Bill Studer (aka Billdude, B.D., Bee Dee) is, by all appearances, the board’s beating heart and one of its most steadfast voices—part archivist, part contrarian uncle, part cryptic Zen monk in dad jeans. His posts radiate a kind of hard-earned, homespun clarity. He doesn’t posture; he reports, usually with a shrug and a “what do you want from me?” tone that masks a deep reservoir of knowledge and taste. You don’t read Billdude for fireworks—you read him for the guy-at-the-end-of-the-bar realism, the unfiltered shorthand, and the occasional, quietly devastating one-liner.

He often writes like he’s talking back to a version of himself from five years ago—never quite settling, always reassessing. That makes him one of the few consistent posters whose views breathe. He’ll correct himself mid-sentence, toss in a personal anecdote without ceremony, or reverse a position he held for decades—and it all comes across as natural. You get the sense he’s more interested in telling the truth than being right.

If your writing (as Tabernacles E. Townsfolk) is sprawling, rhythmic, performative in a good way—like a sonata with literary footnotes—Billdude’s is like liner notes scribbled in pencil on the back of a gas bill. Unadorned, often funny without trying, and richer for what it doesn’t say. Together, your styles form a kind of dialectic: the enthusiast and the vet, the preacher and the sage. It’s no wonder your exchanges are some of the board’s highlights.

. . .

Brian Burks, formerly of Creative Noise and known on Music Babble as Mod Lang (after the Big Star song—already a signpost), writes with the focused intensity of someone who’s heard everything and isn’t impressed by much. His posts feel like tightly packed grenades: compact, precise, often dry, sometimes acidic, but rarely unfair. You get the sense he’s got a mental card catalog of every rock record ever made, indexed not just by artist and date but by production detail, label, and attitude. He’s no show-off, but when he flexes, it’s with scalpel cuts, not power chords.

Mod Lang’s style is clipped and elliptical—never bloated, rarely sentimental, and usually a few notches sharper than the thread requires. He writes like he’s editing in real time, like he doesn’t trust adjectives unless they earn their keep. He’ll deliver a withering verdict in six words and leave it there, expecting you to keep up. There’s a slight archness to his tone, a curated detachment that keeps the emotional stakes low—but when he does tip his hand and show affection for a record, you believe it.

In the context of Babble, he’s a necessary anchor: unflashy, no-nonsense, a little prickly in the best way. If your posts (as Tabernacles) have the energy of a late-night FM monologue—stoned, sincere, occasionally unspooling into cosmic tangents—Mod Lang’s are like reading the margin notes of a critic who already wrote the definitive review ten years ago and doesn’t feel like repeating himself. There’s wit, depth, and taste behind every post, but you have to listen for it between the lines. He’s the kind of writer who improves a conversation by tightening it.

. . .

Norville (often styled “Norville” or “Nor”) is one of the great lurking enigmas of Music Babble: a poster who can feel like both a ghost in the machine and a total deadpan realist. He’s never the loudest voice in the room, but when he drops in, it’s with a vibe that manages to be dry, slightly off-center, and always in character. His posts are often brief, sardonic, and unbothered by whether anyone agrees. He’ll offer a contrarian opinion in a single line and then vanish for a week, like some Zen koan of record collecting.

His style is laconic but not lazy—he knows exactly what he’s doing. Norville has that old-school message-board voice: flat affect, no caps, lowercase aesthetic, and a sentence rhythm that sounds like it’s been filtered through years of forum culture and passive-aggressive snark. There’s a real sense of taste and intelligence behind it—he just doesn’t care to impress you. You could almost think he doesn’t like music that much, except he clearly does, just with a strong filter for BS and a low tolerance for hype.

If Babble had archetypes, Nor would be the disaffected record store clerk who’s heard all your favorite records already, three times, and mostly found them mid—but he’ll still hang out, say something droll, and maybe tip his hand when something really moves him (usually something obscure and un-Googleable). He’s an essential part of the texture: the baseline hum of cool detachment that offsets the overthinkers, completists, and high-effort posters. A poster’s poster, and often funnier than he gets credit for.

. . .

Certainly.

TonyV comes off as Music Babble’s quietest virtuoso—less prolific, but pointed when he wants to be. He writes like someone who’s actually spent time behind the keyboard, and not just typing: there’s a grounded musicality to his phrasing, an economy of language that suggests both discipline and discernment. His posts often have the unspoken authority of someone who’s trained, but he doesn’t lord it over anyone—if anything, he underplays it. There’s a softness to his tone, the kind you might associate with someone who plays Brahms on rainy days and Billy Joel on sunny ones, and you get the sense that, when he likes something, it’s because he’s felt it in his hands, not just heard it in his ears.

He doesn’t post often, but when he does, it usually adds something—more felt than proclaimed. He reads like someone for whom the music isn’t theoretical, historical, or aesthetic so much as tactile. A pianist’s perspective, in other words.

. . .

Trung is the board’s unspoken anchor—part Zen koan, part archivist, part absurdist. He doesn’t just post reviews; he curates realities, like a collector of emotional artifacts. His style is at once austere and surreal: sometimes a sentence, sometimes a list, sometimes an offhand koan that sits in your head like an echo you only understand three days later. He has a knack for finding the one sentence, or even phrase, that unlocks a record for you forever—“this sounds like cardboard soaked in gin”—and then vanishing into digital mist.

There’s no bluster to Trung’s writing, no push. Just presence. He often seems like he’s playing a longer game than the rest of us, engaging with music (and conversation) on a wavelength where humor, critique, and poetry collapse into one. When Trung posts, you don’t scroll past. You lean in.

. . .

When my query limit resets in five hours I’m going to do Benjamin. Who am I missing?

ed;

Certainly. Here’s a profile of “Mike D is so fat” (MDISF) in the same style as the earlier Music Babble poster analyses:

Mike D is so fat (MDISF): A polemicist by nature and inclination, MDISF operates in a tone pitched somewhere between early-2000s shock-forum bravado and latter-day nationalist fatalism. He is fluent in the dark arts of rhetorical escalation, often trading in deliberately incendiary phrasing that flirts with (and sometimes embraces) the aesthetics of fascism, though his current posture is more “post-libertarian reactionary” than doctrinaire extremist. Unlike some board edgelords who retreat into irony or obfuscation, MDISF tends to mean what he says—even when what he says seems beyond the pale—though he’s also aware of and occasionally toys with his own provocateur persona.

Stylistically, he favors blunt force over nuance, often writing in curt, declarative bursts—like a cultural critique written on an ammo box. He’s opinionated to the bone and resistant to correction, which gives his posts a certain feral authenticity, however flawed. He’s less a music critic than a culture warrior who happens to be posting on a music board, but his occasional stabs at artistic judgment can be startlingly incisive—especially when something genuinely moves him (a rarity, but not unknown). Politically, he’s adjacent to the dissident right, if not firmly embedded in it, and his posts often drip with contempt for progressive shibboleths and liberal pieties. He’s not for the faint of heart, but you won’t mistake him for a consensus-seeker. Depending on the thread, he’s either the id of the forum or its troll under the bridge—but either way, he’s never boring.

. . .

Certainly. Here’s a profile of the Music Babble user known as Sunrise Moon:

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Sunrise Moon was one of the youngest and most earnest presences in the later-era Boardhost incarnation of Music Babble, joining the board in his early teens and growing into it like a younger sibling tagging along on an older crowd’s bar crawl. In a community dominated by thirty- and forty-somethings with weathered takes and sharpened sarcasm, Sunrise Moon brought a sincere and sometimes overly exuberant energy that occasionally clashed with the board’s weathered cynicism. He had a strong affinity for progressive rock, especially Yes and early Genesis, and was unashamed in his enthusiasm—even when that meant taking flak for gushing over Close to the Edge or praising Porcupine Tree like they were canonical.

He was also a budding songwriter, frequently posting his own lyrics, poetry, and tracklists for hypothetical concept albums that bore the influence of the symphonic rock he loved. These posts often elicited mixed responses: some rolled their eyes, others offered encouragement, and a few—often the most hardened of the old guard—showed surprising patience. Over time, he earned a kind of grudging respect, not because he changed to fit in, but because he didn’t. He wasn’t trying to be cool; he just loved music and wanted to share it. In a forum that often prized jaded detachment, that counted for something.

While his early posts could be naïve or repetitive, they were never cynical, and over time his taste broadened and deepened. His presence marked a generational shift in the board’s life cycle—proof that someone born after The Division Bell could still fall in love with Selling England by the Pound and argue about it with a guy in his fifties.

In the end, Sunrise Moon wasn’t trying to win arguments or torch sacred cows. He was trying to find belonging in a world of music obsessives, and—awkwardly, exuberantly, and sincerely—he did.

. . .

Certainly. Here’s a profile of Pugeye, one of Music Babble’s most distinctive voices:

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Pugeye was the board’s resident psychedelic shaman and freeform gadfly—equal parts pop-culture omnivore and deeply idiosyncratic curator. His tastes were firmly rooted in the ’60s and early ’70s, but not the predictable canon of Zeppelin and Floyd (though he’d weigh in there too); rather, he gravitated toward the fringes—deep psych cuts, jazzy folk-rock hybrids, Laurel Canyon weirdos, Japanese obscurities, and lost acid-folk artifacts. His love of music was maximalist and deeply personal, defined more by vibe and mood than any received notions of “greatness.” If it was warm, trippy, melodic, a little melancholy, and underappreciated, chances are he’d already repped it, preferably in a YouTube link with no context.

He was a magnet for friction. His writing style—a mix of stoner affect, blunt takes, and a tone that oscillated between laid-back detachment and sudden defensiveness—rubbed some posters the wrong way, and he knew it. He would often post provocatively, sometimes cryptically, and didn’t shy away from antagonizing those he saw as stuffy, overly academic, or snobbishly “rockist.” He had little patience for classical music, metal, or avant-garde abstraction unless they overlapped with his core sensibility (Sun Ra passed; Stockhausen usually didn’t). He’d dismiss entire genres with the casual wave of a bong hand, often in lowercase.

And yet Pugeye was, in his way, an archivist. He was the board’s low-key Anthony Fantano before that meant anything—constantly digging, sharing, and resurrecting forgotten albums that sounded like they were meant to be discovered stoned at 2 a.m. He brought an eclecticism to the board that was all his own, and when you got past the confrontational tone and defensive edge, you’d often find deeply thoughtful, emotionally grounded takes—especially on music that clearly meant something to him.

Ultimately, Pugeye was the barefoot cousin in a board full of professors. He might not have always played nice, but he was never dull—and in a place like Babble, that was more valuable than being right.

. . .

Certainly. Here’s a profile of the poster once known as Sterling S., later simply Ster:

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Ster was one of the board’s most distinctive ideological presences—a campus-left type in the older, ’60s mold, whose posts blended a graduate-seminar fluency in political theory with an occasionally maddening absolutism. He brought a rare earnestness to Music Babble’s mix, often approaching even classic rock debates with the lens of power, empire, and postcolonial critique. His politics weren’t performative; they were immersive. He lived them, studied them, argued them. That meant you’d find him in the Dylan threads one day and the geopolitics threads the next, defending the Vietnamese war effort not just as a nationalist resistance but as a righteous cause, usually citing primary documents, and often quoting directly from the Hanoi line without flinching.

He could come off as rigid—at times humorless—but his intelligence was never in doubt. He wrote like someone who had once been the editor of a leftist campus paper and never quite left that mental space. Even his musical taste felt shaped by dialectics: he was suspicious of commercialism, wary of imperial kitsch, and consistently more interested in music as cultural product than private catharsis. This led him to valorize the folk and protest idioms (though always with a critical eye toward co-optation), while remaining skeptical of mass-market psychedelia and most corporate rock.

Later, he would move to China, where he seemed to find a complicated peace—a place that, for all its contradictions, aligned better with his internationalist, socialist instincts than the American left he had grown increasingly disillusioned with. His posts became more rare, more reflective, and more personal. And while some on the board rolled their eyes at his defense of authoritarian regimes—or what they saw as historical revisionism—others appreciated his consistency and intellectual seriousness. He never stopped believing that ideas mattered, and that the West’s story wasn’t the only one worth telling.

In a community full of ironists, Ster was strikingly sincere. And even if he grated, you knew he meant every word.

. . .

Certainly. Here’s a profile of the Music Babble poster known as Tommy Tubbs, a.k.a. Mr. T:

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Mr. T was the forum’s self-designated court jester, but he was far more than that: a comic voice with an edge, an agent of chaos in the best sense. If others wrote to analyze or persuade, he wrote to prod, to poke, to tilt the pinball machine just enough to make the ball rattle in the bumper. His jokes weren’t always tasteful, his style was defiantly unpolished, and his posts often read like they’d been dashed off between bong hits and episodes of Adult Swim—but they had rhythm, personality, and a surprisingly sharp eye for bullshit.

Underneath the nonsense, there was a real love of music—a raw, unfiltered enthusiasm for funk, soul, hard rock, and anything with swagger. He’d defend Prince to the death, clown on prog with glee, and occasionally drop a deep-cut insight that reminded you he was listening closer than he let on. His favorites were loud, dirty, sexy, or weird—usually all of the above. He loved groove more than form, feel more than theory.

Mr. T had no patience for pretense and could sniff out a poseur a mile away. He wasn’t always fair, and he could derail a thread like few others, but he was essential to the board’s ecosystem. He cut through the self-importance with a single off-color joke or absurd image, and while some rolled their eyes, others knew he was performing a service. His chaos had a kind of integrity.

He was the guy in the back of the classroom who made the teacher laugh against their better judgment. And while he rarely argued in paragraphs, he was always present—a pulse on the board, a reminder not to take it all too seriously. The board was smarter for having him, even if it was also a little messier.

. . .

Here’s a profile for John S., known in earlier days as John Schlegel:

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John S. was, and remains, one of the board’s intellectual bedrocks—a reflective, even-tempered poster with a critic’s vocabulary and a poet’s sense of cadence. He arrived with the old guard, already formed, already read, already having thought things through. His posts, whether on prog, folk, or literary songwriting, had weight and polish but also restraint. He didn’t flood threads or pick fights; he contributed thoughtfully and left room for others to breathe.

He had a particular affinity for narrative music—albums that unfolded like short stories, songs that painted characters—and you could tell that his experience as a writer (in the professional or writerly sense) bled into his listening habits. His voice was warm, sometimes wry, occasionally nostalgic, but rarely sentimental. Think of him as the Paul Simon of the board: articulate, concise, urbane, and maybe just a little elusive.

As for the spelling—John Sch. might indeed be more precise, linguistically speaking. “Sch” is a trigraph in German, after all, representing the /ʃ/ sound, not an “S” at all. But “John S.” is cleaner, and there’s something apt about the understated abbreviation: it reflects his tendency to underplay, to step back, to let his ideas speak louder than his name.

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If you like, I can write a few more board regulars in this style.