Rolling Music Writers' Thread

Only just saw this, sorry for that (full week last week). Wish I had more concrete advice to offer but ultimately I'd say you'd want to find your best balance in what is ever more increasingly a shifting-sands landscape. And I've long since concluded that there is absolutely no one sure way to do that.

Brad, nooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I know, man. I KNOW. I have had very real frustrations in the last 2-3 years and felt myself close to walking away, too. But you're too smart and knowledgeable and insightful to leave this profession. So stay.

(Your review of the last Green Day album was deeply on point. Did I mention that?)

https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8530075/spin-stereogum-vibe-layoffs

Lay-offs at Spin, Stereogum, and Vibe. Includes an ilxor or maybe several.

Several friends posted updates on social media yesterday. Ugh.

Bezos shut down on 1 day notice the Express, a free Washington Post published paper that employed some arts writers

https://www.washingtonian.com/2019/09/13/the-washington-post-killed-express-in-such-a-shabby-way/

Owner of the OC Weekly suddenly shut down that Orange County , California publication

Jeff Weiss tweet excerpt: LA Weekly, OC Weekly, East Bay Express, and San Diego City Beat destroyed by greedy mayonnaise brained ghouls in the last 2 years alone. That’s basically four of the five biggest markets in California. Can’t stress how deep the impact is.

Greg Kot took a buyout at the Chicago Tribune, which is currently capitulating to new corporate overlord Alden Global Capital. He was always great to me, and a boon to the beleaguered major city paper beat.

https://www.robertfeder.com/2020/02/05/music-critic-greg-kot-leaving-chicago-tribune/

Kot taking a buyout and retiring as Chicago Tribume music critic at age 62.

Still gonna do radio show

I liked his book Ripped.

I wonder if Chicago Tribune will hire a replacement

My guess is they will appoint a nominal replacement, but everything I hear I hear out of there is dire. DeRogatis's wife worked in the arts section, and she just took a buyout, too. Budgets (and assignments) have been decimated.

Chicago Tribune has done itself no favors. Just running itself into the ground for the last decade plus. Endorsed Gary Johnson ffs. Best wishes to Kot who is by all accounts an incredibly good human.

A friend tweeted "I honestly don't remember a time when Kot wasn't the pop music critic of the Trib," which is the same for me. He'd been in that role since 1990. I haven't read his Trib reviews in a while, but I'm a longtime Sound Opinions listener, and I've always been super-impressed with his thoughtfulness and the range of music he's open to (including jazz and international stuff).

In other news , the Ringer that has some music coverage, has unionized, but it also got bought by Spotify.

This applies to any kind of online writing.

I'm sure most do already, but if you have any kind of writing on a blog or a web page, I'd start backing it up on a flash drive or something. I was thinking that some of these platforms just aren't going to survive this. You would hope they'd give notice, but you never know. I've had a homepage on Tripod (true!) for 20+ years, so--always figuring they'd disappear overnight one day--I've already done this, and also with a couple of WordPress-related things.

I should do that Clemenza. A few publications I have written for , changed how the archived material, so the articles are now gone , although the publications are holding on.

The Austin-American Statesman has eliminated the music/arts writer position of Joe Gross who had been there full time for 18 plus years, and writing for them for nearly 20. Joe also wrote a 33 & 1/3 on Fugazi ‘s In on the Killtaker

I haven't had contact with Joe for 25 years, but he contributed to a couple of issues of a fanzine I put out in the '90s--hasn't he been with Rolling Stone, too?

yes.

have been more or less continuously burnt out since 2013 but lately it seems particularly bad (not helping: all the opportunities I've squandered that might have improved outcomes for me)

Sorry about that. It's rough out there

there just seems to be no winning. either you write a lukewarm-to-negative review and are yelled at for years (I'm still hearing from j*hn m*yer fans) from stans, or you write a positive review and are yelled at because you couldn't force yourself to dislike an album by an artist the internet has deemed a "plant" (a label that seems to be applied incredibly selectively, out of the pool of people it could be applied to). and that too has no statute of limitations

(or you don't write a review and then are yelled at because you aren't approaching it the right way and aren't "grounded in music," as we have seen)

The internet is full of idiots who will yell at you regardless. The only person you need to please as a critic is yourself (and obviously your commissioning editor).

A shitty Britpop band started a hate thread about me on their official Twitter page last week in response to an NME review I wrote 21 years ago. The thread was full of people saying horrible, shitty things about me that bore no relationship to reality, and a few of these numbnuts started posting messages on my personal website. It was annoying, but it died out a couple of days later, and it doesn't matter. Don't let these assholes get you down, Katherine - you can't win with them, and they don't deserve your concern or attention. Just write the review that aligns closest with how you feel in that moment. That's all you can do. If they don't like it they can choke on it.

that's awful, I'm really sorry

(that said, in the latter case, it isn't coming from "idiots" but colleagues I respect. and yet I cannot force myself to dislike the artists in question or think their music is bad. shaming has not accomplished it.)

You shouldn't! And if those colleagues aren't idiots then they'll respect that you won't dislike those artists just because they won't. I know this sort of thing can be rough, especially as a freelancer. But in the end, the only thing you can do is be true to yourself and let the chips fall when they may. You have to believe other people will respect your fidelity to your own beliefs, and if they don't, well, you could never have won them over anyway.

The Shed Seven thing was more bizarrely amusing and a depressing index on how thick huge swathes of people can be, really. The thing that bummed me out was this insinuation that, even 21 years ago, I was some kind of cynical hack out to take bands down and be cruel, when actually I've spent most of my career championing lost causes and leftfield artists. (Also, the review they were pilloring me for was legit awful, so I didn't even want to defend myself). But at the end of the week I had a conversation with one of my favourite artists who told me that a question I'd asked him and his bandmate in an interview a year before had helped them confront issues in their relationship, and led to them making music together again. It's that sort of thing that really matters, not the yelling from people who don't like what you like.

https://www.startribune.com/city-pages-is-closing-ending-the-era-of-alternative-weeklies-in-twin-cities/572897771/

City Pages is being shut down in Minneapolis. Occasional ilxor Ke*th H*rris was an editor there. Bad decision, partially Covid driven.

this sucks all around but yeah keith is one of the best living music writers and it sucks to see him out of the job

sorry should've google-proofed

The biggest of bummers.

I don’t think anyone should publish a year-end list in 2020. The plague has completely fucked the musical ecosystem. Artists who can't tour are out the money they'd have spent publicizing their albums, which skews critics' attention even more heavily than usual toward the shit that bigger labels can afford to push their way. If you *must* run a list this year, run it like a mutual aid society. Draw attention to artists who really, really need the spotlight to shine on them for just a minute. Pop acts already have all the money and most of the attention; do they really deserve the critical love, too? In my heart of hearts I believe that if more than 25% of your year-end list is made up of major label releases, you're a lazy hack and should get out of the game, because you're not helping artists.

That doesn’t really work in the pop/r&b space, where majors sign cool/interesting/offbeat artists pretty quickly these days.

https://memecrunch.com/meme/C3S7I/guess-whos-back-back-again/image.jpg

"I’m not going to say we’re retarded, or slow, although both things have definitely been said about us and, sadly, more than once, but we just haven’t grown up much."

https://www.spin.com/2020/11/times-flies-when-youre-having-fun-spin-is-35/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/arts/music/minneapolis-city-pages-music.html

Keith H in NY Times on legacy of music critic writing in the now shut down City Pages in Minneapolis

Cool.

I write one album review a month for a publication that has to cover certain "big" albums, which means often I'm reviewing something to meet the publication's priorities. Which is fine! I fully understand how this all works, and I appreciate that they let me hang around.

But I'd like to find a place to review smaller, more underground / fringe stuff. I'd really love to avoid a super competitive pitch environment and just find a low-key / DIY-type spot that will let me do a review or two per month on stuff I'm interested in / excited about. (While I believe strongly that writers should get paid for their work and have been doing so for many years, I'm willing to do this for free for a place that's trying to cover cool stuff on a shoestring budget.)

Anyone write for (or know of) a place that sounds like it fits the bill?

Aquarium Drunkard?

I run Burning Ambulance and am very open to contributions. What have you got in mind? Email burning ambulance at gmail if you like...

Have written for Aqua Drunkard, which I love and am proud to have some bylines there and hope to have more. And thanks for the heads up, unperson. What you're doing is (and always has been) awesome. I may very well take you up on that.

I probably wasn't very clear. I'm not so much saying "Who's taking pitches" ... more like trying to get a sense for what other sites are out there that do something like this: http://post-trash.com/reviews

But not, like, Pitchfork and other big places that everyone is trying to crack.

Hit me up too if interested.

You mean for Humanizing the Vacuum, or something else? (Sorry, I don't keep up with the Web these days.)

RIP Ed Ward---good interview from the Fresh Air archives, replayed this week: can read, stream, download (incl.one of his early faves, by the "5" Royales)https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994267788/fresh-air-remembers-rock-historian-ed-ward
He was our rock historian from 1987 until 2017, sharing music he loved. Asked if he listens to much recent music, he replies,Oh, I listen mostly to contemporary rock music. It's only when I have to do these shows that I pull out...

GROSS: (Laughter) We make you go back to those old records.

WARD: I pull out the old records and go, geez. This happens to other people too,

Oh, somebody just sent me this:
John Wojtowicz

hey there

There's a discussion about the recently deceased Ed Ward, along with links to obit here:

https://www.metafilter.com/191367/This-year-I-have-made-just-over-1000-from-writing

So now here's my question, which is an issue taken up in the discussion:

In this article:

https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/music/2021-05-05/the-table-ed-ward-built

There's this passage:

I asked whether the first volume of his remarkable rock history – which reported events sequentially, annually, starting with the advent of the phonograph and popular music, rather than a series of profiles of the major artists – had sold.
“No, it was sabotaged,” he reported from across the table. “Fresh Air refused to have me on after 30 years of talking about this particular subject on the air for very little money for them. It killed the book and killed my career. No idea if this is true or how true except lack of their coverage no doubt didn't help the book. But: there are a lot of rock music histories, and 30 years of using his stuff, even for very little money (it being NPR), seems like it would have helped some re exposure, during the decades in which his byline was no longer often spotted(but as noted in the Mike Bloomfield thread, his already-good bio of MB was refreshed w updates by ilxor eddhurt a few years ago).

Obit in the NY Times today:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/business/media/ed-ward-dead.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage

Anybody watch some of those panels associated with the writer Dave Marsh event Land of Hope and Dreams?

https://greilmarcus.net/2021/05/08/listening-past-the-myths-dave-marsh-panel/?fbclid=IwAR2nL5ynvKQh0NLuK6ghwfEPACZuS2GdKi_EdAwuxPj-G2jCtpgf6B-UiF4

Greil Marcus joined Robert Christgau, Greg Tate, Ann Powers (w/ moderator Lauren Onkey) to discuss Dave Marsh and his work, one of many panels in the Land of Hope and Dreams event taking place throughout the month of May (still ongoing, more details here)

The funniest part for me was some of the captioning. E.g., "See if we can get Greil and Greg back on" =

https://phildellio.tripod.com/zoom.jpg

Uh oh . Ha