About Viva La Mainstream

About 8 months ago I was patrolling through some music blogs and realized something; they were all talking about the same things; "Bright Eyes this!", "Clap Your Hands Say Yeah that!", "If it's on the radio, it sucks!"...you get the idea. It's all very elitist, pretentious, and kinda condescending to the Daughtry's and Fall Out Boy's of the world. Why is it that the bands who write catchy hook after catchy hook and get rewarded for it get relegated to being called talentless corporate drones? It didn't make sense to me, and it was a pain in the ass to see these people generalize the people who support these bands (people like me)as lemmings with no free thought or brain cells. I'm a fan of the bands like Linkin Park and Green Day and, yes, even Nickelback, and I happen to think I'm a pretty educated listener.

So out of frustration with the way things were, and as a tiny little "Fuck You" to those pretentious indie kids, Viva La Mainstream was born, which is a really glorified way of saying I started this blog. I wanted to be the voice that reminded people that just because a band's in the mainstream doesn't mean that they don't deserve the same praise. A lofty goal? Yes. A bit prententious? Maybe. But it's what I want this to be, and that's not changing.

I have ideas for what VLM will become, some more realistic than others. I'm well aware that I've got a short list of readers, and I want to try to reach out. In the next few weeks VLM will launch its radio broadcast at radio.arcadia.edu. Most of it will tie in with the website, and vice versa. If you're reading this because you were linked here from the Facebook group, and you have ideas on what you want to see happen, by all means let me know. I've got my ideas, but I want this to hear what other people say, 'cause I know you guys aren't lemmings either.

So that's my mission statement, I guess. Starting tomorrow you'll get the regularly scheduled music commentary, etc.

==TJ==