Just when I thought I was out....they rope me back in.

Well, I never said my blogging days were over entirely, and they're not. Drug Punk as such is done. It was part of an intensely nihilistic period for me that' I'm trying to walk away from. It served its purpose for awhile, in that some people heard about music, scenes, and experiences that they did not know of before. Or at least, I'd like to think so. For me, however, DrugPunk's originally joking but increasingly real ethos of being a fucked up, sneering loser was just getting too heavy, and it had to end.

Sometime in the next coupla months I'll be starting a new blog, untitled as yet. I'll still be doing reviews of current music, but will also write longer pieces on albums that, in my view, speak to the unstable crisis period we're living through globally and, I think, in our personal lives, some of us anyway. I might also do occasional pieces on books. Yes, books. Being a stoopid drunk ponx was a fun phase of my life at times but that pose has gotten real boring. So books.

Lots of you sent emails to me over the past year (2015) that have gone unanswered. I probably won't end up reading and replying to all of them, or even all of the personalized ones, but I'll try. I do apologize for abruptly pulling the plug on the project without replying to said emails or reviewing the music contained in them-at some point, the blog stopped being fun and became an unpaid job.

I had no interest in monetizing the blog and so I had to withdraw from it. A lot of the time in between has been devoted to cleaning the mirror and figuring out what I wanna do now that I've managed to make it to 30; writing about music's part of that, killing myself in the process, a la Lester Bangs, is definitely not (anymore).

One technical lesson I learned from the DrugPunk experience is to avoid doing reviews based on downloaded, or downloadable, files. Robert at Terminal Escape has an intelligent and clearly stated explanation that I'm happy to refer you to, regarding why zip files and such are a colossal pain in the ass from the reviewer's point of view. Furthermore, it makes it impossible to review a band's music if their zip files have expired or been removed; relying on mediafire or whateverthefuck to warehouse our music was a bad idea, as some of us found out care of "Lemaire", back in 2012.

So on the next project, I'll be referring largely to bandcamp pages or full albums posted on youtube. It's easier and more direct than fretting over whether a zip file loaded. Also, in a limited way, it doesn't contribute to the sort of academic, "my i-tunes library is bigger and more 'eclectic' [stupidest fucking word in American English at this point!] than yours" thinking that internet music culture breeds. I say that as someone who was sort of one of them until quite recently. In the future I wanna focus on the music and songs (and books)  and trying to make sense of where they fit with other stuff, not exhorting you to buy or download stuff.

Now, as John Lydon said, I'm getting rid of the albatross, and will be back, hopefully in a slightly more intelligent if not optimistic form, soon.

Thanks for reading this, and I hope that some of you will like what I produce in the future, assuming that project takes off. DrugPunk taught me a lot about "life", "the world" and all that jazz. It's been cool learning how many freaks, weirdos, dissidents, and subversives there are out there, all over the place.

Punk in its broadest sense has always been about refusing to do what your society, your elders and betters tell you to do, and I hope that, in a small way, I participated in knitting together some of these far-flung misfits. Yr great.