I'm not a blogger. I don't read blogs, either. Most of them seem like a waste of cyberspace. As the saying goes, "Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few." So why start a blog of my own?
Because there's just SO MUCH GOOD Czech music out there.
From the film music of the interwar First Czechoslovak Republic, through the protest songs of Prague Spring, the experimental/avant-garde fervor of the prog and fusion groups of the 1970s, to the numerous utterly unique contributions made to extreme metal since the late 80s, the treasure trove expands further the closer I look. Most of it never gets the attention it deserves, even within its own country, let alone abroad. Researching the stuff takes tons of effort, especially if the language puts up barriers to what little has been written about some of this stuff.
I'm not an expert in either the Czech language or its history. But I do know my way around in both, and have access to additional resources that many would-be fans of this music may not.
This blog provides me a medium, a platform, a structure through which to approach a systematic examination of some of the gems I'm uncovering. My hope is to not only post my own thoughts and reviews of specific artists, recordings, or movements, but also put in the leg work to dig into the backstories behind things as much feasibly possible, and to provide translation of lyrics, song titles, and so on into English where needed. The end result should not only enable the reader to discover amazing music, but also have some idea of how to understand or evaluate that music a little better than might otherwise be possible.
As a final note in this opening post, I'd like to clarify that the name of the blog derives from an age-old Czech proverb: "Co Čech, to muzikant", which means approximately that "To be Czech is to be a musician". Whether music is the most essential art form for Czechs is a question better asked elsewhere. But at the very least, music recordings have the advantage of being more easily reproduced and distributed than, say, paintings or theatre performances. And for that, I am deeply grateful.