Four Years

Four years in Second Life has a way of seeming like a lot longer than four years of real time. Things change more quickly in our digital realm. People arrive, splash around in our lives, and vanish with a greater frequency than anywhere outside of live theater.

So for me, it means a lot to have been playing at Velvet for four years today. I took the gig without ever having been inside the place before, because Jasper mentioned in an IM that he was playing the dB's, and I was still trying to play hugely eclectic sets for apathetic crowds at mainstream venues. I had no idea there was a place like this in SL, where new releases might be celebrated, where weird bands from anyplace—who never managed to click into the mainstream—might have a home. And where I might as well.

I started out on Saturday nights, in roughly the same timeslot Mallory has now. I was still mainly a photographer in SL, and there was a bit of friction as to how much time I was suddenly siphoning into this new profession, but I knew from the moment I got Nicecast running on my machine, that this was what I wanted to do. It's what I had always done, from the days when I would stay up late at night making mix tapes for friends, or planning out a special playlist for a car trip to maximize the amount of songs I was eager to play for someone I could get into a limited time.

Within about a month, Jasper asked me if I would move to Sundays. I thought he was demoting me, so I said I would do it if I could take up four hours on the deadest day of the week, to stretch out, goof off and dig a little deeper into my collection. I've been there ever since. Three times now, I have hosted my 26.2-hour charity fundraiser at the club. It's where I log in nearly always.

My main goal as a dj is to play music I love for people who might love it, too. The highest order of compliment you can give me as a dj is telling me that you bought something you heard at one of my sets. Well, and huge sums of cash, of course, but mainly that you liked something I shared at a set enough to embrace it as a part of your own collection.

My relationship with Velvet is a long, complicated one. In that way, it is much like the relationship people might have with a hometown. There have been times when I wanted nothing more than to flee from it into the night, but by the time I ever felt like that, Velvet had become too much a part of my SL-DNA for me to ever truly cut the cord and remain in SL for long. This is the place where I met so many of my cherished friends, played so many sets (at least 400, and counting).

Now I also function as the club's manager, where my goal has expanded into finding djs who also get a rush from playing a song they genuinely love for someone else, who light up when that someone grows to love it, too.

Four years is a long time in SL. Here's to four more.

Come and Go With Me

A lot of nostalgia is bullshit. Dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives, we imagine the times that came before as being simpler: problems were more manageable or food was better tasting or whatever. We hearken back to when we were children, when our parents were children, smear some Vaseline on the lens and gaze wistfully into a lost epoch when gas was cheap, love was true and the world was more pure.

It's harmless escapism, of course. The problems of the past can seem more manageable largely because we already know or don't need to care how it all worked out in the end.

One of the most common types of nostalgia among music fans is the notion that the music you listened to around the time you came of age was somehow the most important music ever made in the history of the world, and that nothing that came before or since can hold a candle to the artists who shone a light into your soul and sang about your pain and your triumphs in a way that helped you form your identity.

As a dj who traffics in nostalgia—my Rock Per Annum sets on Wednesday being the largest and most concrete manifestation—it's not my job to tell anyone they are wrong. In fact, where musical nostalgia is concerned, I tend to think the opposite is true: everyone is correct. Given someone with a remotely similar taste in music and the right mindset, I can totally hear how the music of someone else's formation is unique to them and special in a way that no other music could ever be.

Today, I'll be hosting a Sock Hop at Velvet from 3-7, playing nearly a hundred songs from the early rock era before the Beatles hopped a flight and changed everything. This is music from long before I was born, and yet I can hear within it something that I cannot hear in the music of later periods.

And I don't just mean the saxophone.

Maybe it's just because the music of the late 50s and early 60s was unapologetically aimed at teenagers, or maybe it's some sort of Baby Boomer osmosis due to exposure through other media my whole life, but the music of that era seems to have a certain purity. The lyrics are straightforward, devoid of irony and cynicism and often kind of dumb, but all these artists seemed to want to do was make people feel good (or make people feel good about feeling bad) and that's a pretty fun way to spend an afternoon.

I hope you'll join me.