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

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

meanwhile this is very much in my wheelhouse in terms of the music being covered and i think this is the most irritating example of "noisey voice" i've encountered

In hindsight it's no coincidence that Panic Stations contains a song called "Over It Now." At this point they were also over you, the person who thought they were too cool to listen to anything that wasn't approved by Pitchfork.

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/motion-city-soundtrack-in-memoriam

xp I know, and it's a shame for a lot of good young writers who just need a bit of help to get better. Really basic stuff like: This needs examples. This generalisation is weak. This transition doesn't make sense. Opinion pieces particularly need that attention because they're much harder than interviews or album reviews.

gotta say it is weird being in the position of being the one in this thread to tell everyone to be less optimistic. also I'm aware a lot of my posts are pretty much the worldview equivalent of straining to avoid any personal responsibility. (also "big deal, you grew up well-off and had big dreams that have to be retrofitted into a beyoncé-shaped box" could very, very well be applied to those and/or me, see "immunity")

katherine but you don't condescend to the realities of the present day while trying to make yourself seem 'smart,' which is a lot of my objection to the nu-didion brigade

http://www.mtv.com/news/2794813/vanderpump-rules-tegan-sara

maura otm

anyway this essay is quite well written and not about music but belongs in the conversation as it speaks grimly to a number of your concerns Kat:
http://thebaffler.com/salvos/rest-advertising

the glazed ham of $4 a word is spoiled more than a bit by these ghosts of christmas future:

I began to wonder if, like me, this veteran editor was just trying to earn his fee. How much was he making, I wondered? How much does an editor who presided over an industry’s golden age receive to consult for the same industry during its hospice years? Did he hate himself too, at least a little bit, for using his decades of expertise to gin up propaganda for corporations that, were he to approach them as a journalist, would shoo him away with a curt “no comment”?

My questions became nagging anxieties and then, over the next few nights, a full-blown existential crisis. I was a month away from the release of my first book, a critical treatment of the big tech companies and the world they’ve made for us, and here I was sweating over an assignment glorifying some of those same companies. And I couldn’t even figure out how to do it properly! I had the impression, common to many anxiety sufferers, that my problems were self-made but also eminently real. This sentiment merged with a number of other ugly feelings—my disgust toward the media establishment, my distaste for advertising, my profound frustration with the older editor, my fear that I would be grinding out bullshit work like this for the rest of my days—until I thought that I just couldn’t do it. I began to wonder how I would explain to my spouse that, because I couldn’t finish this assignment, we would have to change our names and move to a foreign country. It all made a kind of sense.

Because it’s a venture-capital-funded company, valuing growth above profit, Casper can afford to spend lavishly on product sample giveaways for potentially influential fans, whether they’re magazine journalists or Kylie Jenner, who once Instagrammed a photo of her Casper mattress. My Maxim source mentioned that colleagues at BuzzFeed also received free mattresses last year—and in February, BuzzFeed published a sponsored post authored by Casper, followed in March and June by glowing reports about the company, one written by a freelancer, the other by a BuzzFeed staffer. As the staffer’s article noted, BuzzFeed and Casper “share some investors.”

In the case of Maxim, Casper naturally hoped for something in return for its largesse. After the mattresses went mostly unreturned (one of the company’s selling points is that you can send back a mattress you don’t like), a PR rep began probing Maxim, asking where the coverage was. The site’s editorial director asked a gathering of staffers if any of them had accepted the free mattresses. About ten hands went up, representing nearly $10,000 in gifts. That was too much, the editorial director decided. They would have to write an article. Eventually, the site published a Q&A with one of Casper’s founders.

On the face of it, this is a familiar tale: wherever free product samples appear, positive coverage is not far behind. But there’s an added twist. In addition to its giveaway initiative, Casper had a little something going on the side. After the mattress haul, three Maxim staffers were approached by the same PR firm to find out if they wanted to interview for positions at Van Winkle’s, a new website dedicated to “smarter sleep and wakefulness.” In May, Matt Berical, a Maxim editor, decided to jump ship for the new venture.[*] It is not immediately clear who sponsors VanWinkle.com, but if you poke around, you’ll land on a familiar name: “Van Winkle’s is published,” says the site’s About page, “by Casper Sleep, Inc.”

Getting steady requests from good editors and earning money for nice food + air fare are all I hope for in the market.

read it, but getting those $4-a-word gigs, however dismal, is also a door closed to me

feel like a broken record at this point but I'm pretty sure the latest noisey kanye piece is the worst music writing ever

Even by the standards of "a Noisey thinkpiece about Kanye West," that was fucking horrible.

xp I know, and it's a shame for a lot of good young writers who just need a bit of help to get better. Really basic stuff like: This needs examples. This generalisation is weak. This transition doesn't make sense. Opinion pieces particularly need that attention because they're much harder than interviews or album reviews.

― impossible raver (Re-Make/Re-Model), Wednesday, March 16, 2016 8:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not that i've ever had much in the way of any sort of advice, but i wish as a young writer i'd received ~career advice - like, how to navigate and progress through this industry if you want it to be long-term. the writing stuff you figure out on your own, most good writers i know agonise over the minutiae like that anyway (if anything being more relaxed about your writing might be better advice for certain personality types). but the career stuff, how to figure out where the next step up the ladder should be when you're not in a defined workplace, how to get different types of work and maybe even a slightly better income, all of that i'm still at a loss about. but then "how to think in long-term career terms" is apparently not such a problem for others

Holy shit, the Casper press page just goes on forever:

https://casper.com/press/

Is there a writer out there not sleeping on one of these things?

from that link, disappointing 404s of our time: http://stylecaster.com/how-i-got-rid-of-my-boyfriends-ghosts-of-girlfriends-past/

Is there a writer out there not sleeping on one of these things?

i am ikea and proud

i am ikea and not proud

who says freelancers sleep?

xp Career advice is hard — I've hardly received any — because so little is universally applicable. I could write it in a postcard:

1. Write well and relatively fast.
2. Be well organised
3. File clean copy on time and never let an editor down.
4. Be pleasant to deal with even when you disagree with your editor.
5. Say yes more often than no.
6. Write for a range of titles (if you can) in case one goes out of business.
7. Write about a range of subjects in a range of formats (if you can). Everyone gets pigeonholed but make your pigeonhole as broad as possible.

The rest is luck.