Well Sheit

Since dirty hackers stole LukasKaiser.com I think I'll be writing here (among other places). For those who don't know me, I'm Lukas Kaiser. I'm the Director of Original Content for the Double Viking Networks and I work on a part time basis for a few other websites. I'm primarily a writer but, in my spare time, I listen to music. Lots of it.

When I was a little kid I used to read Alex Ross' columns in "The New Yorker." Back then I thought, hey I want to be a culture reporter for the New Yorker too! Then I went to journalism school, where all of the professors were various talented writers who had all been rejected by the New Yorker. Ouch.

Attending journalism school was very helpful, even though I'm not a journalist in my day job (I'm probably what you'd call a comedy writer, I guess). But it taught me how to write terse statements that have a lot of meaning, how to cut all the bullshit and, probably most importantly, how to back up anything I say with loads of sources and attribution, lest I get sued.

That doesn't mean that's what I'm going to do on this blog. But I'll try.

I think most music journalism is severely lacking. Its firstly lacking diversity--for some reason there's a very strong herd mentality among those who write about music. I'm not sure why that is, because it's not there in movie reviews. There's rarely consensus among film or even TV critics.

I also think there's a dearth of people who write about music who KNOW about music. Maybe the big magazines don't write about chord changes and arrangements and dynamics lest they turn off readers, but I don't understand why the internet hasn't birthed a class of people writing about music who KNOW about music.

I think I know about music, at least somewhat. I'm a paid musician--I've scored commercials and TV shows and toured around with a jazz band. I studied music and music theory for over 8 years and have been teaching myself about music production for about the same amount of time.

I listen literally to everything. I'm not one of those "everything but country" guys. I listen to country too. It's good to drink to. And I don't mean Uncle Tupelo country. I mean Garth Brooks country. Why not?

Anyways, that's me and my relationship to music. In a nutshell? No. In a blog post. Zing!

I'm hopefully going to be writing essays here, not reviews. Since I don't get paid for this, I think I can take my time.

Take Care!

-Lukas K.
lukaskaiser@gmail.com