WTF, Why?

The Oak Set:
A Pseudo Mission Statement

I was thinking one day about opinions and how most of the people that give them (the experts?) are people that are nothing like me. Most critics of art, whether it be music, movies, or books, anything really, read thousands of books a year, watch thousands of movies, and listen to thousands of bands. I don't know about you, but that's not me. If i'm lucky, with school and such, I can probably get through about 20 books a year. I listen to a lot of music, but I hardly get the time to take in every nuance of every album I hear each year; most just get lost and forgotten in my iTunes library. I watch a good amount of movies every year but hardly the amount of Roger Ebert.

I don't fully understand the technical aspect of movies. I understand that some movies are considered good and some are bad, but hey, sometimes I like the bad ones too. While I do play a little guitar, I don't completely understand the significance of a guitar lick here or a vocal pitch there. While I am an Englsh major (and will have a degree in said subject in a month), I could never tell you why one book is more important or credible than another. I like politics, but I understand that nothing I say can change a person's mind, and I don't plan to.

Basically, I just know what I like, and usually, I can't entirely explain it.

So what I'm trying to do here is gather some of my best friends, people whose opinions matter to me, people who don't write for Ain't It Cool News or Salon or Pitchfork or anything like that. We all love music and art and politics and literature, but we don't get the same exposure to it as say Michiko Kakutani (NY Times book critic). We might not always agree with each other. And if you're reading this, you may not (and i hope not) always agree with us. That doesn't matter. Our opinions are not set in stone, they're not the end all be all of criticism, they're not commandments to be blindly followed. We just know what we like, and we want to tell you about it.

There are no strings attached. We are not getting (obviously, I hope) promotional albums to review or pre-release copies of books to read. If we find something cool, we'll tell you. Maybe you've heard/read/saw it already, but I hope that every once in a while, you read a post and find something cool.

Opinions are just that. Opinions.