To the Paid Professionals of ILM

You might want to reconsider that last assumption for a number of us here.

I don't think I want to do it forever, I've no idea what else I'll end up doing though. Maybe write for TV or do radio work, in the music side of things aswell as regards radio. Not sure. Maybe write about non musical stuff too.

Real roof-over-head income: non-writing newspaper work.
Time dedicated to music writing a week: this week, z-i-l-c-h. Next week, maybe 20 hours.
Age: 26 and 50/52nds years old.
Career aspirations: To stop doing this to myself.
Percentage of my income derived from music writing: 20 to 50%

Yeah, Keith kinda beat me to it, but I was gonna tell Phil that he really needs to get over this. (Though I do hear that *Tracks pays quite their freelancers quite promptly, for whatever that's worth. Plus there's always the possibility of *NY Times op-ed pieces!)

Time dedicated to music writing a week: depends, from 5-15 hrs

Age: almost 38

Career aspirations: at this point, laughable.

Percentage of my income derived from music writing: 1%-2%.

Yes he would. That's basically what he already does. (I'm not even going to get into how wrong you are about how genres should be judged by the demographic they're made for. George Smith and Metal Mike Saunders have written better about emo and teenpop than just about any critics I've seen half their age. And the most thoughtful writing about rap and metal and country and techno tends to be done by generalists, not specialists, for the simple reason that generalists are much more likely the challenge the genres, not just toe the line.)

Time dedicated to music writing a week: until the start of this month, 10-15 hrs. I'm on strike right now (seriously), as the publisher of the magazine I work for more or less exclusively hasn't paid me yet for anything I've done this year. (Almost all freelancers at the magazine have stopped working for them, interesting times for all parties involved)

Age: almost 33

Career aspirations: stay on the radio, maybe at some point move into management. Also (my goal for this year): get into real DJ'ing

Percentage of my income derived from music writing: 30%, when I get paid that is :-(

(And yeah, if we're gonna count all the time we listen to or argue about or dance to music as part of our work hours, which maybe we should, then you can probably just about double my 60.)

xposts galore

I was thinking about this in another context the other day. I've been doing stand-up comedy lately. While I generally spend about an hour before I go on getting ready, and then about 5 or 6 hours a week actively writing material, I actually spend 24 hours a day (maybe minus sleeping time) gathering fodder, practicing mugging, developing fetishistic idiosyncracies, blahblahblah infinitum.
And since I've only had one paying gig so far, I've probably finally found a less lucrative career than reviewing records.

half the professions in the world to thread. if you're in, say, construction, then you spend your "off" time looking at buildings or reading about buildings or thinking about them. if you're a salesman, you spend your off time making contacts and checking out the competition and all that other stuff. etc.

so i'm going to have a hard time feeling sorry for all the hours y'all have to spend listening to records and dancing!

your money or your wife!!!

Nope, at that age they've just gotten hired by a daily paper.

"Does that mean I'm born washed-up?"
Don't be so hard on yourself. You had 23 good years in you before you were washed up!

Seriously, that does sound like a drag. "We need someone to cover John Hiatt at the State Fair."

And thanks Chuck. I'll try to think of some good'n's to ask you.

Infant shrieks + the Byrds = now I understand why you're the only one who insists Died Pretty are heavy metal.

Okay, couldn't resist. It's extremely impressive that you could feed those hungry mouths with Kix (the band, not the cereal) and Truth & Janey writings. Especially with strongo eating out of trashcans.

I'm 34, I write 3-4 hours a day and piss away the rest on ILM, housekeeping, shaving, running around, taking unnecessary trips, drinking, and also cooking. I worked temp jobs while freelancing until 1995, then entered I would say was the prime of my music journalist life, writing under constant deadline for about 20 magazines -- the punier the band in the bigger the magazine, the better. Hooray for getting Doo Rag, Drink Me, and Miss Murgatroid into Request, Mortiis in Details, Caroliner a full color page in AP, Thinking Fellers in CD Review, Napalm Death into Snowboarding, etc. Each successful pitch like that felt like a seditious victory. But at some point I had to channel my professional ambitions away from writing about music, and that would be the level where the celebrity system dominates. I decided I'd rather write about blimps and cell phone tower camoflage for Wired. Obviously Spin covers about 16 bands, Rolling Stone about 30, and my editor at Blender told me to [paraphrased] write using a box of Crayolas. I said, oh the 64-color set with the pencil sharpener, and he replied no, more like the 16 box. If I were Raymond Scott, I'd write a javascript program to generate that kind of review automatically, but if I wanted to make money by killing myself I would have gone to law school. If you're resourceful in what you write and how you live, you can really enjoy yourself freelancing.

Along the way I paid the rent as a bluegrass fiddler, videogame test pilot, condenast web producer, world trade center financial minion, colgate international marketing powerpoint slide creator, modern dance composer, DJ, newsletter editor, vegetable chopper, scavenger, music producer, mafia bartender (one night only, but it was fun), and window dresser at Urban Outfitters.

Anyway, after many years of now I'm a book author, SOUND of the BEAST is in its second paperback press and pushing 50,000 copies in print, and I'm finishing a novel about a satanic scare in a midwestern town during the 1980s. I feel like I learned how to write through 10,000 unsupervised record reviews, and though I wrote long letters to Don Kaye and Mike Gitter as a teenager quizzing them about their jobs, I'm glad they never answered because there's really no career path in writing per se. It's more like swimming up a waterfall.

PS Yo Chuck did you get my last mail?

I do think that as I've grown older, the idea of writing about music or even DJing has made less and less sense, for two basic reasons, one being the need I feel to make as much money as I can to save for retirement, and the other fairly close to what Phil described here: becoming more and more attached to music of the past and feeling unable to be 'relevant' to a younger demographic.

I think it's great if there are people over 40 who are able to hear new music and still be excited about it without filtering it through all the baggage of several decades of experienced music listening (and I know they are out there, surely John Peel is awesome in this regard). I just know that for me personally, once "new music" stopped being very exciting for me, I lost the inspiration to do any of these things. When I used to DJ on the radio, there were new bands coming out of England every week that thrilled me and I was enthusiastic about sharing them with others, through DJ'ing or writing. But that was a long time ago.

Time dedicated to music writing a week: less with every new week. 3/4 days per month for Uncut-related activity. Time Out/Wire stuff done on an as-and-when basis (currently for "Wire" read "nil").

Age: far too old for this shit, as Danny Glover was prone to say in the Lethal Weapons movies.

Career path: two years ago I thought that by now I would have been able to jack in the NHS and earn my living entirely through writing. Not only is this not the case, but I'm rather glad I held on to the day job, which does provide a stable social environment that freelance writing just doesn't enable. A full-time treadmill I do not find very inviting - the old "when you have to write about music as a chore, that's when the alarm bells ring" warning rings true. I'm at the periodic point where listening to/enjoying to/doing other things to music is far more life-enhancing/justifying than writing about it.

Um...who are you?? (Wait, did you write that Ill Bill and Necro spec review??? If that's what you're referring to, I kinda liked it.)

I mainly seem to write for pay about film, although I also hustle grants and work copy-writing gigs for non-profits and the like. I’m doing more ‘straight’ journalism, but am I’m looking forward to my novel—dealing with information technology control, extreme mental illness and Depeche Mode--coming out next year. A new novel ferments as I type. I'll prolly be doing this til I croak.

But chuck that's what's so fun!

Anyway generalists on dance music can only ever have the ability to write about maybe 10 percent of the records.

Cool is as dead as God. It is my aspiration to convince 15-year-olds of this.

I'm 50, write about music/culture whenever anyone is willing to read, talk about it to anyone who will listen, hours and hours every day. Avg time spent writing things that I could potentially/conceivably get paid for is 1 hr day, if even that, since record reviewing is not the form of writing or thinking that I most naturally fall into. Most of that hour is spent doing blindfold tests on records that I never review.

In early '80s I earned money as legal proofreader, late '80s to late '90s as technical editor for environmental and engineering firms. Now all my money comes from record reviews; result, I am falling further into debt. This has to do with my work habits more than with lack of opportunity, in that the opportunity to write for pay exists but the opportunity to write what I want is far less. Career aspiration is to help create a great conversation.

But what if you didn't want to write about any of them? (Except the Dixie Cups, about whom I know nothing.)

You aspire admirably and create greatly. Many thanks for that.
Sincerely,