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

to be fair scott, you do live in the boonies. limited cell service. maybe he was born in a shack

i think young people sense pretty early on that music is something that people use for status and for sex. and young people pitting their ideals and their art against a crass, materialistic society is a story that's rather old and definitely not unique to rock N roll. so i think certain aspects of rockism are likely to recur just as a process of identity formation

I’ve always found a lot of this debate strange, frankly.

"how quickly we forget alex in nyc"

Fuck is that supposed to imply?

They forgot you didn’t like bad music writing.

Alex, think imago was just citing you as the main person pushing back against early ILX's love of commercial pop, don't think it was meant as a diss?

I wasn’t sure if Alex’s comment yesterday was leaning into that for comic effect.

A shirt I wear while posting to ILX that reads “I’m with Alex in NYC”

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jul/21/new-labour-1997-rave-culture-ed-gillett-book-extract

Worst music tweeting 2023:

Snoop Dogg has canceled two of his forthcoming concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in solidarity with the strikes that are completely unrelated to what he does as a musician. https://t.co/SdS5LqRUEj

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) July 25, 2023

this is not the worst but it does read a bit like a very high person seeing the light
https://www.stereogum.com/2230948/big-thief-pitchfork-festival-2023/reviews/concert-review/

Good thread about that piece:

This is so unbelievably condescending. The fact that he’s like “I’m not trying to slam the writer” in this thread yet implies said writer is “too young” to write a piece with good musical references and has “brain worms” is pretty abhorrent tbh pic.twitter.com/9n5R5BbCcs

— Grant Sharples (@grantsharpies) July 25, 2023

as someone who is not sold completely on the band big thief, i thought it was a nice piece? personal, self-aware, not overbearing, something v sweet about it. as a reader was able to understand a bit more what i'm missing and also clarify what turns me off.

I hated that piece, happy to continue to steer clear of BT.

to be more specific, i am not sure that the writer’s style choices are very interesting— the debatable point about autofiction and the self-mythologization of “the fan” comes into play— but i also left the review totally unclear as to what Big Thief sounded like. the author even makes casual mention of Big Thief songs (“you know the one”), as if the piece is written solely by and for people like the author. it simply isn’t good writing!

the piece successfully conveys that big thief are goofy hippies, but not that their music is so transcendentally good that that becomes an endearing quality instead of an annoying one

I think it’s a cute piece, but yeah I’m not really sure who it’s “for,” and also what ufo said.

It just seems like the writer is saying that unlike a lot of popular indie acts these days, Big Thief is a band in the old fashioned sense of that. That Perpetua is like "what about Fugazi or Jam Bands?" is missing the point.

\no editor i've met would let me get away with any of the "stylistic flourishes" in that piece, and they'd be right to stop me

Never having heard them, my takeaway from the article is that they're Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians for Gen Z?
Also I hope the writer soon realizes the fine line between cute and irritating.

and as a closer, the raucous stomp-along of “Spud Infinity” was — speaking in the strictest dictionary definition of a “hoot and a holler” — a hoot and a holler.

:|

As usual I blame the uh infelicities in this piece on editing, which includes perhaps nixing the idea entirely. That said, Perpetua was wrong to shame such a young writer.

oh don't get me wrong, perpetua should take a long look in the mirror, genuinely one of the most embarrassing people to ever do it

just can't help thinking that if i, as a young music writer, were indulged in this way, all of my pieces would be unreadable, and a great number of them already are (to me), and i think one of the jobs of the people who read these pieces before they upload them to the internet is to make them less embarrassing for the writer's sake, so they can look back with pride on their work and the collaboration that resulted in it

alas

exactly

But maybe the roiling tempo of internet fandom in 2023 is simply too resting-fascist to put its faith in a band that reworks its setlist each night

The roiling tempo is resting-fascist?

resting fash face

wait are they saying that internet fans aren't fans? i thought they were popular! even got a recent 40 page piece in the new yorker. (okay, it just felt like 40...) my 20 year old drove from montreal canada to northampton ma to see them last week. that's some sorta fandom.

(and no offense to the writer of new yorker piece. anything written about indie rock over 500 words is probably a bit long for me...felt the same way about the national and wxahchee things that i tried to skim in 30 seconds. new yorker is nu-pitchfork.)

If I were a light-touch editor inclined only to use my red pencil on one line in the piece, it would indeed be that “resting-fascist” one.

none of you would even know me if i had had a more heavy-penciled editor when i started writing. and now you can all say: "EXACTLY!"

lol i mean also getting edited to death is one of the reasons i have the most merciless and evil editor of all time living in my head, and they are the reason i spend agonizing amounts of time on everything i write, so ymmv

having an editor who understands you and appreciates/prioritizes your voice but helps you refine it and clear away the garbage is priceless, i've been lucky to have a few

It's 2023, I can't imagine any publication doing much in between "Make this read like our house style" or "Don't edit this at all"

does stereogum even pay people? because if not then yeah they can write whatever they want.

lol what IS the stereogum house style, btw?

I'm not conjecturing on Stereogum in particular, I'm just saying anyone expecting any world where someone is line-editing over your shoulder like William Shawn editing John Hersey's Hiroshima or whatever, well, you need to stop waiting for the Don Draper drink cart to roll in...

does stereogum even pay people? because if not then yeah they can write whatever they want.

They pay a little.

yeah thats understood all you have to do is read something online to know that. its pretty dire.

x-post

“You want us to EDIT your piece , kid? Oh sure, let me go down the hall and get Ezra Pound for you.”

when I wrote for XLR8R right before the great dying (2009-2011), I was edited constantly. we made fun of publications that used a lot of flowery prose and flourishes that said little about the actual music. i know i sound like an old man, but yeah, that piece needed a good editor, so that the young writer could get a sense of what it might mean to actually write about music instead of writing a meta-commentary on their own experience of the music and its cultural connotations

Stereogum's "masthead" lists five editors, seems reasonable to imagine they do some editing.

Maybe they all work on the company sailboat

There's also a big gap between line-by-line editing and not touching a piece at all... they could encourage certain things to be rethought, approached a different way, etc. (maybe they did, and the initial draft was even more out-there!)

does stereogum even pay people? because if not then yeah they can write whatever they want.

They pay a little.

― but also fuck you (unperson),

and they pay fastq

i wrote some nothing 100 word thing for an indie rock magazine once and i swear they made me rewrite it ten times. then they never paid me for it. and THAT is all i need to know about indie rock.

see i just learned to write by writing a bunch of crappy garbage and posting it to the internet. after 30 years of doing that i'm actually a pretty good writer now apparently. still haven't ever gotten paid for it, but i'm slowly working on getting rid of my inferiority complex about that.

I learned to write by stealing from most of you all.

but I guess it didn't take.

Great couplet.

😬

(seriously though, lots of phrases that I've adopted into my daily vernacular have come from here!)