About

One of my favourite lines of movie dialogue comes from Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Contagion’. Stuffed with stars – Winslet! Paltrow! Law! Damon! – and multiple interconnected plots, it’s about how a viral outbreak affects multiple people, including a blogger who uses the situation for his own financial gain. But not everyone’s buying the fear mongering – like the epidemiologist who spits: “Blogging isn’t writing. It’s just graffiti with punctuation.”

That’s how I felt. Until I left my job as an entertainment website editor and, with it, my piece of wall to write stuff on. So here I am, punctuating graffiti.

The link to music is a bit more tenuous. I grew up in South Africa during the 1980s, when the South African Broadcasting Corporation was as backwards as the ruling political party that ran it. With three channels to choose from for most of the decade, there really wasn’t much in the way of dedicated music programming on TV, apart from a couple of shows with down-with-the-kids names like ‘Video 2’, ‘Fast Forward’, and, yes, ‘Graffiti’.