Today’s post introduces a new feature to the site, which my girlfriend cannily suggested I call This Blog / That Blog, and which will profile arts and culture websites that tackle their subject matter in engaging and provocative ways. The first installment is dedicated to my favorite new thing on the internet, Pre-Durst.
My sentiments are hardly unique; founded scarcely a month ago by Stephen Swift, 27, and Adam Zavala, 26, Pre-Durst has already received nods of recognition from the likes of NYMag, Idolator, Blender, and Flavorwire. Its focus is simple: YouTube clip by YouTube clip, the two authors chronicle the Top 40 hits that informed their lives between 1990 and 1997, the year Limp Bizkit’s Three Dollar Bill Yall$ hit shelves and became a bellwether for the dawn of nü-metal and modern rock. This week, Swift and Zavala submitted to an email interview and told This Blog / That Blog about their creative process, how YouTube has changed the game for bloggers, and what Everclear has to do with getting to third base.
So what is it about this time period that’s so dear to you?
Stephen Swift: Well, that’s when my childhood happened. 1990 is when I started listening to the radio, and 1997 is about when I started turning to sources besides the radio to find bands I liked, and I figure anything I heard in-between is fair game. It feels a little disingenuous to claim that the blog is easy to write because that’s when music was good, man, but it seems to me that every decade has its own little streak of popular culture aligning with the music independent artists are creating, and I managed to land squarely on top of one of them. If I were a decade older I’d probably have a lot to say about Kate Bush and The Style Council, and I think it’s happening again now with the interlocution of mass media and internet media, both with barely-signed Brooklyn bands playing TRL before it went off the air, and with artists like Cassie building their rep on MySpace, and with bands like Paramore, who are basically descendents of the Promise Ring and Jejune, selling out giant arenas. Either way, though, there was a distinct period in my life during which I loved basically everything that crossed my ears, and whether or not there’s some underlying cultural explanation for my young enthusiasm, I’d imagine “being thirteen” is more than enough reason.
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