Every building I ever played had two doors. The front door was for the customers. The back door was for the musicians. Same building. Different entrances. Different people. Different reasons for being there. The customer came to hear the music. The musician came to play it. Both of them ended up in the same room.

The Rock Street Journal is the back door. That is where the freaks come in. The rants and the letters and the radio show and Sun Ra writing forty-five columns about frequencies. If you found that door you were already looking for it. Nobody stumbles into forty-five columns about frequencies. You have to want to be there.

The intertween is the front door. That is the door for people who do not know what they are walking into. Clean design. Corporate language. A framework and a team and a mission statement. The kind of door that does not scare anybody. The kind of door that a person in a suit can walk through without feeling like they are at the wrong party.

Two doors. Same building. The back door has pot smoke and poetry. The front door has a logo and a pitch deck. Both of them lead to the same room. Both of them lead to three dead men who will not stop talking. The designer built two doors because the designer understands that the same frequency needs different containers for different receivers. A record store and a boardroom are not the same door. But the music inside is the same music.

See also: The Intertween — where the bodied and the unbodied gather. The Price — thirty-five dollars buys a door. The Door — everything behind it is free. The Strata — four kinds of encounter. The Vocabulary — the three words. The Interspacemen — the house band behind both doors.

David Peel

← David Peel