I’ve been considering starting a Master’s degree in new media publishing at Northwestern for a little while, and one of the main focuses of the program is the paradox of instant publication: the immediate dissemination of information is astoundingly useful, but does it cheapen the value of the information?

I had the challenging experience of interviewing Voxtrot’s Ramesh Srivastava a couple of weeks ago for a profile story in a local magazine. I’d originally wanted to talk with Stephen Malkmus about his Pitchfork Music Festival performance and the new record he’s working on (oh yeah – and the fact that Pavement is one of the best bands of all time), but he was unavailable so the nice folks at Matador offered me some phone time with Voxtrot instead. Seriously, that’s like dangling a filet mignon in front of me when I haven’t eaten all day, and then throwing it away and replacing it with a pile of beef jerky. This was one of those pulling teeth kind of interviews - the kid had no idea who I was or why I was calling, wouldn’t give me more than two-word answers, and had that bleary, stoned-or-really-sleepy hesitation at answering everything. I’ve been met with this kind of zoned-out indifference by bands on the road before, but in light of Srivastava’s recent tirade about the blog world’s general indifference to his band…you’d think the kid would’ve given any journalist who called something to work with.

Perhaps part of the problem is that by the time Voxtrot got around to finally releasing a record, the hype had died and the music was judged solely on its own merit…which showed it to be passable but not compelling. Though Srivastava says that his band’s album just takes a while to “get,” he also acknowledges that he himself has “a very disposable attitude towards anything that doesn’t set me on fire in the first five seconds, as it is instantly forgotten.” So yeah, Ramesh, the bottom line is this: what the Internet giveth, the Internet taketh away.

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