IS ROCK CRITICISM DEAD?

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/lynne-d-johnson/digital-media-diva/10-most-creative-people-music-biz

lmao @ #4 -- forget what i said, anything related to music is dead

as a "writer" (albeit not in the criticism or journalism game), i have a 10-6 gig and try to get into a nice groove writing on the side at night and on weekends, though sometimes it feels like a dead-end because i've only sold one piece in three years and writing isn't likely to support me in this economy as much as it could have 7-8 years ago.

shocked theres no market for Blossom fan fiction

sorry i was just on a role. think im gonna go for a run & think about how to create a sustainable model for personal success. will let u guys know what i figure out

*a roll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_Nu51whDN8

whiney yoo will land on yer feet. think of the 50-something dude with bills up the butt laid off from his job at the local newspaper. where's HE gonna go. my dad is 74 and he works 4 days a week with the mentally ill to make extra bread. ya gotta do what ya gotta do. if yer smart and quick you come up with stuff. somehow. maybe. sorry, it's the beer. i don't know where i'm going.

what i liked about yer speech was that it was about - sorta - uncertainty. and we can all relate to that.

heck, i'm 40 and i've got two kids and i decided to leave my job with EXCELLENT benefits and move and open my own business during the worst recession in decades! those nike ads finally got to me.

meaning, ya gotta make your own fun sometimes. and make your fun work for you. somehow. maybe.

Thx scott :)

Good messages from Scott indeed!

I've muttered this story before but it seems appropriate here:

Back in 1993 or so, maybe early 1994, I noticed J. D. Considine posting on alt.music.alternative. I knew his name from his short takes column in Musician and enjoyed his work there, and having barely dipped a toe into 'music criticism' as such via the school newspaper at UCI, I figured I'd drop him a line just to introduce myself and network a bit (hey, why not?).

At some point in our brief e-mail exchange I mentioned how even though I was currently in a grad program in English lit I really had a notion that writing about music seemed to be more my speed in general. So I asked him what the life of a working writer was like. He was very thoughtful, even-handed but ultimately clear about how it was a job only for those who were constantly, eternally self-motivated, chasing down all opportunities, all possibilities for work -- that it was not a job for someone who needed, flat out required, a certain unchangeable stability.

I took that lesson to heart -- I knew already I needed that kind of relative stability, something which the years have already made clearer to me. For that reason I pursued writing as a side pursuit in terms of making one's basic way in the world, from then to now -- it's hardly a unique path, many other writers do similar and do it very well, and many more deftly and thoughtfully than myself, and I feel it.

But as time continues and as I see that path that J. D. talked about shrivel more and more as any kind of workable model for living, more than anything I'm grateful for his unintentional warning. Just now the UC employees at large got a formal note from the office of the campus president statewide discussing the pay-cut/furlough options we all must face, and as expected the numbers are jarring. It's still a stable anchor, though, and I'm glad of it -- the Wallace Stevens option, on a much reduced scale in my case.

Thirteen ways of looking at a blackboard.

What this always appears to go to is a discussion of a combination of developments which have ripped the bottom out of the US economy and the application of merciless 'social Darwinism' in which
being the fittest isn't the trait valuable in the Darwinian part, just individual circumstances
and blind luck.

Everyone I knew in newspaper work back in Pennsylvania (and in LA) has either been fired or compelled into early retirement in the last year or so. And this culling stopped being something which
improved performance and efficiency a good long time ago. Even a well-known on-line venue for which I wrote a twice a month column, not on music and not in the US, had its budget damaged by the US economic meltdown.

There are a combination of reasons for the severe contraction, and not all of them have to do with the facile explanation that the Internet is the great leveller, hastening the demise of writing professions which need being put down.

A lot of it has been the result of bad faith decision-making, incompetent and short-sighted
business management, and a ruthless and shriveled economic environment brought about by the US finance
industry, which has nothing to do with the talent and work ethic -- surplus or lack of it -- among those who work in journalism.

Generally speaking,
the bottle works sometime.

but at least youre not working for GM

dude that lives downstairs from me, his granddad/dad have a GM dealership in wisconsin that was closed after being in business since the 30s. his dad had thought about selling out a few years ago, when he might have gotten 5mil for the business. now he's 65, and he ~might~ get 250k for the lot

so long retirement

I really kinda do feel bad for j-school people. I started writing about music for money in 1996, and I got in because the NJ alt-paper the Aquarian Weekly (still publishing, having reverted to its original late '60s name after a long stretch as the East Coast Rocker) issued an open call for new writers which my wife spotted and cajoled me into responding to. From there I pestered Jason Pettigrew at Alternative Press until one day he called me and said, "Will you interview Godsmack so I don't have to?" and from there it was off to the races. I have never made my primary living from freelancing, though it's now my #2 source of income (my #1 source of income is unemployment checks, insert bitter laugh here, and thank fuckin zombie Jesus that NY State is passing out a total of 72 weeks' worth to the unlucky many - the usual 26 weeks, plus 33 weeks' "emergency unemployment" and a bonus 13 weeks' worth after that, and I haven't gotten to the end of the first 26 yet so I plan or at least expect to be suckin' that government teat until well into 2010). But the thing is, I never did a damn bit of studying to become what I am. I barely graduated high school and went to three semesters of community college; while there, I met my wife, and academics went right out the goddamn window. I've worked for auto parts stores, warehouses, trucking companies, and behind the food service counters at Newark Airport. I can drive a forklift; I can cut a brake rotor; I can spackle and paint and lay tile. I may call my uncle up and see if he needs help on one of his crews - he does home renovations in a part of NJ where the neighbors get antsy if too many Latinos show up at one time, so he likes to hire all-white crews when he can.

yah dude i work @ a ballpark

honestly dudes, if i'm gonna go back to having a real job and doing something as a hobby, I'm gonna bail on writing altogether and go back to playing drums.

i hate the idea of having a 'hobby'. theres my life, then my 'hobby' pays the rent

I sympathize with you, Chris, and with tipsy, deej, Scott, and the others who've done this professionally and otherwise for many years. As someone who's been freelancing intermittently for ten years (in July), I know the thrill of reading a review online or print AND receiving a check in the mail; I couldn't believe I was getting paid for doing something I loved -- something I considered a 'favorite waste of time' (to quote Howard Hawks).

At the same time, I never for one second thought this was a way of making a living. We all have different standards, and I just enjoyed too many other luxuries to become accustomed to living check to check. Now that I'm in my mid thirties and paying a mortgage, it's luxuries + safety cushion. I have neither a wife nor children, and I couldn't put them through the monthly anxiety of not knowing you can't, I don't know, put off paying for braces or not buying them ice cream or something.

I hope it's not presumptuous of me to suggest that if you love writing and thinking critically maybe you should return to school. At the very least, a college degree guarantees a certain level of income or gets your foot past interview gatekeepers. Times are too strange to walk around without some proof of undergraduate education.

Whatever else, we're here if you wanna bitch.

yeah i feel the same way, more or less, about music and movie writing. it's always been a sideline to more conventional journalistic endeavors. (sad thing of course is that those conventional endeavors are getting squeezed now by exactly the same forces as the music writing...)

i'm really disappointed that none of the autogoon cru noticed my ego trip shirt in the video

i can't tell if its hopeful or depressing, this attitude that the collapse of print journalism will somehow just kill off all the bad stuff. kinda bums me out tbh. would you really say that about any other industry? and i gotta say, even though there are mediocre writers in every local paper, i still think there is something valuable about their local-ness, about there being people still covering their little arts scene or police blotter or whatever, living where that stuff is actually going down. there's value to that even if the writing is not great.

the dumb thing about me is i kinda fell ass-backwards into writing/editing, which has been my main source of income for like 8 years now. since i was always doing other stuff at the time i somehow was doing it for... the money? or at least that's how it started out, like an oh they'll pay me for this kinda thing?

i mean it became something else and writing has always been pretty much my main thing but still.

i def noticed whiney's ego trip shirt

i can't tell if its hopeful or depressing, this attitude that the collapse of print journalism will somehow just kill off all the bad stuff. kinda bums me out tbh. would you really say that about any other industry? and i gotta say, even though there are mediocre writers in every local paper, i still think there is something valuable about their local-ness, about there being people still covering their little arts scene or police blotter or whatever, living where that stuff is actually going down. there's value to that even if the writing is not great.

― s1ocki, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 11:16 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well i def wouldnt extend it to reporting s1ocki! just pop music criticism

ya i know. i think there is some good to local scene writing type stuff, even if it is unbearably parochial.

As a guy who was laid off from what I thought was a steady job in February and has been doing contract work since the severance package disappeared, I want to give my sympathies to all you writers who have been or may soon be similarly affected. It sucks!

Whiney's speech touched on the phenomenon of people so wrapped up in their subcultures that they're oblivious to the broader culture. That's not new, but I think the internet encourages or at least enables and in many cases flatters this tendency. So does cable (as vs network 30 years ago), and so does satellite radio (as vs freeform or even regular old pre-market-segmented radio). There's always a tradeoff, and the resource explosion we've gained also gave us a million little foxholes in which to squirrel ourselves away. All this new media helps us compartmentalize ourselves out of even a pretense that we're all diving or even dipping into a shared pool, some sort of a commons. Where that matters most (to me) isn't aesthetics but politics - left and right wing bloggers each finding their own special echo chambers, cable news choices reduced to which flavor of loudmouth you prefer, etc. As though there's no longer a center/common ground. In general that seems like a bad thing for a democracy - I'd think you'd get better political results (or at least a better political process) when we all are responsive to each other.

But was there ever a center to begin with? To get back to music: Wasn't the Universal Music Critic and/or Magazine, covering everything & doing it well, largely a shared fiction? If I've seen any common ground among music fans, it's been the chip on the shoulder about those who don't quite get it when it comes to their particular favorites. Seems to me that annoyance at critics getting it wrong is the primary way they've been received, for generations. More to the point, common ground may be important for a democracy, but I'm not sure it matters for music. What's so bad about a million sub-communities all digging their own things?

honestly dudes, if i'm gonna go back to having a real job and doing something as a hobby, I'm gonna bail on writing altogether and go back to playing drums.

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 10:38 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i will buy 2 copies of your next record, maybe 3 if it's as good as those P&L records

i'm really disappointed that none of the autogoon cru noticed my ego trip shirt in the video

I noticed and thought, is he making some silent comment that twittering or rockcrit-ing is just one big ego trip? Or is he just wearing a hip shirt?

i noticed!!

it's really sad though, that no one noticed

"and i gotta say, even though there are mediocre writers in every local paper, i still think there is something valuable about their local-ness, about there being people still covering their little arts scene or police blotter or whatever, living where that stuff is actually going down. there's value to that even if the writing is not great."

Unfortunately a lot of this "local writing in your local paper"-stuff got killed off by the massive media consolidation of the late 90s so a lot of what's being killed off right now is just a bunch of VV/NT junk on a weekly level and a steady diet of AP wire rehash on the daily. If the SF Bay Guardian dies though, I'll be really bummed though since it's a good weekly with a lot of solid local political reporting and good local events coverage.

ya i know, this stuff has been dying by a thousand little cuts for a whle now.

fwiw the only reason i'm still making any money at all writing about music is that i made local music my niche & my paper is cutting away space/budget for that slower than all other music coverage

but then it's not a VVM paper and is probably more an exception that proves the rule than not

"ya i know, this stuff has been dying by a thousand little cuts for a whle now."

To be fair though, this is the one thing that the web is really good at replacing. Semi-professional (or totally amateur) topical writing about local politics/scenes/happenings is something that very easily leaps from newsprint to blog. It's the more in-depth journalism that's really being hurt most and I'm not sure how that (or if it even does) gets replaced.

^^^^yeah i mean even if u want to talk about it w/r/t music, its not like bloggers are able to do things like getting the entire crew of ppl responsible for a classic album in a room together to talk about the making of an illmatic or whatever. there are certain real things that, at least when it comes to journalism, requires institutional $$$

i agree that the web is ideal for replacing this stuff, it just sucks that it's no longer a viable paying job - also i wonder if the people who are doing this stuff on the web will have the tenacity to keep going, consistently, week by week like a paying gig would

Probably not. Remember when every music writer was a dutiful blogger in like 2004?

exactly. who will be doing this stuff? and why?

another thing that i fret about is that most web writing (blogs of course) are unedited... i think editing is if anything more undervalued than writing. it is important, no matter how good a writer u are.

xpost It's gonna be either 19-year-old kids who think it's an opening for a job, or older dudes who do it as a hobby.

big name magazines regularly tell my copy-editor friends that they need to edit less and just look over things FASTER to get more content out, since quantity is slowly overtaking quality as the measure of financial success

godspeed, 25-year-olds. xp

Apologies to Whiney and everyone else cause I know this is real serious talk time but Chris, I really like that hat.

big name magazines regularly tell my copy-editor friends that they need to edit less and just look over things FASTER to get more content out, since quantity is slowly overtaking quality as the measure of financial success

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Thursday, June 18, 2009 5:16 AM (12 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

urgh terrible. not just copy editing im talking here tho of course

Also, great speech Whiney

whiney i noticed your ego trip shirt too : )

also this whole thread is hella sobering...speaking as someone who has only been protected from this due to god's grace and larger data footprints.