It’s amazing what you can find if you look.
All I did was search for songs with “blue sky” in the title, and a vast, unexplored world opened up. I already knew Pink Floyd’s “Goodbye Blue Sky” (from The Wall), and A-ha’s “The Blue Sky” (from Hunting High and Low), but then started looking at the ones I was not familiar with.
I found Kid Cudi’s “BLUE SKY” (from his recent album INSANO), and now have a bunch of new (to me) music to catch up on. Great!
Finally, though, I landed on Blue Sky, by The Allman Brothers Band. I had heard of the band, of course (anyone from my generation will have), but knew very little about them, and found a fascinating rabbit-hole to explore.
The thing which most caught my attention was that this was one of the last songs recorded by guitarist Duane Allman, who tragically died in a motorcycle accident at the age of 24. As it happens, in contrast to the opinion I recently expressed, he was a session musician who “made it” through coming to the attention of (among others) Eric Clapton, who was astonished by Allman’s performance on Wilson Pickett’s album Hey Jude. In 2006, he was named by Rolling Stone as second only to Jimi Hendrix among the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. While highly subjective, this gives a bit of context for the esteem in which his playing was held.
The song title “Blue Sky” actually refers to Sandy “Bluesky” Wabegijig, the girlfriend (and later wife) of Dickey Betts, who wrote and sang the song. It was deliberately phrased in a generic way, however, to make the song more relatable to everyone.
So, the song Blue Sky was written for Bluesky, but in such a way that it could refer to any Blue Sky.
For example, Bluesky. After the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk (about whom I shall say no more right now than that I am... not a fan), a great many changes were made. These included laying off about half of Twitter’s workforce, the resignation of many others after Musk’s demand to commit to “extremely hardcore” work in support of his vision of “Twitter 2.0”, and the restoration of many accounts which had previously been banned, such as Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump.
This all led to many Twitter users searching for other platforms, and thus to significant work being done on platforms such as Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon, which seem to be considered the main alternative platforms. Threads appears to be the biggest long-term threat, as it is backed by Meta and closely tied to Instagram. With 275 million monthly active users it is also the only platform with a comparable user base, but the association with Meta is exactly why some prefer to avoid Threads.
Shortly after the Twitter acquisition, I heard quite a lot of interest in Mastodon, but most of it was in the InfoSec community, and did not appear to represent a broader trend.
Bluesky, however, seems to be the platform that has been generating the most “buzz”, particularly in the aftermath of the recent US election. As I rarely used Twitter anyway, I decided to delete my account, and when I checked the accounts I followed (mostly tech and InfoSec), many of them listed Bluesky handles and a notice that they either had migrated or would be migrating shortly.
In the interest of thoroughness, I requested a backup of my data, both as a double-check and out of curiosity about how the process works. I then deactivated the account.
I am now on Bluesky, and can be found at https://bsky.app/profile/richardg42.bsky.social.
Cheers!
Comments