Greetings and Salutations immediate audience!
Welcome at my attempt at Music Journalism and "Blogging". I'm a musician and lapsed visual artist situated here in the far east isolation of St. John's Newfoundland. We sorta have a reputation of having a large number of musicians per capita and being generally pretty awesome. There are a lot of musicians and bands in this city that I really enjoy and for the most part I don't regret moving here back in 2003 (or was it 2004? I can't remember..). I've made a lot of friends and I enjoy taking part in the music scene out here, but there are several ugly truths a creative person has to face up to while living and doing things here.
For one; St John's is a small city with a very limited audience that can only support a handfull of artists at a given time. If you are lucky enough to find yourself with a decent sized audience at start after a few months (even if you are totally amazing live) that audience will get smaller and smaller because those people have seen you allready and there is literally no one left in town who would be interested. You'll find that even with the most popular bands in town the total number of their active audience tops out at around a couple hundred people who will follow what the band does and take an extra effort to make it out to your shows every once in awhile. It takes a cross country tour with some actual mainstream media coverage to drag some fresh blood to your gigs at that point.
Which takes you to the next problem with the St. John's scene; It costs a lot of money in travel costs to leave this province and there is very little opportunity to actually make cold hard cash at music in this town. Most musicians around here start off hopeful and excited and gradually over time with gradually receding audience attendance, lack of recognition, lack of money and the growing realization that they have to save up their money and leave this shithole city if they want to chase after their rock and roll dreams; they become disillusioned, despondent and depressive. Also in this city there are none more lazy and brutally nihilistic then the music journalist. The music journalist who long ago gave up going to the bars where they actually play original music, and instead will write some lazy paragraph about whatever band emailed them their myspace page that week or whatever dipshit band from out of town happens to happen through this month. The only local bands that get any type of regular press coverage, any type of regular radio airplay, or any funding from grant giving organizations are the ones that focus all their energy at unrelenting self-promotion. So the equation for musician quality in this town is thus: the awesomeness of the music is inversely proportional to the amount of press it's received (if someone knows how type that as a mathematic equation please tell me). With this here blog I mean to help promote all the bands in town I enjoy that are either inexplicably ignored for some reason or who long ago gave up on the pantomime of show promotion and just put on shows for shits and giggles or the appreciation of their small group of followers.
Anyway, for hypocracy's sake I will make my first posting of my new blog my own music video I produced for my own song "Crutches" off my latest album "Sex Lives of the Paralyzed"
This video is an approximation of my average work week (with added Special Effects!)
"Crutches" - Song by Patrick Canning from Patrick Canning on Vimeo.
I have nothing against self-promotion and you will see me doing a lot of it on this blog. I just feel that in a town as small as St. John's, for a band to spend 90% of it's energy promoting the shit out of themselves instead of, you know, writing good material, and then get celebrated for it, is kinda sickening.
Hopefully my future posts won't be so long winded and whiny. But it's my blog and I do what I want to!
Cheers!
