Back in the earlier days of the Disposable Underground ‘zine, I interviewed Jason Netherton of Misery Index about his blog, Demockery. His band is political lyrically, while his blog was for his analysis and opinions on politics.
Netherton let Demockery.org fall off the internet years ago, but the good news is that I stumbled upon it again using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine; the blog is up there for anyone so inclined to read: start at this link.
“Greetings! With thanks to those who visited here off and on over the last 12 years, I am signing off indefinitely,” he wrote in his final blog post in 2011. “I have a growing distaste for the panoptic tentacles that presently troll the online medium. Also, while I enjoy offering such thoughts, travel reports, and criticisms, I simply no longer feel the compulsion to express and communicate in this method (at least at this time), until something better can be devised.”
So many years later, I recently reached out to Netherton and asked for his look back on Demockery.
“To me it’s a relic of its age,” Netherton emailed me. “It was a time, actually (from ’98 to the mid-to-late ‘00s), before blogs were really a big thing and people would directly visit websites on their computers (rather than scroll through aggregation applications/platforms on their phones). For me it was a great way to write and work through the issues of the day as well as a means to explore the themes in the lyrics more deeply. It also ended up being a cool way to meet and interact with Misery Index fans.”
Further reading:
I’ve talked to Netherton a few other times over the years:
for the Misery Index Live in Munich album
and about his other band Asphalt Graves
and here’s the Demockery.org interview
Photo: Jason Netherton at Maryland Deathfest in 2014
