Bloggasm

Spike Priggen, of Bedazzled.tv lives on the Lower East Side of NYC with his girlfriend and video collection. A songwriter and musician, his most recent LP is “Stars After Stars After Stars”.

Simon Owens: Your blog focuses a lot on music videos while many other music bloggers mainly focus on just the music itself. Do you think a good music video can turn a mediocre song into a good one?

Spike Priggen: Not really, no, but it might make it easier to sit through. But then again, most of the clips I show aren’t so much “music videos” as “video music”: pre- MTV “clips” and vintage live and mimed TV performances, not the full-on productions we have today. It’s hard for me to talk about music videos because I don’t really follow current music (or music video) that much. I have been seeing more of them lately since I discovered this great local video show called NY Noise that’s on Channel 25 (NYC’s city-owned station). I’ve seen stuff on there where i thought the video was interesting but the music still sucked.

SO: Or vice versa: can a bad music video turn a good song into a bad one?

SP: Yeah, sure. Well, it doesn’t make the song any worse really, but a bad video can make you hate a song more, I guess.

SO: You seem to balance yourself between music and politics. Is there any point at which these two different subjects merge?

SP: I don’t know that the two things meet anywhere except that they’re just two things I care about. I never really planned on having politics on the site when I first started it about a year ago. It was supposed to just be entertainment and cool links and whatever. But I just got so fed up about certain things going on in the US that I started blogging about them (mostly just linking to stuff I agree with, actually). When right-wingers started complaining about it, that REALLY pissed me off so I started to do a bit more of it. I suspect that most of the people who like the music stuff on my site share my politics, more or less, because the mail I get is overwhelmingly positive. I would rather not have to have politics be a part of the site and I look forward to a time when political events cease to anger me and I can stop thinking about them.

SO: Do you think you turn off any potential music lovers from your blog by posting your views on politics?

SP: Not very many , I don’t think, and the ones that are turned off, I really couldn’t care less about. I mean, that’s kind of why I do it. To expose those people to a bit of reality, and/or piss them off. I’ve posted some rants on this subject on the site, but basically I feel that the entire media in the US is incredibly slanted to the right and this is my little way of evening the scales, through the only outlet I have. The political posts are a tax that you pay to come enjoy the content on my site. No one HAS to read them.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

SP: I have about 84 blogs that I follow with Bloglines. I’m obsessed with this one firedoglake that is really on top of a lot of issues I follow like the Plame/CIA agent outing. PCL Linkdump is great for pop culture type links. This guy Dan Goodsell has a bunch of cool sites including A Sampler Of Things, where he posts great animation and advertising artifacts from his collection. Boing-Boing deserves its status as the #1 blog on Technorati, there’s always a lot of great interesting stuff. Mark from Boing-Boing has a cool new blog called Mad Professor that’s kind of a consumer guide to cool things.

You can find Bedazzled over here