The Final Band of Horses Post

I'm gonna try to make this the last Band of Horses post ever on this site. But, since the whole thing is in this week's Blurt, I thought I would properly direct new readers to all of the links within this site.

From the Reader:

Whiny Foal- Rosey Bystrak's blog (www.sddialedin.com) has fueled the debate over fans shooting concert videos to post online. After a July 6 Band of Horses show at 'Canes, Bystrak posted, "So there I am with my tiny Sony digital camera... While playing the super emotional song 'Funeral,' [singer Ben Bridwell] flips me off and midsong yells, 'I see you recording me.' I look around and at least five other people are taping him, and he calls me out.... There's nothing worse than a...whiny baby onstage." After the song, Bridwell launched into a tirade against concert tapers who post on YouTube.

"Several bands have e-mailed me to thank me for posting pictures or YouTube footage of them," blogged Bystrak, "and [they] even link to me on their respective websites, but apparently Band of Horses is...too cool...to accept whatever publicity they can get."

Pitchforkmedia.com asked Bridwell about the incident. "It was really annoying," he said. "It was just scratching at the surface of what's happening to shows lately. Everybody's got a camera in their pocket, and they turn it on to just, I don't know, exploit us in some way or further their own projects or whatever the fuck they're doing with their websites and shit...as far as I'm concerned, it just looks like someone trying to record a really shitty performance to post somewhere and embarrass us forever."

Pitchfork's report then turned up on Idolator.com and the U.K.'s Drowned in Sound, with readers posting comments defending and/or berating both Bystrak and Bridwell. "In a day, I went from about 250 hits to almost ten times that," says Bystrak. "I opted to not respond to comments, and I still won't, because most likely they've come and gone and are now hating on the next indie-nation whatever."

-- Jay Allen Sanford

Here's the post that launched a thousand blogs. OK, more like 6. And not until a couple weeks after the incident happened. But still, it got under quite a few commenters' skins.

I mention it a little here. Then I read that the singer, Ben, was complaining about having to play his "hit", so I posted about that here.

Then the shit hit the fan when Pitchfork linked to my story and drove a whole bunch of new traffic my way. This post was written at the end of that long day, and has all the links of sites who picked up the story (that I knew about), including the original Pitchfork interview with Ben, and updated links throughout that weekend. Most of those posts have their own comments that are interesting, to say the least.

And here's a very old unrelated post about BoH when they won three Plug Awards. At the time, I thought they were joking. In a way, I now think maybe they were dead serious.

Now, I'm dusting off my hands and I'm done with this. Here's my sitemeter for the last 30 days and life has definitely gone back to normal. Just the way I like it.