THE DELETE BIN
Ten Years After
On the lower right hand side of this site
there always has and always will be a link to The Delete Bin, one of the most thoughtful and well written music
blogs on the lifehouse grid. On December 18th, exactly one decade to
the day, founder, writer and editor Rob Jones published his last post.
“I was mostly interested in talking about
pop music as a means to understanding what it is to be alive and human. I felt
like it was important work to do, as well as being a lot of fun. In terms of
pure numbers, everyone loved blogs of the kind The Delete Bin was in 2008-09, which is roughly when I enjoyed
quite a bit of traffic and interaction. I was lucky to get a number of regular
visitors and commenters; very smart and articulate people who would add
dimension to what I had written. That’s how that relationship used to be when
it came to bloggers and blogs. It’s a lot tougher these days to be heard above
the din and to get a sense of that connection.”
I first became acquainted with Rob on a
music chat board with a British URL about 15 years ago. We learned that we were
neighbours, sort of, the Rocky Mountains in
the way. We’ve met over pints of beer on a couple of occasions at the Lennox
pub on Granville Street Vancouver
“When I started The Delete Bin, I knew I wanted to talk to people who didn’t
already have a fixed opinion on everything that moves; I wanted to talk to
people who were ready to be amazed by something they’d never heard before, or
had heard but never thought about in a certain way. Aside from that, and to be
honest, one of my biggest motivations to start my own thing was just to have some
vehicle to force me to write something new every day, however that turned out,
and for that to be mine. I wasn’t
even sure if anyone would join me in my pursuit, or that I had much to really
say that would resonate with anyone. It was just calisthenics at first.”
The
Delete Bin was a doubly inspired endeavour. The
name evokes a bygone era of vinyl, of record stores with dusty racks purveying
discounted albums with the corners of their sleeves clipped, of radio play
lists generated by payola instead of corporate computer programs; the days of a
parallel and thriving music press. Rob says, “I got into reading music
journalism primarily when I lived in England
The masterstroke came once Rob had found
his stride. He avoided lists and the current hypes. The majority of his posts
were narrowly focused, insightful, entertaining essays about specific songs:
new releases, obscurities or classics. “Listen to this, good people!” That
format allowed The Delete Bin to
evolve from a daily scan into an archival resource. The content can never get
stale because great records never die, and the Internet is forever presently.
“As much as I love the album format, I
realized fairly early on that when it came to writing about music, it was ‘the
song’ that is the base unit for me. That really helped to unlock a direction
for the writing. From there, it was a lot easier to figure out what the nature
of pop music and artistry is for. It
was about the concept of connection as the prime motivator for creating
anything meant to be consumed on a wide scale, whether that’s a song or a piece
of writing about a song. Songs are
written for different reasons. But for me the most interesting ones are those
that touch on something personal, but also have some bearing on the human
condition in some capacity.”
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