,” where he was explaining how he was completely fucked up on the junk and sitting there staring at a building. It occurred to him that everything outside of his body was the city of Chicago, and everything inside of him was human, quite opposite from buildings and concrete and noise. So he started saying “this is Chicago, this is not Chicago,” as he mentally pointed back in forth between the two. Kind of like the “camera one, camera two, camera one, camera two” bit from the Wayne’s World movie.

Anyway, the article I’m reading mentions some Radiohead lyrics from Karma Police, and then I get really sad. Why do the web sites go’eth? Another now-gone favorite was the Follow Me Around site, which listed every single lyric to every single Radiohead. Why oh why is it gone? I think the URL was www.followmearound.com, which printed every Radiohead song with lyrics, preceded by an interview or excerpt from an interview with the band. They would explain how the ideas for the songs developed and it was a fantastic sneak peak at the wizard behind the curtain. The song Airbag was actually inspired by a real-life car crash in which Thom Yorke (I think it was him) realized that he was a split second from death in a really bad wreck. Had it not been for the airbag that inflated, he’d be gone. It got him think about the incredible immediacy of life and the power of how abruptly it can end. “In an interstellar burst/I am back to save the universe.” What a nice way of expressing that concept, huh? He could have sang, “Ford Rules, Honda drool,” but he’s a lot more clever than that, aint he?

Alright then, back to my original search now. Let's see if I can learn something useful instead of pining for URLs of yesteryear.