Rolling Music Writers' Thread

holla

Update: I am enjoying writing and don't hate what I have written thus far.

It's easy though, in that I am no getting paid - and I know that cheeses off people in this thread whose livelihoods are diminished somehow because assholes like me will work without a paycheck. and I get that because there was a time I was resentful of writing for free after I established myself to some extent. I actually turned down writing for Magnet because they couldn't pay me when they first started and I was kicking myself when it became a pretty good magazine that wouldn't give me the time of day when I pitched them.

But getting on guest lists and maybe CDs (in my small sample size publicists seem very reluctant to send physical product to the likes of me) will help offset being a music junkie still even as I hurtle towards 50.

And dig this - I missed writing about music. I missed that feeling when I turned a phrase that I liked or made an observation that I thought was unique and informative.

There are negatives such as paying $500 for a real camera as my wife is learning to take photos so we can spend more time together and I don't have to take them. I was up really late writing and now I am tired with two jobs to do today.

But this weekend I (likely) have free tickets to see a two-day festival with a ton of great bands which would have set me back $160 including ticket fees. And last night I hung out with a publicist and "talked shop" and schmoozed a little and it felt like old times.

It's a work in progress but the positives outweigh the negatives thus far.

try having my inbox the day after anything I write goes up, see how much you enjoy writing then, or life

You can always quit. I didn't write for six years and somehow survived.

it doesn't matter if I quit or not, there is no statute of limitations on this shit, I still get hate mail about stuff I wrote years ago

I can see how that would get frustrating. Possibly you can change your email address.

I know how terrible it can be. I am friends with Kim Kelly who gets shit on constantly. I wouldn't want to deal with the shit she deals with.

Fortunately nobody much cares what I write except my editor, my wife and the publicists. And since I am only doing this because it's fun again, I will have zero problems stopping when it's not.

Catching up on some old bookmarks...

here's a thing I wrote about music writing way back when...way back.

https://medium.com/@markcoleman57/the-opposite-of-a-career-or-how-i-became-a-rock-critic-787020176542

― Dogshit Critic (m coleman), Tuesday, April 4, 2017 2:26 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Awesome read! When's part two coming out? ;)

it doesn't matter if I quit or not, there is no statute of limitations on this shit, I still get hate mail about stuff I wrote years ago

― a self-reinforcing downward spiral of male-centric indie (katherine), Thursday, April 20, 2017 2:35 PM (three weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Jesus, that sucks. Getting shitty hate mail would give me anxiety, for sure. For whatever it's worth, your review of the Austra album from earlier this year was the sole reason I checked out one of my favorite albums of the year.

yeah well the first result when you google me is a hate site so rip my chances of ever making a fucking living from now until the day I die in our age of employers googling you

the way I found this out incidentally is my sister visiting from fucking england, asking if I had a website, googling me and finding it. so no, quitting will not help because it is there forever

I think I found what you're talking about and it was like watching a badly programmed robot dismantle itself.

so if you have ever longed to live a life where you have to explain to your sister, who is crying because she doesn't understand why she upset you, the number of people who shit on you on a near-daily basis, a number that is positively correlated to the (sub-rent) amount of money you make, but never zero, then sure, by all means, become a music writer. at least actual celebrities have money and power and fans to insulate them. here you have all the visibility, and none of the insulation

katherine as someone who has admired your writing, particularly on TSJ, I have to tell you that the person on that page has no clue. Even when I think your opinions are different to mine I find your work stylish and brimming with a sense of personality, please do not let this become A Thing in your life

You're a brilliant writer. Sorry about all this shit you're going through.

Katherine, if it's any consolation, a lot of the writers who have been "ripped" regularly write for The New York Times and the New Yorker and whatever, so it's not exactly a death sentence

Normally when I tweet at people, they just block me or send GIFs of black women waving goodbye.

Fuck this guy for about twenty different reasons (not the least of which is being wrong about your writing).

Probably for another thread, but I'm astonished at what people say to each other online that they'd never (a lot of assuming here) say face-to-face. It may just be my age (37) but my online "personality" is the exact same as my real-life self, for better or worse.

RipFork taught me to be more thoughtful when spending roughly 20 minutes reviewing an album -- based off one skimmed listen -- just after being informed of a death in the family.

Imagine thinking of starting that website, having the time to do so, then actually following through for several years of your (presumably) adult life.

Whitest Words: cloying, oeuvre, orthodoxy, affectation, ubiquity, overwrought, incongruence, authorial, Sapphic, relegated, mimicry

fuck this dude for real

― condaleeza spice (The Reverend), Monday, January 4, 2010 6:54 AM (seven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Guy who operates a music-criticism mockery website to Roy Ayers: "You sound white."

http://www.cision.com/us/2017/06/jessica-hopper-mtv-news/

June 22, 2017/in Consumer & Lifestyle, Media Updates /by Cision Media Research

Jessica Hopper has left her role as editorial director of music for MTV News to join Spotify. She joined the network in 2016 after serving as senior editor for Pitchfork.

http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7849323/mtv-news-restructuring-shift-video

"MTV is restructuring once again. This time, the changes are focused on the MTV News department, which according to a source with knowledge of the situation is closing the chapter on what many saw as a bold and fascinating experiment in longform editorial. Multiple sources have told Billboard that layoffs are expected as early as today."

Yup. All the writers pretty much just got let go in a heap.

lol the video pivot. "how can we waste as much money as possible?"

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/IB4kTLN15y0/maxresdefault.jpg

Thank you, no.

utterly bizarre that someone —or many people— thought that Grantland should be recreated at MTV.com in the first place.

Maybe so, but a lot of sites were thinking along similar lines, wanting HuffPo, Buzzfeed numbers and deciding OK, let's hire a bunch of writers to write a bunch of tangy articles and put blisteringly clicky headlines all over them.. To work as a model you need a massive volume of articles per month/week/day. I think it can work but the payoff isn't immediate and quality control becomes a real problem

CLRVYNT is dead. I wrote one article for them - an interview with Kreator's Mille Petrozza, published in January. They never paid me for it.

let's hire a bunch of writers to write a bunch of tangy articles and put blisteringly clicky headlines all over them

that wasn't mtv's or grantland's strategy at all.

it was part of mtv's strategy -- the grantland-y stuff (which was always overstated IMO, The Ringer is a better fit) got all the press but a fairly significant part of what they actually published was exactly that

at least 50% of the actual content was stuff like this (and I realize pretty much every music site operates this way, but): http://www.mtv.com/news/3020995/jersey-shore-team-meatball-snooki-deena-sleepover/

sorry to go off-current-topic, but i've never read one of those "this album turns 20 today" pieces ... are they usually interviews w/ the artist? personal essays about how great the album is and how it affected the writer? some sort of "let's put this album in the context of 1997" look-back? a combo of these, or something else?

the latter two, usually

it depends on the outlet and the access

I've read good ones and terrible ones, depending on the outlet and writer and, importantly, editor.

utterly bizarre that someone —or many people— thought that Grantland should be recreated at MTV.com in the first place.

The stable of writers they assembled was outstanding, but I agree there was always a disconnect between the brand and the content. There was always a sense of "why am I reading a longform personal essay on MTV News?"

It's a shame the whole experiment couldn't have just been ported over to like a Rolling Stone.com, where it would have made more sense, and where the youth and diversity of online writers would have offered a nice corrective to the magazine's historic biases

i'd so much rather read an artist (and peripherally involved ppl) talking about a 20-year-old album, plus some writer-provided context of the time ... than the one i put in the middle.

anyway, thanks y'all. appreciate it.

mostly I'm just exhausted with the same old "hire 20-22-year-olds, possibly as permalancers, lay them off as 23-24-year-olds" churn being celebrated as a win for youth or social justice or anything like that. conditions are never as rosy as the puff pieces claim -- to take a non-music example, a lot has come out in recent months about the less-than-ideal editorial process and pay rate at Teen Vogue.

Being a writer sucks. Being a writer has always sucked. My life is defined by two competing quotes:

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money" - Samuel Johnson
"I write only because I cannot stop" - Heinrich von Kleist

mostly I'm just exhausted with the same old "hire 20-22-year-olds, possibly as permalancers, lay them off as 23-24-year-olds" churn being celebrated as a win for youth or social justice or anything like that. conditions are never as rosy as the puff pieces claim -- to take a non-music example, a lot has come out in recent months about the less-than-ideal editorial process and pay rate at Teen Vogue.

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Thursday, June 29, 2017 2:36 PM (forty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

at the very least I hope Lauren Duca is making a decent living for dragging Tucker Carlson.

anyway, between this and the new york times' copy editors it has been a thoroughly depressing week for media (also known as a week for media)

this is...... extensive http://www.spin.com/featured/the-mtv-news-experiment/

yeah, from time to time I worry that I am being overly paranoid/anxious about the state of the media, that I'm just projecting my own ~*quarterlife anxieties*~ and then I read things like this

also, I don't know the benefits situation, and I know the timing probably has more to do with the fiscal year than anything -- but if these positions came with any sort of health insurance (some permalance/temp jobs do) it's the icing on the cake to lay everyone off just as the Republican Party is about to get rid of it

“There’s this cycle that happens, that I was a part of. Someone gets the idea that they want editorial, and then a couple editors who all know the other editors are like ‘Come here, the faucet is on’,” Suarez said of the state of the industry. “And everyone runs to that faucet and it attracts the attention of higher-ups who realize there’s too much money coming out and shut it down. Then somebody you bring to your faucet gets their own faucet, and so you run over there.”

otm

yup

That Spin article deserves it's own thread.

just further validates my conviction that Chance is corny af.

spin made me take out a negative sentence i wrote about mtv in a review once. it was the best sentence!

i should find that column about pitchfork that jessica asked me to write that pitchfork wouldn't publish in their magazine. in retrospect though, i didn't really want to write a column about pitchfork. but, like samuel johnson, i can always use the money.

is journalistic "freedom" and "integrity" really a thing now though? especially on the internet. i don't really expect it. there are people with money and there is what they want to do with that money.

a thing that wasn't mentioned in the Spin article (I'm sure a lot wasn't) is how much vitriol MTV News writers got, particularly if a piece leaned progressive or against consensus, and yet Kings of Leon gets to spike a writer's story over "plays like an imprint of the last five years of music—neither a return to Kings of Leon’s svelte roots nor a reinvention worth investing in."