It’s a question that has crossed my mind recently. I seem to just roll with the flow, and not think about why I do such things. But the WPAJ Interview, in particular, is one of those things. I constantly look for talent of various genres and successes on the web to talk to. But why?
Back “in the day” when I first had a website for no damn reason, I also worked a website for my friends in a band, LYNT. I always just loved, and absorbed music, and thanks to my friends, got to know some good people in other bands in the area. The area being mid-western Pennsylvania. I’ve always wanted to have a hand in helping some of these guys out. So I started a site at music.sirpsychosexy.net. (I was all about sub domains then.) It featured my friends’ band, Darkwater (featuring a fellow now known as Crash), Armed Battery, and others from that time. Mostly, people I met at shows I came along to support at, and the popular MP3.com of the time. I believe I featured this site as a small web project at AIP in one of my classes. This site actually still lives on over at Tripod, now utterly destroyed by banner ads…
So WesternPAJuggalos.com overtook this project in importance, shifting my focus on the community of Juggalos in the area. I was always told I needed to leverage the site to try to land some big interviews (with ICP, Twiztid, etc). Then, almost 2 years ago, I got an email about interviewing some Suburban Noize artists, landing my first interview with Potluck. I took it on with some reservation, not really interested, or confident, in doing the “interview thing.” I think I actually attempted to pass it off to Dr. Espling for his Empire magazine, actually. So I did the interview, and the next didn’t fall into place. It was several months until I realized that one interview was landing over 300-400 hits a month. Someone found this, it got linked, who knows. We had something. So I started again with another Suburban Noize artist, Dogboy. And the rest is a 40+ interview history later. We’ve talked to Kottonmouth Kings, a newfound porn director, an ex-Dark Lotus member, and scores of local and unsigned artists. It’s great to talk to these bigger names in the scene, and the exposure the feed gets from these big names helps the lesser known artists to get their name out there.
And we’ve come full circle.