Tweet of the week, you'll laugh so hard you'll cry.

Tweet of the week, you'll laugh so hard you'll cry.

So back in the dark ages of the internet (read: mid-'90s) I was part of a rather vocal Pavement discussion group. It ended up spawning quite a few of the more prominent voices you see critiquing music today, and while the threads of that group unraveled after the band broke up, many of them were woven back together through P2P file sharing. I'd say Soulseek is arguably the hinge upon which most of the changes in the music industry turned -- Napster wasn't as popular as you've been led to believe -- and it was also where most music writers found their exposure to music both new and archival change from a manageable trickle into a deluge.

Little known fact: Arcade Fire was the last band to launch actual palpable real-life excitement coming out of the unknown, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah was the first band to set the template for the Animal Collectives of the world to follow. Which is why this tweet from my friend Paul is both terribly funny and awfully goddamn sad.

Don't misread that as an indictment of Pitchfork, or Stereogum, or even the "I can't figure out how someone that got a start cut-n-pasting press releases ever got so popular" Brooklyn Vegan. It's not. The music sites that adapted to follow the new model of both music consumption and criticism thrived. The others didn't. And still other still burble in the underground writing 5,000 screeds read only by the most dedicated.

Me? I miss the old days, but I don't expect anyone else to, and even I am of a split opinion on how things are today. Was the old guard really any better than the new guard? Flip through an issue of Rolling Stone circa 1991 and I think you'll see that crap writing has always inhabited the critical sphere, and one-hit wonders will always exist. Even in the indie underground. (For proof of that thumb through ANY issue of NME.)

So at first I started writing this because I wanted to showcase Paul's tweet as my tweet of the week, but now I understand the reason I laughed so hard when I first read it is because I'm actually really sad about what we've probably permanently lost.