pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

*apathetic shrug, puff of clove*

thread getting weird

95 percent of music writers should quit right now, today, not because it's a doomed career path but because they're fucking terrible at it and the market will never reward them for getting better.

― Don Van Gorp, midwest regional VP, marketing (誤訳侮辱), Thursday, May 5, 2016 7:27 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've seen the market reward PLENTY of truly terrible writers

david brooks is his own cottage industry of hate reads

yeah you can do really good being shitty. it probably even helps to be a little shitty.

most people hiring writers just want what most employers want from their employees. the ability to crank shit out fast and not complain. and to be on time.

being broke and uncertain than sitting mouldering in an office job that i hate,

what's super cool is doing both at the same time

actually, i don't really mean shitty. though there is a lot of shit. but people who can blend in with a format/style in a generic way. they tend to do better. i think they always have. that doesn't have to be shitty. that's just being a pro (or a hack if you are mean). i've always thought that people who did a lot of newspaper writing were best able to fit the format elsewhere. magazines, websites, etc. you learn a lot doing grunt work journalism. i read a lot of stuff now that just seems really inexperienced and written by people who will be doing something completely different in a few years. that's why i appreciate the good stuff so much now when i see it because it isn't really necessary to BE really good in so many places.

I'm grateful that I did it as long as I did, but tbh it was mostly just good luck. I think it sucks the way things are but by the end I almost felt bad that we'd have interns classes every three months. Lots of good writers but where are the jobs going to be? It's just tough and frankly I saw the future and it scared me. With a kid I just felt like I couldn't afford to gamble. No one retires a game writer, and if I didn't change now when? 10 years from now? With no experience besides the one jobI'd already had for 16 since I was an intern in college? I had recruiters tell me straight up that was a problem some companies wouldn't wasn't to look at me because I guess having one job is bad now. If can see why that came off as smug but I was scared shitless. And that was the last couple years, what about in 5? 10? I hope to maybe write for fun or beer money down the road but I don't know, I certainly wouldn't encourage my daughter to go into journalism. And shit we were still like the 5th biggest mag in the U.S. W 6 million circ and I know they already cared more about youtubers and twitch.advertising was down for years.

Shit was always hard for freelance as far as I can tell, I wouldn't have had the guts for that. So I had to gamble my future on another 25 years of a cushy mag position, or bail.

Plus I really if I was being honest with myself ib wasn't really enjoying it, the current climate isn't very fun, felt like you'd try to do something good and it gets no hits then the worst things I would do just to get something up would do great.... I also became paralyzed by the comments like you end up spending half your time antipating every possible angle someone could rip you apart in the comments or on Twitter, especially with reviews. Then gamergate happened and people are getting like death threats over video game bullshit and now I write marketing copy and stuff but I go home at 5 and don't have to work until 1 am on deadline and we have great coffee.

thread got dark night of the soul

Ha overcompensating for being overly glib. But I just think that continuing to say oh you can do it just gotta adapt, be great and hustle ignores all these large scale economic, business, tech and social trends that just make it harder for writers now. And yeah sure I could tell about 80 hour weeks and 20 workdays when I started but mostly I was in the right place at the right time and there are just less of those places and times now.

I think my experience parallels yours exactly. Can it be done? I have full-time writer friends, and it's a full-time hustle, but the rewards (as such) become less and less, and there's no security. Friends of mine who have written recent books for pretty substantial sums, however, prove to me that that industry, unlikely as it is, is apparently somehow doing OK. People love rock bios/oral histories.

I'm doing better than OK with freelance gigs in the last 18 months but I wouldn't have pursued this without the comfort of a full time job even 20 years ago. This happens to be my particularly abnormality, not a recommendation.

on the rolling clusterpresident thread, there was a quote from a talking head that media work/writing is white collar work with blue collar wages and yes.

I have this same conversation with musician friends all the time.

Big turning point was when I realized that there were more people playing in the NBA than in positions of making a comfortable living, benefits etc like I was in my particular field of entertainment journalism. If I lost my job where could I go?

If the NBA teaches us anything, China.

Sad!

In my neighborhood you had two choices: Sell drugs or write listicles

Either you wrote for Vox or you had a wicked jump shot

I Had to Write Click Bait To Escape Poverty... And That's Okay

All Of My Dreams Died ... And Here's Why

You Have To Read Upper Mississippi Sh@kedown's Epic Takedown of His Career

Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool: The 5 Most Important Things To Know

We hear eerie glissandos (you know, like when there’s a cliffhanger at the end of a Lost episode)
We hear eerie glissandos (you know, like when there’s a cliffhanger at the end of a Lost episode)
We hear eerie glissandos (you know, like when there’s a cliffhanger at the end of a Lost episode)
We hear eerie glissandos (you know, like when there’s a cliffhanger at the end of a Lost episode)
We hear eerie glissandos (you know, like when there’s a cliffhanger at the end of a Lost episode)
We hear eerie glissandos (you know, like when there’s a cliffhanger at the end of a Lost episode)
We hear eerie glissandos (you know, like when there’s a cliffhanger at the end of a Lost episode)
We hear eerie glissandos (you know, like when there’s a cliffhanger at the end of a Lost episode)
We hear eerie glissandos (you know, like when there’s a cliffhanger at the end of a Lost episode)
We hear eerie glissandos (you know, like when there’s a cliffhanger at the end of a Lost episode)

also, This Mortal Coil didn't write "Another Day," rock geniuses

someone tell them to up the res on the photos on the front page. whole things blurry as hell

http://i66.tinypic.com/11vsdtv.png

it's because they are in heaven

Scrolling up and down, I am born again,” Thom Yorke sang on OK Computer’s “Airbag,” which was written about a car accident, but could also describe the experience of using a message board.

lol

all album reviews should compare the listening experience to that of using a message board
so is it written, so shall it be

I had never even seen a message board before.

scrolling up and down, I am born again - best screen name ever?

a supergroup whose lineup includes some of the Bush era's most forward-thinking punk musicians: Jordan Billie and Cody Votolato of the Blood Brothers, Justin Pearson and Gabe Serbian of the Locust and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Nick Zinner

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other Dept

Do you mean the faulty parallel construction?

assume he just means "the YYYs aren't a punk band" which definitely seems like something worth posting here

saddest supergoup

this is bad:
http://pitchfork.com/features/article/9894-the-dark-art-of-mastering-music/

purports to explain mastering but mostly resorts to a bunch of different bad metaphors and continually referring to it as mysterious and inexplicable

"If rock stars are the sex gods of music, mastering engineers are its druids, the ones who work methodically and meticulously, and to whom people come for mystical wisdom and blessing."

there's good useful stuff mixed in there but mostly their conclusion is that the job of the mastering engineer is to make stuff sound good, which isn't a very good explanation

there is an excellent interview with Scott Hull of Masterdisk in the new issue of Tape Op Magazine that i just got in the mail. very illuminating.

also a long interview with Don Was that is good. don't think i knew that he was now the president of blue note records.

i certainly didn't

that mastering article was so disappointing

no one knows what they do... so we wont try to explain

this fits my lifestyle and my kicky new windswept summer look.

http://wwd.com/media-news/fashion-memopad/conde-nast-traveler-pitchfork-launch-musical-magazine-spotify-10434908/

ow, that mastering article made me angry! One because, it reeks of non-musician-dumbsplains-music-stuff, and two because I actually have a hard time believing MC Schmidt doesn't know what mastering is!

Here's mastering: after a track has been recorded and mixed, you send the completed audio file to a mastering engineer. He makes (usually subtle) changes to it, including compression, EQ and overall volume/gain. The important difference between this process, and the mixing process, is that in mastering, you're working with a single audio file -- the whole song, that's already been recorded and mixed -- which is why the changes are usually subtle (but important).

Why would that have been so hard to explain in that article, like maybe somewhere in the first couple of paragraphs?

Re: "Traveler"

Yep, nothing makes me feel like I'm barrelling down the open road of summer like the line "he came out a little late / maybe that's where frustration's born"

hey dominique that's a really good and concise explanation!

L.F.W