Rolling Music Writers' Thread

(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.)

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.

https://www.metrotimes.com/news/kevin-ransom-a-beloved-music-writer-in-metro-detroit-dies-at-69-36445083?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1vhMYuHtGrg9uIbIyyEMQBxlFd4Rd0VOEVwKmRWl3Nf3xmRzy1mZbD_EA_aem_AdNws5OuvDB5OvdDDCpV-1ePn5yoQqb_adxkUdMMRxtRJbtpa0cq2iv0vpzqUavHIbUNZOrhgDqfDNIow3PzHRla

Rob Stone, the co-founder of music and culture magazine ‘The Fader’ and founder of Cornerstone agency, has died of cancer. He was 55. pic.twitter.com/Xfw5i6X6Lq

— Brooklyn White-Grier (@brooklynrwhite) June 25, 2024

Rob Stone , co-founder of music and culture publication The Fader, has died from cancer at age 55

freelance journalism is so fundamentally broken right now. you can consistently do innovative stuff and still barely make enough to get by. to make it work, you either have financial security and it's therefore a hobby, or you have to hustle so hard it makes you ill

— Thomas Hobbs (@thobbsjourno) June 24, 2024

Thomas Hobbs sadly OTM

#realtalk

Totally accurate. My entire writing career as such has been a hobby in that formulation and it's not wrong. I just aim to do as much as I can within reason, but at the end of the day, my regular library work is the 'roof over my head' job.

kinda same as it ever was — at least in my adult life. I remember landing a staff writer position at an alt-weekly in the mid 2000s and thinking I had achieved my dreams ... until I realized I'd have to find another job to make it remotely sustainable.

I came of age when these jobs still paid rent and groceries, but even then they didn't look sustainable.

My last full-time job in music journalism was as editor of Metal Edge, and that ended in February or March 2009. I write for a half dozen outlets at the moment — Stereogum, The Wire, DownBeat, Shfl, We Jazz, and my own Substack — but I certainly couldn't live on that. It's all basically for fun, and when it stops being fun I'll stop doing it.

it stopped being fun for me and that's why i stopped doing it. i think i had good run though! considering it was all an accident anyway. sending a fan letter to Chuck Eddy somehow ended up with me writing about The Stooges and Black Sabbath for the Rolling Stone Album Guide, getting praise from Greil Marcus in print, getting paid $500 by Rhino Records to write Foghat liner notes, writing for an awesome metal magazine for six years, and eating at In-N-Out Burger with Ned Raggett in Los Angeles. only in America! it wasn't just the fun stopping though. it was also money. i knew that i had to focus 100% on my store to make it a real thing that could make money and contribute to our family income. writing was never gonna do it. plus, i wasn't cut out to be a freelancer. matos and whiney and unperson. those people are cut out for it. and good at it. there are and were so many people here who would have made a living at writing books and writing for magazines in another era. but we are stuck in this weird world unfortunately.
i have some ideas for more personal writing stuff. i still enjoy writing. it just takes me so much longer now to get it to be good. to get it to where it needs to be. i'm a rusty bicycle.

could basically write the same post as scott except exclude the record store and sub my lucrative publishing career ha hah hahah ahkldjlkafk,m

but yeah freelancing made me want to die most of the time. i still do it once in a while, and every time i want to die

I don't die (yet) because I still get a kick after all these years of seeing my byline.

I only ever freelanced as a sideline, relying on it for income always seemed terrifying to me. One reason I loved working at an alt-weekly was that was the only place where music writing was actually part of my job — a small part, lots of us chipped in, but it was valued as much as the front-of-book news and politics stuff.

And now that paper hasn't existed for a decade. :(

I think I stopped writing album reviews around the time that physical promo copies stopped being a thing. Like, you took away the only thing that made the very low pay and hours of tedious, thankless work worthwhile: free CDs. Thanks for the link to the digital files, but...no.

By far the most lucrative writing in my life is Slack messages.

hi, glenn! it's me, scott! from the old days.

i like when people pop in. i should have drinks and pie ready.

it stopped being fun for me and that's why i stopped doing it. i think i had good run though! considering it was all an accident anyway. sending a fan letter to Chuck Eddy somehow ended up with me writing about The Stooges and Black Sabbath for the Rolling Stone Album Guide, getting praise from Greil Marcus in print, getting paid $500 by Rhino Records to write Foghat liner notes, writing for an awesome metal magazine for six years, and eating at In-N-Out Burger with Ned Raggett in Los Angeles. only in America! it wasn't just the fun stopping though. it was also money. i knew that i had to focus 100% on my store to make it a real thing that could make money and contribute to our family income. writing was never gonna do it. plus, i wasn't cut out to be a freelancer. matos and whiney and unperson. those people are cut out for it. and good at it. there are and were so many people here who would have made a living at writing books and writing for magazines in another era. but we are stuck in this weird world unfortunately.
i have some ideas for more personal writing stuff. i still enjoy writing. it just takes me so much longer now to get it to be good. to get it to where it needs to be. i'm a rusty bicycle.

― scott seward, Wednesday, 26 June 2024 03:01 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this makes a lot of sense to me, as much because scott's reviews always seemed so bursting with humour and enjoyment, and I think that would be a difficult vibe to maintain while also hustling for yr life - in particular the review of el-p had a huge impact on me even though I was then, and probably remain, much more uptight as a writer

maybe my favourite thing about being a former music writer is realising how much i draw on the skills it helped me to develop in a more serious/professional/well-paid setting.

people in a work context are always like "how did you write that <insert> so quickly?" and I'm like "... you clearly have never had to write a 1,500 meditation on a kitsune maison compilation of undistinguished blog-house, from scratch, with a filing deadline in half an hour..."

okay it never gets old when a writer as good as tim says nice things about me. tim f. and philip s. being two of my very favorite 21st century music writers and ilxors.

and i'm sorry if i toot my own horn too much on here sometimes i just like to remind myself that i knew how to do something other than sell records and raise excellent children. because honestly i'm a mess and i need all the help i can get.

so funny that that el-p thing stuck with people. in retrospect it feels mean! someone worked so hard to make this massive artistic statement and their local alt-weekly says: yeah, you are a goofball and definitely no blackalicious. ouch. but i sure as hell had a great time writing it. ( i listened to blackalicious once for that review and then never again...)

One of the reasons for which I have an affinity for Wallace Stevens has to do with a comment he made in a letter. He wrote something like "I love wine and cheeses almost as much as supreme fictions." I knew I could never hustle full-time because I couldn't accept falling below a certain standard of living and my admiration for those who do the full-time hustling is bottomless.

I've been content with publishing my seven or eight reviews/essays professionally a year and keeping my blog going. The price I pay for not freelancing full-time is that I write all the fucking time. And I don't see a point when I'll shut up.

and scott and Tim F, two of my favorite writers, are otm about fun. So long as I can blog about movies, Florida politics, and the best synth bass solos of all time I'm cool

(Meeting scott at 2007's EMP conference was one of my highlights. Scott talks like he writes!).

maybe my favourite thing about being a former music writer is realising how much i draw on the skills it helped me to develop in a more serious/professional/well-paid setting.

people in a work context are always like "how did you write that <insert> so quickly?" and I'm like "... you clearly have never had to write a 1,500 meditation on a kitsune maison compilation of undistinguished blog-house, from scratch, with a filing deadline in half an hour..."

Absolutely otm. It's how I finished my master's thesis in 2010. My defense committee chair was astounded that I cranked out a chapter in two days.

Yeah journalism writing skills actually do translate to other venues. When I went to work in government communications for a spell, people acted like it was magic that I could write a press release in an hour. I was so used to being surrounded only by other writers and editors that I took those skills for granted — it was just the work we did — but most people can't write at all and struggle to put together a coherent paragraph.

Maybe my favourite thing about being a former (freelance) music writer ... is I really appreciate a regular wage that I don't have to chase people up for.

You folks are lucky to have worked with non-writers who were impressed with your work, particularly the ability to work with both speed and accuracy. I faced the other side of that when I briefly did some contractual copywriting work. It was hourly pay on the honor system, and there was always some grumbling among the PMs about how long it was taking the writers to churn out copy. The tacit suggestion seemed to be, "how long could it possibly take to write an eccomm?"

I've definitely noticed it working in health insurance. I'll have two, three days to compose a three-paragraph email.

Meanwhile, journalism training — combined with seven years of ghostwriting/editing work — has definitely affected my approach to writing fiction (a thing I am doing now). I don't write a word until I have a completed chapter outline, and then I treat each chapter like a freelance assignment and just start blasting, like, OK, in this "piece" the following three events must occur, and the whole thing has to come in at 1500 words — go!

I can very much vouch for Scott’s excellence in person as a speaker as much as he is a writer. A very fine thing! And I’ve seen him three times that way!

I don’t entirely know if I was already a fast writer (I was definitely a fast typist after taking a great high school class in it) or if doing music writing of some sort or another since late 1992 just brought it out further. But it helps either way.

Did you all know I was once a music writer? I gave up around 2002 bc I couldn’t handle the competitive environment but I could’ve probably pursued it further if I had enjoyed sharing my opinion more. Have absolutely used these writing skills in my day job work as…a writing teacher. 😀