OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

also the Q&A format really leaves no room to paper over a bad interview, which can happen to anyone and isn't necessarily a marker of the journalist's skill

and more than anything else interviews are something you HAVE to learn on the job, there's no formula for a good one, a lot of it is intuition, and the more experience you get at them the better you become

I'm just glad I didn't do many interviews for the university paper because I shudder to think how many musicians I'd have alienated with dumb questions back then.

Perhaps Oldham is difficult because he's such a classic student journalist interview

Hey guys I work really closely with our intern program. In fact I have 2 multi page feature articles written by college interns that will be in the next issue. They will be going out in 8 million issues of the magazine. We've had tons of kids that were just as young write great stuff. Thing is you have to challenge them, send stuff back, make them do it over, work at it. Writing for a living is almost impossible if you're good so no ones doing this kid any favors by trekking her it's ok not to prep for an interview or to publish shit that is this bad. So I'm not being some meanie to student, I work with great interns every day and some have gotten jobs after because we didn't treat them with kid gloves. We respected them enough to give them real criticism. They aren't babies.

They don't get paid. If you're not going to at least help them learn what it really takes to do the job well, you are just wasting their time.

m@tt OTM

Writing for a living is almost impossible if you're good

Strange state of affairs w all these gr8 opportunities for unpaid interns.

We do ours through schools, it's something they apply for. It's a 3 month temporary term to ensure that 1) they come in understanding that this is not a promise of eventual employment 2) we don't keep stringing them along as indentured servants.

I myself started as an unpaid intern.
The lack of jobs in writing is due to the large scale meltdown of the publishing industry.

That cool w you bananaman?

& lex is right, being a good interviewer take time, but teaching kids that it's ok to be lazy and not even bother to do any homework isn't helping.

teaching kids that it's ok to be lazy and not even bother to do any homework isn't helping.

who here is doing that? i think the sentiment is that this thread shouldn't be for piling on student journalists, not that someone shouldn't tell the interviewer that they flunked this one out, and how.

This wasn't published on a student site, that's a professional national public radio site.

It's not like I'm trolling student newspapers, it's considered a major outlet of music coverage in my city

Shit. I misunderstood... okay, I take it all back...

Ah ok I see why ppl reacted that way... For the Brits this is sort of like a BBC site equivalent

Yes, that's the website for Minnesota Public Radio

In that case it can gtfo

http://blog.thecurrent.org/2013/12/15-minutes-in-fargo-with-martin-zellar/

looks like she asks the same basic questions to everyone

A lot to learn here:

"Well, after listening to some of your 'stuff' (sure), I’d agree (not committing) with the people (they exist) who said (ready to blame them if this doesn't go well) it’s a type of (open to interpretation of course) alternative, indie style (two descriptors make it feel descriptive!)."

Yeah, I mean these are definitely a failure of whoever's running the intern program there. "Being published" is not the same as "learning."

imo there are few learning experiences more important than getting shot down hard. I know some people find the experience too upsetting, but, you know, grow some skin already.

sure, but i mean the fact that these pieces have been published is a sign that nobody is being 'shot down hard' in the long or the short run.

Isn't NPR's business model centered around publicly humiliating interns anyway?

xp editors have ceded this responsibility to commenters now

NPR != MPR, though?

re The BPB, do you think there might be some chance that no one with experience was willing to do the interview, precisely because of his terrible reputation, at which point it was thrust on to the intern with five minutes' notice? Because it certainly doesnt read like said intern had lobbied hard to interview a hero, does it?

sure, but i mean the fact that these pieces have been published is a sign that nobody is being 'shot down hard' in the long or the short run.

― maura, Thursday, 23 January 2014 17:05 (3 hours ago) Permalink

right, that was exactly what I meant by my post

Everyone undertaking a conversation with such a fantastic and unusual person should do a good bit of research before getting on the phone. You should be able to find out whether or not he's been to Minneapolis pretty easily with some internet research. Then you can skip straight to questions about the movies he's been in, his facial hair, the evocative lyrics he's written, where he lives, and the stuff not yet on the web. What made you want to talk to him in the first place? Don't underestimate how helpful publicists can be to brainstorm good discussion topics, and they'll definitely know ways to get their clients talking.

So tell me more about your facial hair and evocative lyrics. Also where do you live?

Looking at it, it looks like it could have been an email or gchat interview. Those come out horribly sometimes, especially if the interviewee responds with single line answers and the interviewer isn't prepared to interrogate further.

The interviewer looked like she had no idea who he is as evidence by the line I broke down slightly upthread. I don't think any blame is on BPB.

wouldn't you be a little insulted that MPR was wasting your time with this interviewer who clearly didn't care? what's he supposed to do?

to this writer's credit she wrote a better story on transgender issues than 99% of the professional critics reviewing the against me! album.

(which is a false equivalency, yes, but A) if we're talking about "doing a good bit of research"... and B) everyone in college writes inexperienced stuff, because they're inexperienced, and the grind of the internship cycle / online publishing just means people can read it.)

Even if she were interviewing a complete nobody that would be a sorry, half-assed excuse for an interview.

Feel like at this point, mocking the AV Club's music writing is like mocking a student paper's music writing (speaking of being topical to this thread!), both are shooting fish in a barrel but AVC shouldn't have gotten to this point, they shouldn't be this bad.

I bring this up because of their "Same Love" piece, written for the Grammys. I'm sure what was written in it (rap doesn't say anything about civil rights, but Macklemore is here to save everyone) was written by a lot of straight music writers but ugh.

At least in their music, hip-hop’s biggest artists weren’t too concerned about civil rights in 2013: Jay Z may have donated the “charity” of his “presence” at the occasional Trayvon Martin rally, but his album was more focused on reiterating that he is still very rich, while Kanye West eloquently quoted Martin Luther King’s “thank God almighty… free at last!” to refer to unrestrained breasts. Meanwhile, on the most pressing civil rights issue of the times—gay marriage, which he professes to support—the exhaustingly clueless Eminem suggested on “Rap God” that he might “break a motherfuckin’ table over the back of a couple faggots and crack it in half.” In the face of such squandered opportunities to use rap to say something meaningful about anyone’s rights, it was utterly refreshing to see the somewhat geeky, un-posturing Macklemore (along with utterly nondescript sidekick Ryan Lewis) step up to the plate and deliver thoughtful commentary on the changing tide on gay rights in America.

…

Lyrically, Macklemore’s ruminations aren’t always profound (Wow, people can sure be nasty in anonymous YouTube posts!), but “Same Love” feels empowering simply because he’s so earnestly addressing the topic at all.

http://www.avclub.com/article/macklemore-amp-lewis-same-love-is-more-than-a-pro--200929

http://blog.thecurrent.org/2013/12/15-minutes-in-fargo-with-martin-zellar/

looks like she asks the same basic questions to everyone

I love Oldham, but reading this one basically made me think, "See Will? That's how you answer an underprepared kid's questions in a kind, reasonable, professional manner."

i was thinking about starting a thread of screenshots of avclub's terrible new article titling but i'm uncertain of its mass appeal

looking at just the titling is hate-reading's version of "just the tip"

http://s18.postimg.org/jhuhbt3vd/royals.png

oh my god, Todd VanDerWerff is terrible enough when he stays in his own lane

ikr!

and yeah i never read the articles because i'm trying to not drive myself to violence and the titles are literally enough for an entire lifetime of hate

i should post quotes from Todd's ode to Royals' finger snaps to rile you up

haha the first line: "It’s the finger snaps, I think." no that's it for me.

the other hilarious thing is that with their disgusting redesign they also decided to ramp up their # of regular features 5000% so every time i visit there are like eight new supposed regular features i'm seeing for the first time and will possibly never see again and every one has some long introductory paragraph explaining the regular feature

it seems tragically difficult to maintain it all and now they're probably realizing they could just scrap the regular features thing and be like every other website on the internet

I think they have a regular column dedicated to food scenes in movies, which is a nadir of something

seriously i have never seen these before this week:

Sketchhistory
Internet Film School
Keyboard Geniuses
What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Stop the Presses!
Firsties

oh god, "Firsties"

insert ouroboros.jpg here

Internet Film School isn't too bad, it's actually written by Scott Eric Kaufman of the Lawyers, Guns and Money blog; he also teaches visual rhetoric at UC Irvine. But yeah, overall AVC has gone right over a cliff.

At this point I only read the Newswire and select TV stuff. The music coverage has always been suspect at best, though.

no, not always.