It's already getting tough to remember how bands operated before the advent of the Internet. And, really, who cares? It's a moot point, aimless nostalgia at best, and irritating old-man gripeage at worst. "When I was your age, we had to flier all of Seventh Avenue every Friday and Saturday, trudging barefoot through the broken beer bottles, uphill both ways." That's great, Gramps. I'm gonna go upstairs now, and find out what color cargo shorts Sully Erna was wearing for last night's Godsmack show in Prague. After all, the Web isn't going anywhere; the broadcasting and gathering of ideas, information, opinion and, most pertinently, stuff about your band, is only going to get easier. That's the best thing about the Internet — any idiot can use it.
Of course, that's also the worst thing about the Internet — any idiot can use it.
Scenario: Johnny is a die-hard music fan. He lives in, oh, let's say Blockbusterton, Massachusetts (seriously, it won't be long now). One night, Johnny goes to check out a show at Blockbusterton's coolest all-ages club, The Nokia Grotto, and sees a really great band he's never heard of. He buys some merch and finds out from reading the band's CD booklet at a long stoplight that they're from Tampa. He's intrigued. Upon returning home, Johnny goes online and uses his favorite search engine to call up a bunch of Web sites pertaining to Florida music in general, and the Bay area in particular.
One of these, coffeestain.com, catches Johnny's eye (you gotta admit, it's a bit of an offbeat name for a Florida-music site). He logs on, finds an engaging, fairly comprehensive set of pages and commences browsing. Eventually, Johnny notices the link to coffeestain.com's guestbook, and, wondering what "the scene" is thinking, saying or doing about now, he checks it out.
He does get a smattering of show dates, useful information and interesting opinions. He also gets bizarre statements, humor from the crass to the woefully unfunny and a "PA For Sale" announcement. But lastly, what he gets is enough shit-talking, infighting and inflammatory posting to send the most hardened junior-high disciplinarian screaming for Prozac and therapy.
The crew over at coffeestain.com has put together an attractive, user-friendly site that does a damned fine job of presenting Bay area original music to the online world. No one Web destination can ever cover it all, and this one tends toward the rock-centric, but it certainly goes the distance, providing an eclectic database of links and contacts, as well as show listings, streaming radio, monthly artist features with photos and sound clips, the whole nine yards. The page also offers affordable Web design and cheap banner advertising for bands, studios and the like. It's a laudable combination of promotional vehicle and networking tool.
The site's most popular feature, hands down, is its guestbook, The Graffiti Board. More of a quasi-chat room for regulars than anything else, the guestbook provides that all-important instant-gratification quotient. Bands can list late-breaking shows. Pundits can relate new rumors, or whatever they saw on MTV News this hour. Scenesters can submit a query about anything, and it's immediately out there for timely response. In theory, the guestbook is a viable and potentially powerful forum for beneficial interaction of all sorts, be it show-swapping, contact-making or debate. And to its credit, it's often used this way.
More often, however, the guestbook is home to such enthralling topical discourse as who's white trash and who's not, whether or not so-and-so "really said that shit," and that perennial favorite: which local musicians are currently fucking baboons up at Busch Gardens. The page seems haunted by a handful of reactionary little specters, bent on starting trouble, or at least keeping the site full of poisonous spew. Valid posts are choked off from one another, sometimes by full screens of moronic comments or drama incitement, like a yard that's become more weeds than grass.
Every couple of days a band or individual is selected, through some mysterious process, for a thorough working over; this subject has come to be known in certain circles as "the bitch," as in "who's the coffeestain bitch this week?" The ratio of complimentary or supportive posts to negative or irrelevant blather is probably somewhere around one to seven. Posters are granted the option of anonymity, and even the opportunity to attach someone else's name to their contribution; why hold back when you don't have to own up?
Not that it's without a certain entertainment value, mind you. There's an undeniable car-wreck sort of appeal to the whole sordid thing. The page is often hilarious, though usually in ways mean-spirited, absurd or downright unintentional, and English majors are advised against logging on, in order to cut down on fatal grammar- and spelling-related hemorrhages. But this sort of fractious spectacle definitely comes to the detriment of the Guestbook's usefulness.
Rarely can anything successfully act as toy and tool at the same time, and over the past several months, many bands have simply given up on the page as anything other than a place to watch their less-restrained peers take the bait. There are other places to post, and guestbook regulars make up a less-than-comprehensive cross section of the area's original music fans. Still, it's disheartening to see such a promising outlet so regularly compromised, and more than a little disquieting to think that anyone with Internet access, anywhere in the world, might check it out and think it representative of Bay area musicians or fans.
I'm not saying that coffeestain.com should institute some sort of policy; I'm not advocating censorship in any way. A bored kid with a spiteful nature and a tenuous grasp of the language has just as much right to express himself as a woman who wants everybody to know her band will be at the Mug on the 14th. It's a tricky area, and there really aren't any solutions that don't smack of discrimination against the cretinous. But perhaps if more artists actively engaged the site, as opposed to leaving it for the jokesters and instigators, we could effect a reversal of power, and crowd out the crap. Then again, some sort of language-sensitive program, one that would refuse to accept a post if it detected more than a half-dozen grammatical or spelling errors, could alleviate the conflict in less than five hours. I have arrived.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2001.