rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) (04/03/85)
After collecting various opinions for a couple of weeks, mail has quieted
down. The question was, "Should a subgroup of net.music be created--topic:
The Grateful Dead." The tally was 47 "yes", 10 "no". That oversimplifies
it; here follows a synopsis of the opinions []=my comments:
Several people suggested that a mailing list would be more appropriate than
a subgroup--the subgroup is convenient but there's always the worry of
clogging up the net with YA (sub)group. [Mailing lists CAN be a nuisance
to maintain--if they get out of date, every message generates a flood of
"returned mail" to the senders or to the coordinator. They sure do reduce
the total traffic if the group is small, though.]
The opinions were decidedly NOT drawn strictly along DeadHead/non-DeadHead
lines, although overall it tended toward D'Head=>yes (but not particularly
non-D'Head=>no).
The major "yes" reasons were to get postings about the Dead out of
net.music--either because the respondent is not a D'Head and is tired of
the sporadic flurries of postings about the Dead, or because the respondent
IS a D'Head and can't/won't/doesn't-have-time-to wade through all of
net.music just to find the higher-interest Dead-related material. [It's
tempting to say that they ought to be able to scan over the Subject lines
rn-style and/or 'n' past the articles, but there were several complaints of
not being able to run sufficiently recent news software to get these
capabilities.] Related to both "yes" reasons is a desire to have material
only marginally related to music go to a Dead subgroup. [Here, admittedly
that makes it questionable whether such discussions should go in a subgroup
of "music"--but that's just the way the chips fall if you have a tree
structure and you might want a matrix (or relational?) organization
instead.]
The major "no" reasons concerned yet another split, another subgroup, etc.
These were both administrative (net maintenance) and esthetic. Some people
(including some D'Heads) were afraid that creating a subgroup would make
the D'Heads vanish from net.music entirely. Many fear that a subgroup
would be damaging not so much in itself as in the example it would set in
encouraging proliferation of subgroups. [Religious issues aside, you just
have to see that there's a judgment call any time you contemplate a
subgroup. You've always got to ask whether creating the new group will
create a problem larger than it solves.]
One issue (which got a lot of airplay in net.music for a few days) is the
question, "What's so special about the Grateful Dead?" D'Heads can cite
any number of reasons--the longevity of the band, the tape and ticket
networks, the extensive tour schedules, the "analysis" that some of them
[us?] go through about lyrics/song-sequences/etc. To each of these there's
a typical response that this-or-that phenomenon may be unusual or perhaps
interesting, but not terribly distinctive and not a reason for a completely
separate group. [This one won't be settled. People argue whether the
Dead are just relix who attract a following of burnouts from a bygone era
or are really the avant-garde of a style of music which is still
developing. They've been arguing it since before the band went into
"retirement" twelve years ago. One's view on this question probably
defines whether one be D'Head.]
So much for the opinions. Stay tuned; more to follow soon (i.e., I'm still
working on it).
--
Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303)444-5710 x3086
...Simpler is better.