Music can be spoken in many different languages: the language of love, comedy, anger, etc. There are many artists that change the sounds of their music, but rarely do artists change the language of music. Pogo, aka Nick Bertke, takes scenes from particular movies and rearranges the audio of the movie to create music. The language is no longer English, but something entirely different: a chorus of phonemes, morphemes, and phrases that make no logical sense. Bertke is one of the few artists I know that has managed to change the language of music into something so bizarre, yet so beautiful.

All Things Pogo! is a fan blog made by a 19 year old girl named Christine who lives in New York. She too is a fan of Bertke and the music he creates. The blog has a simple black-and-white background design and yet, I love it, for she posts beautifully colored images that cause the posts to jump out in front of your eyes. Each time I look back at the blog and read her posts, I feel as though the images are almost real, so real that I can reach out and touch them.

She has written about 20 posts per month ever since the blog began (March 2011); she keeps up to date with everything Bertke does, including interviews and fan art. The only form of advertisement I see is a link to Pogo presents World Remix, and it shows how much funding Pogo needs for his next trip around the world, if you want to pledge money.

The blog is very informal, which is just the way I like it. She posts all the most recent pogo music videos with personal opinions and posts some events related to Bertke. She also supplies info that I could not have gotten from the actual Pogo website! For example, I had no idea that Bertke was banned from the US, or that he releases draft versions of upcoming pogo songs! This blog is truly a fantastic blog for she also posts updates on the petition to remove the US ban on Bertke, as well as pogo soundcloud songs that are not yet on the official Pogo site itself! She rarely posts things that are not worth reading, and I appreciate this blog immensely for that. The official Pogo site does not have a lot of information relating to Bertke, only that his work has been featured in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The official Pogo site does not nearly feature as many Pogo music videos and instead tries to sell the reader iTunes music, unlike  All Things Pogo! 

The blog is very focused on things only related to the music Pogo creates and Nick Bertke himself. The blog appears to garner a small amount of viewers, so it’s more for her than for appealing to a large audience, which I admire. Her very own blog Hey Annie is much more famous and personal (her personal blog also has a lot of appeal and merit!).

To make this blog even better would be for Christine to add a little more of her opinions to each pogo video she posts. I have come to value her ideals and I think that I can learn just as much from her opinions as from her facts (maybe even more!) to further appreciate how the music Nick Bertke makes affects others.

Speaking as a person who is very unaccustomed to blogs and how they work, All Things Pogo! is a blog that I am able to use, understand, and relate to, with ease.