We Got to Go Now, but the Beat Goes On

This feels weird. Okay, let’s do it.

Will make this short and sweet, as it’s being written with a heavy heart.

Revolver’s journey started in 2013, as a quest to discover the vast sea of music available around Planet Earth. It’s been a limitless learning experience since, for us and for many of our readers and listeners. It also felt good to share songs, albums, and playlists with strangers around the Internet.

Obviously, music is made to be shared but it is also so much more. Music has a power that – you might say we’re biased – no other art has come to compete with. Music is everywhere, all the time, at the forefront or in the background – a soundtrack for the stages and phases we go through. Music means we can soundtrack our happiness, our passions, our anger, our misery, our madness. We soundtrack memories, people we meet, people we leave, places we visit, trips we take. Our whole life has a soundtrack. Wait, actually our funeral if we want to. Hey, cool list idea!

Revolver’s mission was always to celebrate music in its different forms. This is why we kept our lists and playlists going over the years, we hosted guest mixes, made podcasts, filmed artists in their most intimate sessions, and uncovered stories publicly for the first time. We got to interview our musical heroes, we asked them existential questions, and we gained precious insights into the music that made and shaped them. We may not always have succeeded in showing it, but we’ve always rejected snobbism – no place for supremacy amongst us.

At the time of Revolver’s inception, the underground scene in the Middle East saw beautiful names come on stage, artists who refused to be bound by a specific culture or region. Their home countries weren’t always welcoming, and often these musicians had no other support but themselves. Through Revolver, we wanted to provide another support platform, and we hope we succeeded at giving it to you all, as much as our resources allowed.

Revolver started and remained a collective effort, a group of music lovers who believed that music was to be collectively shared and consumed. So the biggest thank you from this Oscar speech is to the many contributors and writers who made Revolver what it became today (should we give numbers? 175 mighty contributors). We won’t mention names but the special ones will recognize themselves. They decided to reject hipsterism as an approach to music, and share their beautiful, quirky, sometimes obscure but never dull findings with everyone.

You might have guessed where this is going by now. 2020 was a tough year for many, but for Lebanon tough was something else. Nothing was easy after the August 4th explosion. Even music sounded differently. We held off content at the time out of respect to the communities and the deaths and injuries that affected thousands of families, but this tragic event made it hard to go on after that, as it impacted the future and ambitions of many members of our community.

This is a goodbye letter (neither short nor sweet, sorry about that). Goodbye and thank you to all of you, seasoned and occasional contributors, avid readers, casual and committed listeners, friendly and unwavering supporters. We hope you’ve enjoyed the music, we hope you’ve enjoyed our soundtrack. We’ll keep the site and our social pages accessible for everyone, for the memories, for the archive and for that Sunday morning when you wake up with a hangover and you miss us.

We got to go now, but the beat goes on.