Rolling Music Writers' Thread

(i think the contrarian article thing is 4real tho -- i mean, controversy sells)

but who's buying?

Contrarianism only seems big because the hivemind is so strong, though. And there are acceptable and unacceptable subjects. Try getting a "No, seriously, Beyonce is terrible" story published. No matter how informed and thoughtful it might be, that piece ain't seeing print.

The ability to engage with unfashionable but popular bands in an enthusiastic way without being condescending or contrarian for the sake of it sounds pretty marketable if you are writing for a mainstream audience.

Contrarianism only seems big because the hivemind is so strong, though. And there are acceptable and unacceptable subjects. Try getting a "No, seriously, Beyonce is terrible" story published. No matter how informed and thoughtful it might be, that piece ain't seeing print.

a well informed and thoughtful article with that opinion is not possible. that's like complaining that science journalism won't publish the well informed and thoughtful articles on the moon being made of cheese.

on the other hand there's plenty of mags that'll publish that sort of stuff anyway, or there were five years ago.

(mojo?)

contrarian articles are definitely a thing, but how sustainable long-term is it to publish pieces that put you repeatedly, so to speak, in contempt of the court? especially if you're just some replaceable kid.

as far as the new albums -- there's data. lots of major outlets passed on the AP album. Lumineers probably got more since they are much newer. and yes, there will probably be at least a few critics turning in the "this is OK. just OK." angle when it's new album time. it's just the next stage in the backlash cycle. think "Born to Die."

(xpost -- there are actually plenty of "no, seriously, Beyonce is terrible" pieces published per event cycle. the problem is most of them turn out to be racist.)

I was actually just recently thinking about how the internet is "the greatest engine for contrairianism the world has ever seen" or some such -- endless fast-paced cycles of finding the fresh angle on the fresh angle on the fresh angle, "X is not really about Y, it's about Z" "X really IS about Y, but not for the reasons you think" etc.

"Why the band everyone likes is shit"
"Why the band everyone hates is good"
"Why the band everyone likes to point out that everyone else likes but is actually shit is actually good for different reasons"
"I like the band that everyone likes UNIRONICALLY because I am a POPULIST, but still in a more intelligent way than everyone else"

when I was at Stylus we specialized in these "On Second Thought" "contrarian" pieces. I don't know if they helped or hindered hit counts. It produced some fine writing. I don't know if a market exists for them now though.

The thing with contrarian articles is that I think they have to be view points that are sincerely held in the face of received wisdom. You can usually tell when they aren't. I think we did one cynical one and I wish we hadn't. The one boosting Phil Collins was great though.

The one I really want someone to write for me is the pro-Bob Marley one but he seems to be the ultimate no-no for British music journalists. Presumably because there are too many guilty memories of first year bong sessions to Exodus or whatever while juggling or weaving friendship bracelets or whatever.

is it contrarian to boost Collins?

katherine, you sound cool.

I really don't like contrarian pieces. They break a fundamental rule for me -- they are disingenuous for the most part. I don't think music is a sacred cow, but I'd much rather someone approach a music piece intelligently and coherently than driven by passionate, disjointed drivel. Even the genuine ones don't offer that much insight, but I can at least respect it for what it is, since they usually do away with all the rhetoric. And these I don't consider contrarian; they're just pieces which happen to go against popular thought because there is some substance to their arguments. And by genuine, I don't mean they have to be sincerely held, but more like unobscure and not deliberately going against an idea for the sake of it (forced/contrived/etc.). Those contrarian pieces that are disingenuous tend to end up in straw-man arguments or ad hominem attacks against the writer that reel in so many click-throughs/visits for online publications. The average Joe loves a good fight or nonsensical name-calling and 'discussion'.

This also reminds me of what bands people perceive as 'mainstream'. It's always interesting to me how in different countries, certain bands are played on the radio a lot, yet in somewhere like the US, they are considered non-mainstream. I can't speak for everyone obviously, but in the places I've lived in the US and Canada, there is this desire to listen to music that is not on the radio, and people usually equate that to non-mainstream. It creates a culture based on falsehood, in my humble opinion.

Oh, and don't get me started on this 'culture of irony'....argh.

"the thing with contrarian articles is that I think they have to be view points that are sincerely held in the face of received wisdom."

essentially, yes: the difference between "huh, I guess I'm the contrarian" and "I'm gonna make myself the contrarian." (which is another thing: the worst contrarian pieces are the ones secretly about the writer and how cool/enlightened he is for being so contrarian, damning the sheeple, so forth.)

I mean it seriously, so save your abuse.
I can't understand why someone who considers him/herself a talented writer would want to go into music criticism.
1. From a practical perspective, there's no money in it.
2. Popular music is probably the most subjective and unintellectual of all artforms, and is therefore immune to any kind of rigorous discourse. A song can be great/elegiac/sad/etc. purely on the basis that you heard it first when you were 15 years old. How do you argue with that?
3. What useful things are there to say about music that can't be said in a few lines in a music forum?
4. Most of the music I love, I have no real desire to read about. I have a desire to read about the lives of the people who created it perhaps, or the circumstances in which it was made. But no desire to read musical criticism.

-- bemused (bemuse...), February 5th, 2004. (later)

Answers
Writing about music is fun! And some people do have the desire to read music criticism. so, there ya go.
-- scott seward (skotro...), February 5th, 2004. (later)

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Judging by your lax grammar and syntax, you should be the last person to complain about artforms (sic) being "unintellectual" (sic). Perhaps you were turned down for a job and are therefore using this thread to vent your envy at people more talented than you could ever hope to be, or people whose lives are so much better, qualitatively and quantitatively, than yours will ever be.
Now fuck off.

-- Marcello Carlin (marcellocarli...), February 5th, 2004. (later)

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well, there's that too.
-- scott seward (skotro...), February 5th, 2004. (later)

I really don't like contrarian pieces. They break a fundamental rule for me -- they are disingenuous for the most part. I don't think music is a sacred cow, but I'd much rather someone approach a music piece intelligently and coherently than driven by passionate, disjointed drivel

Good writing justifies itself. Your second sentence contradicts the first.

otm

I’ve got some good advice, but, like Albert Brooks says in Lost in America, please, keep this quiet--you don’t want any other would-be rock critics stealing it.

Get yourself a non-writing job that pays pretty well, so you’ll be fine even if you never earn a cent from writing. You don’t want to have to jump through hoops for anyone, and when a certain kind of editor knows you need the money, you’ll have to.

Don’t try to convince anyone of anything. Propose your idea, and if they don’t want it, move on and never try a second time. Their loss, not yours--you don’t need the money, so no big deal.

This approach does have drawbacks. Chief among them is that you’ll get old and die and not get published. If you’re okay with that, it’s a very good system.

one of my personal guidelines is to try not to assume the reader agrees with me, which i feel like a lot of music writing does -- obviously you can start with a baseline of something not too controversial like "the beatles/insert canonical artist here was good/important" but often the first paragraph stakes everything on some loaded premise that not even half the readership is going to be on board with. if you free yourself of that, it becomes a lot easier to express an opinion that isn't conventional wisdom without having to locate yourself on the 'contrarian' (or troll) spectrum.

i like that advice, some dude

If you're going to use "we," make sure you're at least a baron, and always include a mugshot of yourself wearing ermine or gold.

Kael showed how to effectively assume the agreement of the reader. e.g.

We generally become interested in movies because we enjoy them and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art. The movies we respond to, even in childhood, don’t have the same values as the official culture supported at school and in the middle-class home.

It isn't that she really thinks her readers agree with her, but arrogating that assumption is a nice way of taking a strong tone, saying "You should agree with this."

that's a v good point. i most enjoy and respect criticism that clearly articulates a position, a point of view. i generally dislike the pose of reportorial objectivity, preferring criticism that explicitly situate its responses in a specific and personal framework. speaking in terms of "i" is self-isolating, but kael's arrogating (and perhaps arrogant) "we" risks the alienation of those who disagree. she did it well. most do not.

^ ...criticism that situates its responses...

Yeah, most don't, and it might actually be a bit old-fashioned. Maybe we only tolerate it from her because we have double standards about past writers.

overuse of the 1st person plural is such a bugbear of mine atm

esp when accompanied by waffle about ~the modern condition~ and, like, laptops

Alfred: Re Phil Collins? Yes, in the UK, imo. This is a general observation and wouldn't apply to writers who know their stuff like DL or Unperson or whoever but I've heard writers, even relatively recently say, 'LOL rappers/R&B singers like Phil Collins.' Now this is dumb on numerous levels, mainly it's because - Homer Simpson style - they're imagining Timbaland sitting in a jacuzzi singing along to 'You Can't Hurry Love' wearing an 'I <3 Phil Collins' T-shirt and not someone appreciating gated reverb on drums as a great production technique or the really expensive sound of his synth production or the potential for sampling on his records (I'm sure some people in these genres straight up just love Phil Collins jams... and why not, I love 'Mama' for example but I'm sure that's the exception not the rule). The worst thing is, you can't even call this rockism, it's just straight up ignorance because at least a rockist scientist would know that Brand X were a rated fusion band, that Phil Collins played on some amazing albums by Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel (not to mention early Genesis in general). But when you've got a magazine like NME that literally only covers new indie and has rules preventing writers from referencing bands and artists (apart from the obvious Beatles/Stones axis) from before a decade or so earlier where is the impetus for young writers to do research? This knowledge is of no use to them. My biggest bugbear is journalistic laziness though. Collins is probably not what you'd call a nice man, or at least, I certainly wouldn't want to spend any time with him. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that he divorced his wife by fax. Not only is this legal nonsense, any amount of research will show that this story came from the front page of the UK tabloid The Sun - a completely discredited source that should be discounted or mistrusted by anyone with journalistic training. But again when magazines don't care for their writers - they have a duty to give writers without formal journalistic training the tools to do the job properly - then what do you expect? You end up with people repeating two facts about him: divorced his wife by fax and said he'd leave the UK if labour stayed in power - only one of which is true, and precious little knowledge about the stuff they should know about, the music. So yeah, as much as I rail against boomer canonical magazines, at least, some of them, American ones especially, know their history. I don't feel you can criticise this stuff without at least knowing something about it.

Also, I don't want to state the obvious but if you know a magazine hates Imagine Dragons or Lumineers or whatever and you're cold pitching to them for the first time with positive feature ideas on those bands? This is a really bad strategy as it suggests you don't read the publication. Why not save that for your third or fourth pitch after you've started to get work at the title.

I read all pitches that are sent to me - literally all of them and there are tons of them - and sometimes a contrarian pitch out of nowhere really catches my imagination but most of the time they're not suggesting anything that interesting and in some cases they're noticeably passive aggressive in their hurt tone about my cruel treatment of, say, Foxygen or whatever.

You've got to remember that taking on a new writer is an investment of time for any editor. The person is completely untried, the cutting they've sent in could have been almost completely rewritten by that magazine's editor. There's no real guarantee of quality from someone you don't know so it's a doubly hard sell when they're asking to write about a band that you really don't like.

As several people - who know what they're talking about - have said upthread: come up with good ideas. They're like rocking horse shit. If you hit an editor with good ideas (in my experience) you will be laughing. 'Why Imagine Dragons Are A Great Band' is not a good idea... 'What The Different Styles Cop Show Themes Are Recorded In Tell You About The Programme' or 'A Short History Of Every Song That Has Been Played By An Astronaut In Space' or 'Varg Vikernes' Secret Past As An EPMD Fan' or 'Why Imagine Dragons Were Predicted By Nostradamus' are good feature ideas.

One thing that very, very rarely works … telling an editor they have to use you because they are old and dead and out of touch and you are young and vibrant and the future. A surprising number of people try it. You have to have written a very funny covering note, and hope the editor is in an extraordinarily good mood, on a day when every single thing has gone right, to have any joy with that.

I'd like to think no one older than about 17 would ever do that. Though I doubt that's the case.

if you know a magazine hates Imagine Dragons or Lumineers or whatever and you're cold pitching to them for the first time with positive feature ideas on those bands?

Magazines/websites should not hold party lines on any band (ex. the obv Skrewdriver etc), they should be open to good writing on any band even if they are normally critical whipping boys

i don't think that's how professional publications work

XP: Yeah, and I should get paid for every piece of writing that I do at a rate per word that's gone up noticeably in the last 25 years but I don't. I just wrote a piece on a feminist Egyptian film maker documenting an underground revolutionary dance scene in Cairo. It's gone up on my site because no one will pay for it. In an extremely abstract way I think this is wrong and that NME or Q should give me a decent amount of money and cover my travel expenses, instead of me having to save up for ages so I can pay to do my own job but I'm not upset about it - it's just the way things are. So you can either deal with what things are like and get work or sit round complaining about what they should be like and not get work. There are enough threads on ILM about how rubbish the music press is, I was under the impression this thread was different and about practical advice.

And, as I said, quite clearly, I am open to good writing on any band but I'd sooner give that kind of work to a trusted scribe. If you are cold calling as a first time writer how do I know you're going to provide good copy? More often than not people sending these kinds of pitches in are indulging in immature passive aggressiveness: "I want to work at your magazine - here's why I don't like it."

I'd recommend telling them to move to London, meet a few friends who're cooler than yourselves, then bam, you'll end up writing for Vice like me.

I've never been paid for anything, which sucks a bit after doing music writing nearly week in week out for four years now.

*yourself

i think it's very important for people to ask themselves why they want to do something, regularly

NV otm.

I don't pitch pieces or hustle but I imagine it's pretty stressful. Writing pieces can be stressful. Sending pieces for review is stressful. Seeing them published and having dozens of people telling you that you are a idiot for liking x, y or z is stressful. It's also fun and rewarding but doing it every day and knowing my financial security depended on it would be too much.

I accidentally wound up writing for money after being approached by a publication whose message board I posted on. It's possibly an underrated way of getting your ideas, tone and style seen by editors.

xpost A former ILX regular once used that very tactic with me, Nick.

I can probably guess who.

https://twitter.com/Spinner/status/327858136218206208
https://twitter.com/Spinner/status/327858952425574401

what was it?

(tweets gone now)

aol shut down spinner effective today

And AOL Music in general, it seems.

Say I have what I think is a good idea for a profile piece. However, I'm an untrusted scribe. If I pitch the idea to an editor and they like it, wouldn't they just say "yes, good idea" and then commission one of their trusted scribes to write it? Alternatively, should I go ahead and write the piece and then submit it in full? If I do that, though, I wouldn't be able to say to the subject of the profile that I was writing about them for such-and-such a magazine.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/214774/spin-lets-its-editor-in-chief-go

Ouch.

http://crumbler.tumblr.com/post/87321590093/the-oral-history-of-music-tumblr-2008-2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLKnCeeAW48&feature=kp

is "music tumblr" something different from regular tumblr? i've never actually tumbld. i've always hated how tumblr looked.