Rolling Music Writers' Thread

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.)

Tbh, reading good first-person music writing is what made me want to write about music. (Or even reading bad first-person music writing: some Pitchfork stuff from around the turn of the century, though hard to read now, at least made me realize that criticism need not be all neutral/detached/objective.)

(Which, I should add, was mighty refreshing for someone who just wanted to write about his experiences with music and his reactions to listening to certain songs or albums without the burden of serving as some kind of authority.)

Avoiding first person is a good technique to get beyond the inherent subjectivity of reviewing music- it pushes the writer to find a common ground with the reader, rather than just reporting their personal reaction. I drop it if I start to get grandiose.

lots of reasons here why i generally prefer reading about music on the internet just my personal opinion!

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."

Re this, exhaustively shat upon by Eric Boehlert.

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200908030038

Related:

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200908110005

"Avoiding first person is a good technique to get beyond the inherent subjectivity of reviewing music- it pushes the writer to find a common ground with the reader, rather than just reporting their personal reaction. I drop it if I start to get grandiose."

I think this is one of the root issues but it also points to the fallacy of avoiding first person - the technique assumes that it's the specific use of "I" that makes music writing solipsistic or uncommunicative. It also suggests that that the choice is between solipsism and objectivity (I accept that specific publications may have other reasons for disliking it).

But it's not hard to write a review that avoids using "I" but still reads like the writer has never thought to question their personal reactions, their prejudices, their assumptions.

Learning to adopt a critical perspective w/r/t those things has a lot to do with how you relate to music generally, how you try to convey what the music is actually doing etc. etc.

Kogan is a good example of a writer who puts himself into the story but still makes the music's potential to affect different people differently the star attraction.

The tendency to lean toward the first person is usually an indicator of a writer being green but not always of self-obsession. A lot of these throw away 'I thinks', 'I feels', 'as I was saying to x' etc come from a nervousness about stating an opinion without a crutch or without reflexively reminding people that, it's just, like, their opinion, man. All reviews and value judgements are obviously the opinion of the writer. We can tell because it's prefixed with a byline. It's just that if a writer is all apologetic and constantly reminding people that it's all subjective innit, they won't get ripped to shreds on the internet. Or not as much anyway.

But it's a writer's job to be authoritative. In, er, my opinion it is anyway.

It's more acceptable in features but then the reasoning still has to be solid behind it. I've been stabbed during or around three interviews. Once accidentally by a member of a band while we were larking about, once purposefully by a band member during a play fight that got out of hand and once after getting so drunk in an interview I got thrown out of the hotel by security and got stabbed randomly outside.

The first piece was written third person with only passing mention of boisterous high spirits. The incident was unremarkable. Barely drew blood. The second time was pertinent. The guy was a loon and this helped to illustrate that. Some of the piece was written in the first person. It was impossible to write it neatly otherwise. The third incident was ignored and the piece was written in the third person. A good pub story perhaps but nothing to do with the band or the story.

Once I got to an interview with Matt C from The Bronx to find out that we'd both broken our noses the night before. That was kind of on the cusp. Could have been written either way. Just about interesting enough as a jumping off point to be worth including.

As a rule you shouldn't do it unless it's an on the road/reportage piece or you have a unique involvement in the story that no one else has (or at least your readers don't). That said - and I'm twisting Eric Arthur Blair to my own ends on this - I'd break any rule about writing I have rather than write something barbaric.

(And house style rules. If you can't write a piece around I said/we said/Rolling Stone said and still make it readable, maybe you shouldn't be writing. It's fairly straightforward after all.)

Co-sign everything that guy said about a variety of voices on a magazine.

Re. "authoritative": should music writers attain a certain level of knowledge of music before setting up as arbiters of taste?

Not necessarily because knowing loads about music doesn't necessarily give you good taste in music and beyond that 'good taste' is a bogus concept on its own.

It's up to the individual writer not to make a fool out of themselves/magazine that's hired them. Canonical thinking is the enemy of good music writing but that doesn't mean you shouldn't know about this stuff anyway. I mean, I hate the Beatles and a lot of other big groups from the 60s and won't write about them as a rule but it doesn't mean I don't have a basic grounding in them.

Some writers set up this completely false binary of the job being fusty old rock professors with their "facts" and everything and young, free spirited rebels who don't know about the music but who can "feel" it and "live" it. Somehow suggesting that the more you know about music, the less you can actually appreciate it, which is obviously not true.

good for you for fighting the power

i can't believe people are still arguing this stuff.

^^^ probably listens to the beatles

i'll fight you for that.

with a broken copy of rubber soul.

i dont think u have earned the right to fight me

It's more acceptable in features but then the reasoning still has to be solid behind it. I've been stabbed during or around four interviews. Once accidentally by a member of a band while we were larking about, once purposefully by a band member during a play fight that got out of hand and once after getting so drunk in an interview I got thrown out of the hotel by security and got stabbed randomly outside. And once in the arm with a broken record by the ghost of a well-known music bloggist after I made some heavy accusations.

for example's sake, here's a review i wrote last year that uses the first-person twice in the first two sentences, and then never again. especially writing in that venue, it felt honest and useful to state up front my own skepticism about the band. it tells the reader -- whatever their own position on the band -- where i'm coming from, and also establishes a little bit of critical tension. i'm sure i could have written the same thing without the first-person, but it would have been less direct, and i don't think would have improved anything.

It works fine, tipsy (and your review is first-rate).

that is a really nice review, but I would have edited the first sentence out if you had turned it in to me since its burying the lede. Ppl are picking up the article to read about DBT, not tipsy mothra.

not to dog yr review, becuz it is a v nice review.

no that's fine, i've had editors who think the same way. i don't have strong feelings about it, it just isn't always a big deal to me as a writer or an editor. (and thanks.)

a pretty large amount of my freelancing is live reviews, and i don't always write in the first person, but sometimes in those situations you kinda have to -- i think when strongo was my editor a more 'editorial we'-or-avoid-it-altogether thing was reccomended, but now that he isn't i get away with straight up first person more. it's just awkward to go by yourself to a show where there's maybe 5 other people in the audience, and then later on not be able to talk about the experience without referring to the obvious fact that you were just a guy in the room and not some omniscient observer. i don't think i've used first person in record reviews much at all, if ever (although i use it a lot in casual, vaguely review-y blog posts because who cares, and also i hate when one-person blogs refer to themselves in the third person like they're Rolling Stone or something).

(should note here the "editorial we" was a diktat imposed from above. there's actually little i hate more than the editorial we. (about six months before i left cp i just gave up and started shoving first person in anywhere it made a piece flow better.))

yeah -- not blaming/crediting you with the policy at all, dog, just saying i think you enforced it more

(that's not to say i wanted people running wild with first-person, either, but it makes anyone sound less goofy than referring to him/herself like the king/queen of a small, bankrupt nation.)

i dunno, i think sentences like "Your Royal Eloquence then retreated to the bar, and ignored the opening band" would really make a piece come to life.

maybe lou-jag can punch up my prose for a fee

I've always liked it when reporters refer to themselves as the name of their newspaper. It's stupid but endearing. "The Observer caught up with Mickey Rourke at last night's charity fandango, but he got away again."

"Stereogum stirred his drink, stifled a cough, and then continued the interview"

I'm always endeared by the NY Times' second-and-subsequent references to a subject as "Mr." or "Ms". . Now and then, when Mr. Korvette ripped into a new song looking as if he was going to eat his microphone, or when the band started a new, messy riff, leaking feedback and channeling Black Sabbath or Black Flag, it seemed that this was going to be a very good gig.

I wonder what the call would be on Mr. Horribly Charred Infant. Mr. Infant, Mr. Charred Infant?

I remember reading an article that read something like "[name of artist] was friendly and demure throughout the evening, even pausing the conversation to pick up Select's sunglasses from off the table to stop them getting scratched"...

Incredible, I didn't know magazines wore sunglasses.

only Fader does

at some point thats really just a branding thing isnt it? publishers want you to think of the magazine as the source of the information, not the writer. saying "steven tyler was kind enough to buy max a lollipop" attaches max to the cool steven tyler story, whereas "steven tyler was kind enough to buy the paris review a lollipop" attaches the paris review to the cool steven tyler story

Ppl are picking up the article to read about DBT, not tipsy mothra.

Does it have to be one or the other? I mean, part of what I like about film critics like Roger Ebert and David Edelstein is that they're smart guys who write in this breezy, friendly, conversational tone. They put their cards on the table -- they admit to their biases, they worry they're being too harsh or too kind, etc. This is all very endearing to me, and I'd much rather read them than most boilerplate movie criticism, since I like the overall effect of feeling like I know them.

dnr u were writing for paris review btw

also, so awesome hanging out with aerosmith and eating candy

ill let u know when the article goes live

i have a similar reaction in q-and-a's, when instead of just Q, it says VF or something. like the entirety of vanity fair is having drinks with penelope cruz.

(altho for all i know, "drinks with penelope cruz" is a monthly staff event at vanity fair.)

one of the many fabled conde nast perks

now downsized to bar snax with jessica biel.

Back to The New Yorker, the Talk of the Town is often the most aggravating at this avoidance of the first person, because half the articles are little observational reports on Manhattan cocktail parties or society events, as though The New Yorker is just a fly on the wall, eavesdropping on people's conversations, which invariably include "a journalist," as though we didn't know it was actually you, Lizzie Widdicombe, with your fancy connections. Thing is, I don't think I'd mind half as much if they went back to omitting bylines, because then I wouldn't be as aware that there was a specific journalist responsible and wouldn't idly wonder "how did she get invited to this?"

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