It’s Something You Said’s fifth birthday
Five years ago today, we launched our website! We wanted to be an independent webzine with an international scope, designed to withstand the heady breeze of pop culture.
The idea for the site was to champion the people you hadn’t heard of as much as those that you had. We wanted a site that cared about talent rather than celebrity. Our remit was also to act as a platform and a canvas for our contributors. Some hoped to make a name for themselves as writers, artists and photographers and eventually move on to bigger and better things, others just wanted a space to be creative. Oh, and we don’t do this for money. We don’t get paid for this shit. Not one of us, from the editor to our contributors. We do it for the love of words and pictures and music and film.
To mark our fifth birthday, here are five highlights since the launch of SYS.
That time we went mega viral
We’re not really bothered about about the number of hits we get. You won’t find us clickbaiting. We just want the people who visit our site to get some enjoyment out of their time on our pages. That said, when something we post takes off, it undeniably feels good. So when Jess Matthews’ rant about how to buy a drink without being a total dick gained hundreds of thousands of views and about 50k Facebook Likes, we were pretty damn excited.
Tips such as: “NEVER tap the bar or whistle at the staff to get their attention. I am not a dog or a taxi and I will just ignore you for longer,” made lots of bartenders laugh and made heaps of other people quite angry. As you might expect, the comments section became a fucking free-for-all.
You can read the full article here.
We won an award!
Our editor was thirteen when he last won something. It was at a football camp. He won the keepy-up competition. So for his website to be nominated at the 2013 Pedestrian Blogster Awards was flattering and something of an honour.
Unfortunately, being overseas, he was unable to attend the awards ceremony in Sydney on Friday, so one of the team, the very talented Elfy Scott, went in his place. Before the big night, she asked if she needed to prepare an acceptance speech and everyone scoffed.
On the night of the awards though, Elfy sent us a message from the ceremony saying, “WE WON A FUCKING AWARD. I was totally under the impression that was not a possibility. You’ll be glad to hear I started screaming at the crowd like a UFC champion when it happened and my interview is gonna be some gushing gibberish.”
Supporting new music
Since the birth of our site, we’ve tried our best to support the new acts that we think deserve your attention, so it makes us proud that we have been able to point you in the direction of some amazingly talented people over the years. Heck, we were one of the very first blogs to champion a little-known teenage singer by the name of Lorde and we’ve been raving to anyone who would listen about how great The Preatures are since they were called The Preachers. We will also excitedly gush about how awesome the likes of Alex The Astronaut and Jerry Williams are. We premiere new tunes most weeks too. If we like it, we’ll feature it, whether you’ve got a million Facebook followers or a dozen.
Posting whatever the hell we want
Alongside bringing you the best news music and advising you which films to check out, we’ve always wanted to be able to post stories about such things as getting awkwardly naked in Morocco, trying to find the perfect burger and getting off to good literature. Because we don’t have advertisers, we enjoy the freedom of being able to talk about whatever we choose, so if you want a story about why crochet is the best, how to not piss everyone off in a hostel dorm and things that shouldn’t be awesome but are (for instance, Benedict Cumberbatch’s face), then all you have to do is slide through our pages.
Ha ha, the comments (the other time we went mega viral)
In 2013 we posted a list of rules about how to play music in public. Such as: “Don’t wear shorts. Everything must exist within the confines of its proper environment. Pele didn’t perform in jeans; Elvis didn’t perform in fucking shorts. Have some damn respect for your art.”
The list got a lot of attention at the time and continues to do so, when some band or other share it on their socials (just last week it got 70k hits). It seems that we have managed to piss off A LOT of musicians, most of whom appear to be drummers in metal bands. There are some seriously angry people in the comments section.
Check out the post here.
Anyway, happy birthday to us! Thanks for reading our website over the past five years. You’re the best. Keep up to date with us on Facebook and Twitter.
