bad monkeyx online music mag 2000-2007 Highlights
Bad MonkeyX began in the summer of 1999, launched in January 2000, and existed in one form or another until late 2007. I had written about music in school for papers, and had gotten the notion that it would be fun and useful to write about music outside of the new releases context. So I invented the internet, and then started this site. Originally it was all coded in notepad in html! I don't have the first issue anymore, but you can see the second off to the left there, and the third down below. For the first couple of years it was put online in discrete issues, and over the course of five of those, Bad MonkeyX had grown to include a handful of writers - most notably mister james andean, who wound up writing about half the site. He's in Finland now. Those five issues were structured around columns - New Reviews, Essential Albums, Career Overviews, and Overlooked Works of Genius. At different points, we added innaresting things - MP3s of Monte Forte, courtesy of Rev. Fear; the first Wiki I ever saw, by Paul J.; I did an interview with local artist Jack Breakfast. Things were looking up. At our peak, we were getting 5000 hits a month. Then the date for renewing the domain name came, and I missed it. I logged on one day to find Bad MonkeyX had been hijacked. Don't go visit - fuck those guys. I wrote them and tried to get it back, but no luck. Bad MonkeyX resurfaced as www.bmxmusic.com, looking pretty much like it does now, and I still wrote for it, but the moment had really passed. Blogs hit, and did a lot of what I wanted to do with this, mainly; in fact, I tried to do Bad MonkeyX as a blog for a bit, but that didn't fly. I did a podcast, which was really fun, but I didn't feel compelled to keep that up. Funny story about that podcast, which you can hear if you like: it was the ten year anniversary of the Monkey Power Trio, and I'd had a relationship with them via the net for a while, so I did a tribute - played a bunch of music by them, gave a history, etc. At one point, for one particular record of theirs, I quipped that it was hard to tell if it should be played at 33 or 45 RPM. When I let the band know about the podcast, they listened and wrote to let me know that I had, in fact, been listening to them at the wrong speed most of the time. I think that may have been bad: they certainly didn't link to the cast. And really, it shattered my love a little bit too. Do you like a band if you listened to them wrong? I haven't ever heard of a similar situation ... that seemed a good way to go out. Rock on. It was fun. I may try and review elsewhere, though I still think most reviews read like consumer reports, and that's boring. For now, it's over to Mister Jep dot com, where I'll share comics and music that I draw and record. It was fun. Over and out. Most of what's ever been on Bad MonkeyX is here (not all, though I ought to put it all up at some point). Dig around. Cheers. - jep