Didn’t Rob Ford privatize Toronto snow removal? Not letting Tory off the hook: I believe he set up the current contract (but I could be wrong)

No matter how artistic your music might be, you’re still working within the entertainment business, with everything that comes along with that. There’s a lot of transactional relationships. Like most “work friends”, things may not extend beyond the workplace. It’s a hard pill to swallow

He’s in love with exclusionary zoning, and has extremely quaint ideas about supply and demand. Drives me insane. My local councillor, and he blocked me on Twitter for years when I pointed out that repeatedly demonizing the most gay friendly bar in Parkdale wasn’t really “supporting the community”

Restricting replies to only people who follow you is also an amazing tool.

I quit drinking about three years ago, and it really does change your perspective on nightlife. I’m really not sure where I fit in anymore, although I still try to go out once every month or two. It’s not a lot of fun hanging out with drunk people when you’re not.

That sucks, and I kind of know the feeling. When I quit music journalism and started working a job that stopped me from going out every weekend, I was amazed at how quickly all my music “friends” disappeared. Then COVID hit, and wiped out the infrastructure I would have used to reenter the scene

I am still curious though about what effect COVID currently has on your local scene. In my city, all I can see is that it prematurely ended a bunch of stuff, and it has taken time for the next generation to rebuild. Before there was a smoother transition between eras. What effects do you see?

Not at all! I know I sometimes come across as more argumentative than I intend. COVID did change everything for a while, and accelerated a bunch of pre-existing trends. I do not disagree that it was huge. But personally, I could see the signs of big changes coming long before that.

You literally jumped into my thread to tell me I’m wrong. Weird to get pissed off that I don’t agree.

I’m sorry you experienced this conversation the way that you did. Seemed to me like you were trying to say that COVID was a bigger problem for the music scene than the end of alt weeklies, and that you disagreed with my original post. I don’t see what’s wrong with defending my original post.

Me and everyone of my generation were having a harder and harder time getting people out to shows before COVID. COVID was the nail in the coffin for us, but our era was already ending. Maybe you might have been able to keep drawing a crowd until you’re 70, but most were never going to be able to

My point is that the COVID related changes have largely passed. Venues closed, scenes ended, promoters found new jobs. But there are new clubs, new scenes, and new promoters. The challenges they face are more related to real estate (depending on the city), and lack of local press.

I’m not sure what you think I’m disbelieving. Of course COVID caused a bunch of changes to happen all at once. But that doesn’t mean that the end of alt weeklies hasn’t led to some even larger structural changes that predate COVID and continue to be a challenge now.

Think of all the wigs you should justify buying if you had a shaved head!

I haven’t played a gig since before COVID, but I’m also also close to 50, so I’m not surprised that the gigs are going to the new generation of young people. The audience and performers are always going to be mostly early 20s. It’s the nature of nightlife

In retrospect, the years that I spent writing about music at an alt weekly were probably the anomaly. There was a 25 year window where you could make very niche music and still get covered in a local paper and exposed to hundreds of thousands of readers. I don’t think that was true in the 70s/80s

I mean, when I was 19, I played a lot of shows for $50 and some beer. I’m sure the older bands hated us for that. The big thing that I’ve seen change is that the scenes are more hidden and hyper local, which seems similar to how things were before the alt weekly era.