Rolling Music Writers' Thread

"It is 3:17pm on a rainy Monday afternoon. The NME sits in a Harringey spit'n'sawdust boozer sipping a pint of Timothy Landlord..."

if you're gonna "set the scene" like this the best way to do it is to say "[the artist] sits by the swimming pool sipping a mojito" - the i/v is about them after all

i mean all obv dependent on what kind of feature, which publication &c &c &c

"[the artist] sits by the swimming pool sipping a mojito"

The Lex interviews Raygun.

I tend to use first person if my experience is an important part of the total picture. If I'm writing a piece that's based on a phone interview and three listens to the album, I don't do it; but if the publicist has flown me to Ireland to spend three or four days with the band, fuck yes I'm gonna inject myself into the story because I am then part of the story. I never use first person in CD reviews.

there's no i love writing board per se but consider this thread. a not-just-music writers' discussion might be fun.

New: "I Love Writing"

the first person thing is tricky. back when I wrote for the village voice many many years ago it was practically required in music reviews. as time went on many publications took the opposite tack, pretty much banning the "I" these days in the NY Times reporters are required to don this pseudo anonymity which I think reads terribly. instead of "so and so told me that..." it's "so and so told a reporter" waht? was it YOU or just some other random journalist who happened to be in the room?

ha, you *are* the room!

Maybe 5% of music writing in the first person isn't hacky. I see it as a huge red flag. Unless it's absolutely necessary to the story, don't do it, imo.

How is it "hacky"?

Maybe 5% of music writing in the first person isn't hacky.

On second thought:

Maybe 5% of music writing in the first person isn't hacky.

o here we are slagging off writers again, that didn't take long at all

there are different kinds of first-person usage. the kind i can't stand is the showy first-person narrative, where the writer becomes some kind of presence. but there's also just the casual "i" where it can be sensible and unobstrusive. "i love the first two tracks" doesn't seem more objectionable to me than "the first two tracks are great" -- they're both obviously subjective statements of personal preference. but i know some editors who will reflexively remove every "I" from copy, so it's good to know the standards you're writing to.

Just slagging off the hacks. If you'd like to defend bad writing, have at it.

My favourite one, (iirc)

"Kirk Brandon formed Theatre of Hate around the same time as I joined the NME. At the time, we were both unknown..."

(Can't remember the writer)

(many xposts)

I mean, I get into this argument all the time. Generally, I don't CARE about the writer. If the writer was an interesting person, I'd be reading an article on THEM, not the artist I care about. Like wow, the Jesus And Mary Chain helped you get through high school. You and America, buddy.

Generally if a piece of music writing has the word "I" in the first sentence, I usually stop reading, real talk. Save it for your dream journal.

The sad shit is now most mag writing is indistinguishable from internet writing because rates are so low.

Not that there isn't exceptions blah blah blah strawman lol flame etc

What about "I don't know about you but I'm fucking sick of this indie-lite electrodribble that permeates every airwave within earshot"?

Whiney, you do realize you just used the first person yourself five times in two sentences yourself, right?

I'm posting on a message board, not writing for a paycheck!

the mark richardson thing about lovely music in stylus is pretty much verbatim all the first person objections ur spoutin btw but imo its top5 great but I suppose its kinda like how it used to be pretty awesome when Buffy had to make some inspirational speech but in the last series she did it every episode and it was really tiresome?

xp (And I just used "yourself" twice in one sentence, duh.)

Anyway, first person is a tool, like any other tool. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. (As an editor at the Voice, I was frequently known to edit sentences from pitch emails back into submitted reviews in part because the emails did use the first person, and sounded less stiff and stilted and more conversational in the process. I.e., sometimes it helps make for better writing just because that's how people talk. So I've never bought the idea that "writing for a paycheck" required "detaching yourself from the subject.")

Again, i'm not saying that it's always bad, but there's not a lot of writers who can pull it off without sounding like My First Fanzine

"The first time I saw Spoon..."

So why would print them (unless it was a really good fanzine?)

Still, especially when space on the page is at a premium -- which it was even when wordcounts could get away with being ten times higher than they are now -- wasted words are wasted words, "I" included. (Though at least "I" is a fairly short word.)

the mark richardson thing about lovely music in stylus

Think you mean Mike Powell, but Mark Richardson is a good example of someone who uses the first person to excellent effect in his Resonant Frequency column.

oops yeah

If you can write entertainingly, I forgive your first person narrative.

xhuxk on point

xp "So why would print them?", I meant.

Anyway, bottom line is, no fucking way does the the detached pseudo-objective tone used in most glossies and daily newspapers make for better music writing than what I was printing week in and week out in the Voice for ten years (though sure, a few pieces I published may have sounded "Internetty" or whatever. Point was to have lots of different voices, so it'd be a miracle if anybody approved of all of them. I didn't want to ban Internetty writing -- which can be good too, sometimes -- either.)

On the other hand, I like the creativity with which guys like Sanneh at the Times have managed to get around the limitations against first person and swear words. A smart writer can work within those perimeters, too, and make it entertaining anyway.

its funny you mention sanneh--his profile of michael savage in the nyer from a couple weeks ago was very careful about not using "i" (which i think is generally a no-go in the nyer, except in the personal essays they publish every once in a while) but still managed to tell a set of interesting stories about sanneh's own encounters w/ savage that sort of hinged on sannehs own specific experiences trying to set up an interview... in the end, though, i thought it would have been a better piece if they had let him use an authorial I

wow that got convoluted

I thought about that, too.

Over the years, Savage has noticed that his disdain for the mainstream media is widely reciprocated ... So when he received an e-mail from a journalist asking for an interview, he was deeply suspicious. He read the e-mail on the air — he kept the writer anonymous, and didn’t mention that the request came from The New Yorker — and then asked his listeners, “Should I do the interview or not?”…

About a week later, Savage revisited the topic — “my continuing correspondence with a big-shot magazine writer.” He quoted the latest exchanges, along with his tart response, in which he asked, “Why must all of you in the extreme media paint everyone you disagree with as demonic? Why is the homosexual agenda so important to the midstream media?”

...

When he invited the journalist into one of his undisclosed locations, he proved to be a first-rate host, chatty and solicitous. A steady supply of beer refills lubricated the conversation (one of his earliest books was “The Taster’s Guide to Beer,” which was published in 1977), and as the temperature dropped and the sky above Berkeley started to turn orange, he seemed to be working hard to stay suspicious, despite himself. On his next show the next day, a caller asked how the interview had gone, and Savage described his interlocutor: "If I told you he looked like Obama, I wouldn't be far from the truth." Coming from him, this sounded like a deeply twisted compliment.

Sanneh has to resort to speaking of himself in the third person ("the journalist," "his interlocutor") but otherwise does a decent job with passive-ish phrases like "a steady supply of beer refills lubricated the conversation."

no i think you're OTM, that NYer piece was convoluted. it read to me like sanneh had a personal 1 on 1 reaction to savage that was quite different than what he expected and the resulting article would have been more effective and immediate using the "I" but the NYer has always employed a certain lofty distance from its subjects, even in the 70s it wasn't really into the personal/new journalism thing. well apart from pauline kael I guess.

but journalists do have to meet readers half-way. my problem with a lot of the vintage village voice stuff is that it's so personal to the point of being impenetrable or off-putting.

the best first person stuff illustrates how the subject of an interview interacts with other people, rather than "setting the scene"

i'm guessing whiney's not big on fiction as a rule.

I'm not big on fiction as a rule either, and one of the principles that was drilled into me when I started writing was that first-person is something you have to earn--expecting the reader who's never heard of you before to go along with I-I-I-me-me-me instead of saying "So what?" and moving to the next item is not generally a good idea--but I love first person writing even if (despite whatever reputation I may have for it due to the 33 1/3 book) I don't use it all that often professionally.

matos if you don't mind me asking: you're not big on fiction as a journalistic device or (gasp) you don't like reading novels?

I don't write fiction or about music, but first-person is the default in my area of writing (analytic philosophy). Sometimes we resort to the royal "we" if we're feeling nervous about first-person. But it was made clear to me that third-person is to be avoided, as is passive voice.

hang on, you're not big on reading fiction...at all?!

xp!

xp I don't buy the "have to earn" thing. I'm not even sure what it means. If I listen to a song sung in the first person, I might be able to relate to, and be moved by, the song even if I'm unaware of the singer's specific biography. Not sure why reviews are necessarily different. You don't have to be a famous writer to have a life that creates a context.

i thought he meant less that you have to earn it in the sense of being already famous or noteworthy, but in the sense that you have to earn it through your writing--i.e. you have to justify use of the first person in the piece itself, not necc explicitly, but at least in making your "I" of interest to the reader

When it's well done - and it does have to be superbly well done, and yes, generally (but not always) "earnt" - first-person music writing is my favourite of all music writing. (And when it's pointlessly done, the reverse holds true.)

For my own part, I avoid it at least 95% of the time - but then I come from a personal-blogging background, and taking "myself" out of the equation was a deliberate, sought objective.

My first piece at the Voice (when no reader could've had any idea who I was) and a couple soon after were in the first person, fwiw. I seriously doubt they would have improved if the "I"'s had been edited out. (Whether they stunk regardless is another question, but they wouldn't have stunk less.)

Editorial "we" -- first person plural -- bugs the hell out of me no matter what, though. I never buy it, and I've fought editors to keep it out of my own writing (which usually they've been open to).

And btw, I've also edited at Billboard, where first person is almost never allowed. So it's not like I don't know that drill. I just don't like it much.

Of course, at Billboard, the writing tended to be more news and less review-oriented. (So first person would have probably have made no sense anyway.)

And I come from a journalism (and not fancy dancy "new journalism") background too. I came up covering zoning boards and sewage commissions, where objective detachment is strived for. Not saying I don't understand it there, obviously. When I'm defending first person, I'm specifically referring to criticism (though, when it comes to say artist features, I prefer criticism to be part of the deal.)

i thought he meant less that you have to earn it in the sense of being already famous or noteworthy, but in the sense that you have to...justify use of the first person in the piece itself, not necc explicitly, but at least in making your "I" of interest to the reader

Well, obviously I buy this, if that's what Michaelangelo means. But in that sense, you need to earn whatever you put in your writing -- so first person's no different from anything else.

I mean I don't read novels almost at all. Gasp!

xpost: If there's one thing I hate even more than editorial "we", it's the sort of "we" that includes both the writer and his/her presumed readership. ("When did we all fall in love with Kings Of Leon?")

haha please tell me you made that KoL quote up Mike

Really: What do you mean we, kemosabe? (Those ILM threads titled "What Do We Think Of [fill in the blank]?" are almost as bad.)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/30/pitchfork-q-music-reviews-critics-songs

That’s J. Doran from Quietus re Pitchfork and Spotify

NPR radio station , WAMU , at American University had taken over the DCist news website years back. Suddenly they just decided to kill it , and are blocking access to the site . Years of articles including my freelancer 2020 interview piece with Ethiopian musicians Hailu Mergia and Selam Woldemariam, who are both based in the DC area. 15 people got laid off.

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/23/wamu-dcist-layoffs-npr-washington

Sheesh, how miserable.

Someone checked and my article I referenced above is still luckily enough available if one places the url in the wayback machine of the web archive, but one has to know that. Management shut down Dcist because they said they wanted to focus on the radio station (but many of the dcist reporters also did audio stories, and the station gets lots of money from listeners and from the University , so it's not a funding issue).

Is it OK to plagiarize your own words from a story you wrote 10 years ago for a publication that no longer exists (and whose website is long gone)?

Hmmmm, do you feel comfortable doing that even if few will know?

Firmly of the belief that reusing your own words is not plagiarism. I don't know the context you're using it in, but you could always say, "as I once wrote ..." or something. But morally/ethically, I personally don't have a problem with it.

I think it's fine. I literally don't think the words I wrote exist anywhere anymore, unless they're in the artist's mom's scrapbook or something.

Story published in 2017. Publication ceased to exist in March of 2020, both in print and online. When I Google phrases from it, nothing comes up. The artist even has an extensive "press" section on his website and it ain't there.

Doesn't really matter anyway - as is often the case, I think I have an idea and then when I start writing it goes a different direction.

But! I have enough defunct outlets in my past that this question comes to my mind a few times a year.

We should ask Bill Ackman what he thinks.

Oh, and I've done the "As I wrote back in..." thing before. Rarely, but a few times - a couple times in the same pub as the earlier reference, and a couple times linking to something I wrote for someone else!

If the 2017 publication still existed, I don't think I'd be comfortable with lifting directly, even my own words. That might be too cautious, I don't know.

Googlability does seem like a pragmatic metric.

The clincher: Some right-wing group bought this alt-weekly a few months before COVID and was in the process of turning it into "the conservative alternative" to the bigger alt-weekly in town before just shutting the whole thing down in March of 2020 with no warning whatsoever. Fuck 'em!

(Although they were *not* the owners when I wrote the piece in question.)

I recycle all the time. Magazine or web articles get expanded into book chapters, etc. No such thing as self-plagiarism IMO.

I recycle too.

I haven't had a new thought in 17 years, so I quote myself all the time, here, there, and everywhere--as tipsy said, usually prefaced by "as I once wrote ..."

worse is when you write down yr insightful and amazing present-day comment on some phenom from a decade or four ago and then find you wrote abt it at the time except you forgot, and when you check what you said last time it's identical

all creative people recycle.

I would be very pleased to have a current-day thought and then find that past-me had the same thought, as opposed to (as is typically the case) something infinitely more stupid, embarrassing, annoying, and long

oh man i would gladly swap one of my old long embarrassing thoughts for one of yours any day of the week. i find that not looking back at all is the key.

I know at least one really great ilxor writes for the site and I'm a dedicated daily reader so I don't want to bash them for a touch decision but, uh, seeing that Aquarium Drunkard is transitioning to $10/month for future access makes me really fucking depressed about the future of the internet.

Like, maybe that's not much, but when I'm suddenly being asked to pay $10 a month for every site I read? That's unsustainable.

"tough decision"

Don't get me wrong, paying writers to provide good, thoughtful criticism is totally valid!

Maybe it's just fatigue of being constantly bombarded by substacks and other outlets asking for money as well. I get it, the media landscape is fucking bleak. I don't know the answer. Just looking through my inbox right now, to buy in to all the great writers and thinkers I'd want to follow in an ideal world it'd cost me over $100 a month. That's not a sustainable solution, for anyone.

I grant that AD posts a lot of stuff, and it's mostly really good, but $10 a month is a lot.

I had a dream last night that a conglomerate that owned a lot of different media brands was going to be hiring writers for their publications and, I think, Chuck Eddy gave them my name. The thing was, you didn't know what publication you would be interviewing to write for. I got a call and I was interviewed with two other people. They were both much younger than me. One of them mentioned that their favorite live concert performance that they had ever seen was by Kelly Rowland. I felt totally unprepared. I was hoping i didn't have to answer any questions. Finally, they did ask what people thought about a release being "overhyped". I said that manufactured enthusiasm for a release was as old as time and a PR firm's number one priority but that the internet had created a monster of hype for EVERY release and that there weren't enough eyeballs or enough money to make that anything more than noise that people learned to ignore in favor of algorithms that did all the consumer's thinking for them and thus took chance or even possible disappointment out of the listening equation. The interviewer looked at me like I had three heads. i shut up after that.
The name of the magazine I was possibly being hired to work for: Formica Magazine

sounds like a dream job!

Jon, I think about that a LOT.

I subscribe to the substacks et al of a few friends but can’t really afford to do more than that. I feel bad about it.

It’s the decentralization of media, analogous to what’s happening to TV.

“What if you didn’t pay $120 per month for cable anymore? What if I told you that instead you could pay $200 per month for a variety of online services?”

Not the fault of the writers, or the creators, of course, but you know what I mean.

(I haven’t started a pay site of my own - or even a non pay site - because I’m not quite self-directed enough, and kinda need assignments and deadlines from others. I need the pressure! I salute those of you who can make self-schedules happen.)

Like I said, I get it - I want sites like AD to stick around in this bleak as fuck online media landscape and I 100% believe in supporting the writers. $10 just seems like a huge ask.

It just makes the future feel so bleak. Almost daily I like to check out AD, The Quietus, Stereogum for the metal and jazz columns, Pitchfork (for the occasional worthwhile review or feature), The Obelisk for stoner rock news, to name just a few off the top of my head (and set aside your personal opinions of each for now, or feel free to enter your own favorite daily bookmark). Are we looking at a near future where doing so costs me $45-50 a month? This isn't even considering individual substacks, Patreons or mailing lists that have a cost. I know everyone is scrambling to find a way in the current landscape, but this feels massively unsustainable.

I keep seeing enthused comments about the paywall saying things like, "what's the big deal? it's less than two cups of coffee a month!". Which, yes, correct. And that's fine if it's literally the only music site you care to pay attention to, but I don't know any music obsessive that limits themselves to only 1 or 2 sites.

Yeah it's a tricky thing. I subscribe to a few Substacks but right, I can't subscribe to every single person I like.

I mean, I live on the subscription model, literally — all of my income for the past 5 1/2 years has come from subscribers. So I am an evangelist for it, but I also recognize that what we're really talking about broadly is trying to backfill the loss of advertising revenue. And that was ~ 80% of the revenue that most print media used to rely on. So, are there enough individual subscribers out there who can afford to support the number of writers and reporters of any kind who used to be supported by advertising-driven print vehicles? Absolutely not.

I have a regular job (three of them, really), so writing Burning Ambulance is entirely a labor of love. Yes, I am willing to accept payment, but free and paid subscribers get the exact same thing, at the exact same dosage. Honestly, if everyone was reading the newsletter for free, but 10% of them bought a CD on the label, I'd be overjoyed.

I think I'm one of the last of the old school '00s bloggers, and I'm not sure I have it in me to charge for the service.

(I don't intend this comment as passive-aggressive anything against anyone here who does)

Well to be clear, the work that I charge for is NOT stuff I would do for free or out of love. It's going to County Commission and school board meetings and writing about budgets and zoning and state legislation and all that kind of thing. My free writing is all the movie/music stuff I post on Facebook (or ilx!) when I'm procrastinating from the day job.

tipsy, your stuff in particular enrages me! You should still be a staff writer covering a government beat. But it also works out: you've got editorial independence.

Yeah, it's a trade-off for sure. We're very fortunate there are people who will pay us to do what we do, but of course we lack a lot of resources. And, like, can't ever take a day off. Sad lol.

But to steer back to the music writing, and arts writing in general, which has gotten so hard to sustain — has anyone explored putting together some sort of cooperatives? Joining forces via mutual subscriptions, that kind of thing? Subscribe to any 3 of 5 for $10 a month, I don't know, I'm sure there are a lot of possible revenue-sharing models.

I suppose eventually you would just end up reinventing music magazines.

It's been fifteen years since someone asked about this, and that poster was interested in hearing from people who've been paid for their music writing, while I'd like to hear from anyone who has noticed themselves improve:

How do (or did) you get better at music writing? -- whether it's in terms of insight, voice/register, structuring, anything. I figure that, as with anything else, you've gotta write a lot, but that isn't quite enough, is it?

Curiosity and prolificity.

read a lot. of everything.

I barely do any music writing anymore, but when I was more regularly, I found that some of the writing I felt best about came via assignments — albums or shows that I might not have even listened to or gone to except someone asked me to. I think in those situations I was engaged critically in a way I maybe wasn't as much on things I was more enthusiastic about. A little bit of detachment from the material? I don't know.

But anyway I suppose even absent an assignment that could be replicated just by choosing to write about something that you normally wouldn't think to.

you can even do it here for practice! hey, at least 10 people will read it. that's pretty good for music writing these days.

Listen to an album you've never heard by an artist you never listen to and then tell us about it!

I will say, as someone who is currently working on a piece for Aqua Drunkard - and who has written many articles to paywalled websites in my lifetime - it is slightly de-motivating to know that this is going to publish and ... I guess the band won't be able to see it without subscribing? I'm sure far fewer people will read it than would've two weeks ago.

I support the effort fully and think everyone should be paid for their work, for sure. I just can't help but feel a little bit like I'm going to find myself directing some pitches elsewhere. Which is a bummer.

Yep. How many $70 paid substacks plus paid websites can people do although yes writers deserve to get paid