Love in a void: a music blogger looks inward

It's that time of year again and I'm seeing various best-of-the-year Twitter threads from bloggers - stuff like "My ten most popular blogs from the year". Or journalists with their "Articles from the year I'm most proud of". Should I be getting in on the act? Should I parade a few of my own posts from this blog? The very best of Niluccio on noise 2023? But how? Select the most popular? Er, no - they're all equally unpopular (or neither popular nor unpopular, just ... unknown). What about those that give me a warm and cosy proud feeling? Hmm, not really. Pride comes before a fall, and er ... nope, I don't think so. I dunno, why bother looking back over things you've done in any one calendar year anyway? To take stock? Is it all just a bit of not-especially-subtle bragging? Come to that, why do music bores like me even bother self-publishing all this nonsense in the first place? Dozens of posts every year. For years! Utter fucking madness, no? The kingly Simon Reynolds - the Taylor Swift to my unknown strummer in a basement bar, first on, no-one paying attention - reckons there's something especially freeing about the self-produced music blog. You bash it out regardless of whether anyone wants it, whether anyone has - god forbid - commissioned it. True, but he's got his book empire as his "real" music output. He's a huge name in the world of music writing - his blogs are, I guess, merely his public ruminations, his preliminary sketches for future articles and publications. Possibly also a way of generating ideas and getting early feedback. All fine, of course, and I'd probably do the same if I was a superstar music writer like him. But no, he inhabits a completely different world. Naturally I agree with his view that music blogging is perhaps first and foremost a compulsion. Or perhaps in reality it's the act of writing that's compulsive. The fact that the writing's about a major personal interest, music, is obviously a big thing as well, but I would say the writing itself is really the compulsion. And, let it be said - and freely admitted - the free-to-air nature of blogging - the ability to "publish" and share it - yeah, this also has some kind of appeal (what, I couldn't quite say, possibly simple vanity). Who actually reads the stuff I write anyway? God knows. A tiny handful of friends (and not even them most of the time), a few people scattered across the globe who stumble on a Niluccio blog after googling a band, a song or some bit of arcane musical history (with "What's this shit from this weird Niluccio guy?" presumably being the typical reaction), and ... er, me. Yes, mostly me. I write them, I read them, full stop. There I am, reading, re-reading, correcting, tinkering, re-reading again years later and also thinking ... what's this shit from this weird Niluccio guy? Ahem. Yes, well, let's just agree that blogging for years about music is a strange habit and there's probably no cure for it. But, I hear you cry, which of your blogs from 2023, Niluccio, are the ones you're most proud of? The best of the year? My answer? Fucking all of them. Or none whatsoever. You decide (or don't). Either way, since 2010 they've been my 874 little moments of musical love. Love in a void.