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

yeah i feel like ILM is badly in need of a rolling discussion thread for recent music writing that isn't framed around WORST EVERRRR hyperbole

i've started GOOD music writing threads before. and on those the crickets hang themselves with nooses they make out of the tumbleweeds drifting by.

but there have been decent rolling threads in the past.

fwiw, the piling on here is really very mild compared to the parade of "yeah, man, this guy really nailed how I feel" i observed on twitter yesterday.

i came here to whine about the piece because Music Twitter seemed solidly supportive of it, tbh

yeah i feel like ILM is badly in need of a rolling discussion thread for recent music writing that isn't framed around WORST EVERRRR hyperbole

it would be overstating the case to say "there isn't any," but there's so little that I feel a thread would probably be too much. the age of instant takes has not made for good music writing.

I tend to praise stuff in band/act threads.

when i was 23 and getting into music writing ilxors clowned my opinions and i either learned from what they were talking about or learned that they could be stupid, depending

tell us more what you've learned in the intervening years

mtv news piece could've stood an edit where the writer got deeper into why x works and y doesn't beyond "[lyric quote]," as it is it feels v anecdotal and relies on a lot of assumed rubrics

prob lost five potential jobs typing that sentence

none of the ideas in that piece hold up to any inspection, and yeah i posted something here because i was surprised how positive people were on it elsewhere and wanted to commiserate in a place where i feel i don't need to pedantically and tediously unpack all the ways it doesn't make sense coupled with sensitively trying to understand where the author is coming from, why they might be pushing their anxieties onto bands that just flitted across their radar, and what real ideas might be hiding in there etc.

and i don't see any percentage in arguing that people shouldn't pick on a piece that's so casually nasty to decent bands -- if you're writing something like that you're begging for pushback, you're clawing your way into the center of the conversation, and you want an expect people to disagree because that's the point. the failure is people aren't disagreeing with the thesis, they're just sort of disassembling the entire edifice of hot take pretending to say something big, so they're not disagreeing on the terms the piece might like. (and i think the people that are agreeing with the piece can't be agreeing with what it actually says, because it just doesn't hold water, but instead they're agreeing with the side of the conversation its staking out, because i mean, is there really a place in the world where you would say "all day every day, its diiv and porches, what is going on where are we going as a society" because those particular bands are so very saturated?)

but yeah, maybe we should have a thread with a more modest title like "rolling picking on other people's writing"

so just as the author of that piece might say "its not those bands, its that they're emblematic of a wave of bands" i'd say "its not this piece, its that its emblematic of a wave of pieces" and i think i'd be on more solid ground tbqh.

On top of everything, Porches are right up there with Hinds as far as the most shitty buzz band music I've heard all year

i saw them live once and felt like the songs were deliberately receding from what could've been hooks and idk i have no time for that in indie rock

it's a lousy piece. i can't tell what it is about.

the title purports to be an expose on wm supremacy in indie rock, yet most of the piece is comparing about a handful of wm indie rock bands.

twice it talks about the successes of pop music in saying important things about issues. it seems like a setup to maybe going into detail on some non-traditionally covered acts. nope.

at one point he starts to talk about women musicians. out of three, two of them are noted for their connections to the wm indie rock bands he was decrying at the start.

so i am left w a piece that complains about the very thing that it is contributing to.

twice it talks about the successes of pop music in saying important things about issues

by this, i mean he literally says "pop music has important things to say" and provides zero examples. yet we hear all about Animal Collective not being as good as Built to Spill

a) if you post in a thread called "OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?" you are also inviting pushback, especially considering the title is a direct question and all
b) I don't know if "lost five potential jobs writing that sentence" is supposed to be sarcasm or not but I'm already on every possible shit list so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
c) my point isn't and never was "don't pick on the young writers!" but that basically no one is able or willing to acknowledge that said picking-on (and praise) of writers selective, how it's selective or why. the only reason I have not ended up in this thread dozens of times is that in some point in my twitch plays writer of a career I said or did the right thing, probably inadvertently.

b) I don't know if "lost five potential jobs writing that sentence" is supposed to be sarcasm or not but I'm already on every possible shit list so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

it's totally not sarcasm, just a lot of accumulate frustration

the only reason I have not ended up in this thread dozens of times is that in some point in my twitch plays writer of a career I said or did the right thing, probably inadvertently.

lol i feel this way all the time, or at least am still patiently waiting for this thread to be bumped with something i wrote

anyway did we ever figure out what the worst piece of music writing is

i'm working on it now

rolling really good music reviews (not necessarily positive)

there is still time to reach this goal on that thread:

five responses by 2017

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive)

tell us more what you've learned in the intervening years

― bamcquern, Wednesday, 16 March 2016 03:58 (11 hours ago) Permalink

If you were curious yes you're one of the people whose opinions I've spent a decade plus ignoring

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/27/Morton_Umbrella_Girl.png

fwiw when I was 23 I was constantly worried about colleagues' opinions, and given where I am now arguably I should have been more worried

23 is young. it's like 12 in human years now. people get better at stuff later now.

I never really cared what other writers thought. Half the time, I didn't even read the other stuff in the magazines that published me. I always cared a lot about what my editors thought, though. As long as I could keep them thinking "this guy's copy arrives clean and on time" I had work. I didn't start getting paid to write until I was 25, though, and I was doing it at night and on weekends after working in an auto parts warehouse all day.

i didn't start writing about music until i was 30. the first music writing i ever EVER wrote in my entire life was a long lead review in the village voice. no pressure. it sucked. but i got better at it. i tried really hard. by the time i was 32 i didn't feel so embarrassed to be in the same section as greg tate and ta-nehisi coates.

the thing is, in writer years 23 is not young at all

Sure it is. Plenty of first-time authors are in their 30s and 40s. And most people under 30 should be encouraged to shut the fuck up anyway.

that voice section spurred me on too. to get better. i remember reading something by keith harris and going fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck....it was so good and clear and FUNNY. it made me try harder. don't know if internet writers have this same sort of inspiration. the blog-centric view is kind of a lonely one. the interweb vacuum.

no offense but things are very different now than when either of you were writing regularly

What's "regularly" in your mind? I only stopped actively pitching new outlets last year. I may not be competing to crank out listicles for Gawker blogs, but I publish every single month. Are you gonna throw the p-word at me now?

I have no idea what the "p-word" is and "writing regularly" was a bad choice of phrase (I still have no idea who you are), but as it stands, in the current music writing ecosystem if you (general plural "you") are not on track to be regularly poached by age 24 the fact that you are not dead is a systemic oversight.

I still have no idea who you are

Me, me, me

i'd expand katherine's point to the general writing ecosystem and add to "poached" "getting carried by established editors from place to place"

i mean i'm certain it sounds dismal to most but it's true to my experiences over the past five years

my stuff has been almost excusively print-based. so, yeah, i was out of whatever picture i was in a long time ago. i don't even want to know what the fast-paced world of internet music writing is like. the majority of it sucks so bad. or its just boring and barely there. or just a buyer's guide.

katherine and Brad, here's a reassuring thought from an old head:

Young, poachable social media-enabled media stars are very much a MUST HAVE when, like companies wanna throw money at things — I remember when me and @maura had our little turn in the sun around 2009; but the real players in the game are the long distance runners who quietly turn in pieces clean and on time and will always get work when an editor asks another editor "hey, who is good," which is the stuff the industry is actually run on

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

"everything i say should be a hip-hop poachable"

speaking from both sides of the proverbial table, whiney is right

also, social media heat very rarely runs exactly equivalent to wider cultural impact. so what if all these didion wannabes who are younger than you are dazzling editors with their ability to implicitly flatter their own rapidly advancing ages. ask any former 20something-ingenue-of-the-moment how it all worked out in their 30s and beyond.

(i find the didion wannabe army sorta boring tbh. big deal, you grew up well-off and had big dreams that have to be retrofitted into a beyoncé-shaped box.)

being "the stuff the industry is run on" is cool and all unless you have ambitions or want to ever make a living wage or have money for retirement

being "the stuff the industry is run on" a writer is cool and all unless you have ambitions or want to ever make a living wage or have money for retirement

it works for some people. at any rate this thread has been derailed, mostly by me, so apologies, not that what it was derailed from was much better

I'm saying, k, this is a surer and clearer path to alla that

B)

"not that what it was derailed from was much better"

everyone's a critic...

Especially the critics

Now I feel bad for piling onto a young writer who's streets ahead of most of the pieces that end up in this thread but he got plenty of praise on Twitter & FB so as long as he doesn't visit ILX he'll be just fine. Tbh all of the fairly mild criticisms made here should have made by his editor before the piece appeared.

a good editor is hard to find