Entertainment

Last year, Chris Cantalini was just an anonymous office drone who spent his day surfing music sites to stave off boredom.

One day when his boss wasn't looking, he created his own MP3 blog, www.gorillavsbear.net. And suddenly, for reasons he still doesn't quite understand, the 28-year-old Dallasite has become one of the most celebrated figures in the rock blogosphere.

Rex C. Curry / Special to DMN

Dallas blogger Chris Cantalini

Sirius satellite radio has given him a weekly music show. Ticketmaster just hired him to recommend bands at www.livedailyblog.com. And the music magazine Filter named him "blogger of the year."

"It's surreal," he says. "The attention has been hard to deal with because it's not like what I'm doing requires a skill or anything. Anyone can do it."

Welcome to the fast-and-furious world of music blogs, which are sprouting so rapidly they're helping shape opinions on new bands. In a sense, music blogs are like the British music media – discovering an obscure act one week and tearing it down the next.

"The hipsters get the leaked album; they discuss it to death for a few weeks; and by the time it's officially released, they're like, 'I'm so over it. ... That band is so August,' " Simon Reynolds, the British-born music critic and blogger, told The Dallas Morning News earlier this year.

But if Mr. Cantalini is a hipster-tastemaker, he certainly doesn't admit it.

"I'm just a fan who's talking about stuff I like, and for some reason, people believe me," he says.

Sitting next to a computer in his small, neat Junius Heights apartment, the soft-spoken Mr. Cantalini isn't the typical indie-rock geek who'll bend your ear for an hour about the latest Belle & Sebastian CD. A former middle-school volleyball coach, he'd just as soon talk about the Dallas Mavericks as the Arctic Monkeys.

He grew up in Plano, the son of a guitar-strumming dad and a Beatles-loving mom. As a teen, he became obsessed with the Dallas band Tripping Daisy as well as rap acts such as A Tribe Called Quest. After securing a fake I.D., he made regular pilgrimages to Deep Ellum to see his favorite bands onstage.

He graduated with a psychology degree from the University of Texas at Dallas and eventually wound up at Cigna Behavioral Health. It was there, in March 2005, he decided to launch Gorillavsbear, taking the name from a friend who loved talking about hypothetical animal fights.

"The blog was just something to do to kill time and share music with my friends," he says. "I never envisioned people would pay attention to it."

They did, slowly at first. But within a few months, hundreds of people were going to the site to listen to whatever new song Mr. Cantalini posted that day.

In March, his plugs for Tapes 'n Tapes helped the Minneapolis art-pop band get noticed by other music blogs and Rolling Stone, which credited Gorillavsbear for helping discover the band.

Mr. Cantalini says such praise embarrasses him: "Really, all I'm doing is facilitating people listening to it. I'm not technically discovering anything."

Today, 6,000 or so music lovers visit his site daily. That's small potatoes compared to big music webzines such as Pitchfork or Top 40-minded music blogs such as Stereogum. But it's still heavy traffic for some guy in Dallas plugging obscure new bands such as Voxtrot and Birdmonster. "I just happened to get in at a good time, and a lot of people aligned with my tastes. That's the only reason I'm set apart from all the other blogs that no one reads," he says.

Despite his growing readership, Mr. Cantalini doesn't pretend to be a music expert. His song descriptions rarely get more elaborate than "pretty cool" or "great stuff." Ask him what he likes about Tapes 'n Tapes and he says, "I can't really put my finger on what I liked about it ... I just like catchy pop records."

And now, he gets to play them on the radio. Earlier this year, Sirius recruited him for Blog Radio, a nightly program hosted by music webmasters on the Left of Center channel. He tapes his show at a buddy's apartment in Dallas and e-mails it to Sirius, which runs it Wednesdays from 9 to 11 p.m.

"I'm a little nervous – I don't know what I'm doing on the radio," he says. "But I have a couple beers and get loose, and now it's getting easier."

The Sirius job led to interest from Ticketmaster, which recently hired Mr. Cantalini to run his picks at www.livedailyblog.com.

"I thought about the whole selling-out issue, and at first I thought 'No way,' " he says. But he changed his mind when he learned other top-name bloggers were doing it, including BrooklynVegan, and that he was free to write what he wants: "They just re-post the same content that's on your blog," he says.

The new gigs, combined with the ads he runs on Gorillavsbear, allowed Mr. Cantalini to quit Cigna in June. But he's not sure how long he'll be able to go without a day job.

His current earnings are "close to what my salary was, which wasn't very much. Technically, you could say I'm doing it for a living now, but it's not a good living," he says.

He's also not sure how long his site will remain in vogue with rock fans. With the blogosphere mushrooming by the minute, he knows Gorillavsbear could easily get lost in cyberspace.

"It's already getting cluttered. At some point, there will only be a small number that people actually listen to," he says.

"There's so many blogs and there's not enough time in the day to read them."

E-mail tchristensen@dallasnews.com