Rolling Music Writers' Thread

the mark richardson thing about lovely music in stylus is pretty much verbatim all the first person objections ur spoutin btw but imo its top5 great but I suppose its kinda like how it used to be pretty awesome when Buffy had to make some inspirational speech but in the last series she did it every episode and it was really tiresome?

xp (And I just used "yourself" twice in one sentence, duh.)

Anyway, first person is a tool, like any other tool. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. (As an editor at the Voice, I was frequently known to edit sentences from pitch emails back into submitted reviews in part because the emails did use the first person, and sounded less stiff and stilted and more conversational in the process. I.e., sometimes it helps make for better writing just because that's how people talk. So I've never bought the idea that "writing for a paycheck" required "detaching yourself from the subject.")

Again, i'm not saying that it's always bad, but there's not a lot of writers who can pull it off without sounding like My First Fanzine

"The first time I saw Spoon..."

So why would print them (unless it was a really good fanzine?)

Still, especially when space on the page is at a premium -- which it was even when wordcounts could get away with being ten times higher than they are now -- wasted words are wasted words, "I" included. (Though at least "I" is a fairly short word.)

the mark richardson thing about lovely music in stylus

Think you mean Mike Powell, but Mark Richardson is a good example of someone who uses the first person to excellent effect in his Resonant Frequency column.

oops yeah

If you can write entertainingly, I forgive your first person narrative.

xhuxk on point

xp "So why would print them?", I meant.

Anyway, bottom line is, no fucking way does the the detached pseudo-objective tone used in most glossies and daily newspapers make for better music writing than what I was printing week in and week out in the Voice for ten years (though sure, a few pieces I published may have sounded "Internetty" or whatever. Point was to have lots of different voices, so it'd be a miracle if anybody approved of all of them. I didn't want to ban Internetty writing -- which can be good too, sometimes -- either.)

On the other hand, I like the creativity with which guys like Sanneh at the Times have managed to get around the limitations against first person and swear words. A smart writer can work within those perimeters, too, and make it entertaining anyway.

its funny you mention sanneh--his profile of michael savage in the nyer from a couple weeks ago was very careful about not using "i" (which i think is generally a no-go in the nyer, except in the personal essays they publish every once in a while) but still managed to tell a set of interesting stories about sanneh's own encounters w/ savage that sort of hinged on sannehs own specific experiences trying to set up an interview... in the end, though, i thought it would have been a better piece if they had let him use an authorial I

wow that got convoluted

I thought about that, too.

Over the years, Savage has noticed that his disdain for the mainstream media is widely reciprocated ... So when he received an e-mail from a journalist asking for an interview, he was deeply suspicious. He read the e-mail on the air — he kept the writer anonymous, and didn’t mention that the request came from The New Yorker — and then asked his listeners, “Should I do the interview or not?”…

About a week later, Savage revisited the topic — “my continuing correspondence with a big-shot magazine writer.” He quoted the latest exchanges, along with his tart response, in which he asked, “Why must all of you in the extreme media paint everyone you disagree with as demonic? Why is the homosexual agenda so important to the midstream media?”

...

When he invited the journalist into one of his undisclosed locations, he proved to be a first-rate host, chatty and solicitous. A steady supply of beer refills lubricated the conversation (one of his earliest books was “The Taster’s Guide to Beer,” which was published in 1977), and as the temperature dropped and the sky above Berkeley started to turn orange, he seemed to be working hard to stay suspicious, despite himself. On his next show the next day, a caller asked how the interview had gone, and Savage described his interlocutor: "If I told you he looked like Obama, I wouldn't be far from the truth." Coming from him, this sounded like a deeply twisted compliment.

Sanneh has to resort to speaking of himself in the third person ("the journalist," "his interlocutor") but otherwise does a decent job with passive-ish phrases like "a steady supply of beer refills lubricated the conversation."

no i think you're OTM, that NYer piece was convoluted. it read to me like sanneh had a personal 1 on 1 reaction to savage that was quite different than what he expected and the resulting article would have been more effective and immediate using the "I" but the NYer has always employed a certain lofty distance from its subjects, even in the 70s it wasn't really into the personal/new journalism thing. well apart from pauline kael I guess.

but journalists do have to meet readers half-way. my problem with a lot of the vintage village voice stuff is that it's so personal to the point of being impenetrable or off-putting.

the best first person stuff illustrates how the subject of an interview interacts with other people, rather than "setting the scene"

i'm guessing whiney's not big on fiction as a rule.

I'm not big on fiction as a rule either, and one of the principles that was drilled into me when I started writing was that first-person is something you have to earn--expecting the reader who's never heard of you before to go along with I-I-I-me-me-me instead of saying "So what?" and moving to the next item is not generally a good idea--but I love first person writing even if (despite whatever reputation I may have for it due to the 33 1/3 book) I don't use it all that often professionally.

matos if you don't mind me asking: you're not big on fiction as a journalistic device or (gasp) you don't like reading novels?

I don't write fiction or about music, but first-person is the default in my area of writing (analytic philosophy). Sometimes we resort to the royal "we" if we're feeling nervous about first-person. But it was made clear to me that third-person is to be avoided, as is passive voice.

hang on, you're not big on reading fiction...at all?!

xp!

xp I don't buy the "have to earn" thing. I'm not even sure what it means. If I listen to a song sung in the first person, I might be able to relate to, and be moved by, the song even if I'm unaware of the singer's specific biography. Not sure why reviews are necessarily different. You don't have to be a famous writer to have a life that creates a context.

i thought he meant less that you have to earn it in the sense of being already famous or noteworthy, but in the sense that you have to earn it through your writing--i.e. you have to justify use of the first person in the piece itself, not necc explicitly, but at least in making your "I" of interest to the reader

When it's well done - and it does have to be superbly well done, and yes, generally (but not always) "earnt" - first-person music writing is my favourite of all music writing. (And when it's pointlessly done, the reverse holds true.)

For my own part, I avoid it at least 95% of the time - but then I come from a personal-blogging background, and taking "myself" out of the equation was a deliberate, sought objective.

My first piece at the Voice (when no reader could've had any idea who I was) and a couple soon after were in the first person, fwiw. I seriously doubt they would have improved if the "I"'s had been edited out. (Whether they stunk regardless is another question, but they wouldn't have stunk less.)

Editorial "we" -- first person plural -- bugs the hell out of me no matter what, though. I never buy it, and I've fought editors to keep it out of my own writing (which usually they've been open to).

And btw, I've also edited at Billboard, where first person is almost never allowed. So it's not like I don't know that drill. I just don't like it much.

Of course, at Billboard, the writing tended to be more news and less review-oriented. (So first person would have probably have made no sense anyway.)

And I come from a journalism (and not fancy dancy "new journalism") background too. I came up covering zoning boards and sewage commissions, where objective detachment is strived for. Not saying I don't understand it there, obviously. When I'm defending first person, I'm specifically referring to criticism (though, when it comes to say artist features, I prefer criticism to be part of the deal.)

i thought he meant less that you have to earn it in the sense of being already famous or noteworthy, but in the sense that you have to...justify use of the first person in the piece itself, not necc explicitly, but at least in making your "I" of interest to the reader

Well, obviously I buy this, if that's what Michaelangelo means. But in that sense, you need to earn whatever you put in your writing -- so first person's no different from anything else.

I mean I don't read novels almost at all. Gasp!

xpost: If there's one thing I hate even more than editorial "we", it's the sort of "we" that includes both the writer and his/her presumed readership. ("When did we all fall in love with Kings Of Leon?")

haha please tell me you made that KoL quote up Mike

Really: What do you mean we, kemosabe? (Those ILM threads titled "What Do We Think Of [fill in the blank]?" are almost as bad.)

Tbh, reading good first-person music writing is what made me want to write about music. (Or even reading bad first-person music writing: some Pitchfork stuff from around the turn of the century, though hard to read now, at least made me realize that criticism need not be all neutral/detached/objective.)

(Which, I should add, was mighty refreshing for someone who just wanted to write about his experiences with music and his reactions to listening to certain songs or albums without the burden of serving as some kind of authority.)

Avoiding first person is a good technique to get beyond the inherent subjectivity of reviewing music- it pushes the writer to find a common ground with the reader, rather than just reporting their personal reaction. I drop it if I start to get grandiose.

lots of reasons here why i generally prefer reading about music on the internet just my personal opinion!

Sanneh has to resort to speaking of himself in the third person ("the journalist," "his interlocutor") but otherwise does a decent job with passive-ish phrases like "a steady supply of beer refills lubricated the conversation."

Re this, exhaustively shat upon by Eric Boehlert.

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200908030038

Related:

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200908110005

"Avoiding first person is a good technique to get beyond the inherent subjectivity of reviewing music- it pushes the writer to find a common ground with the reader, rather than just reporting their personal reaction. I drop it if I start to get grandiose."

I think this is one of the root issues but it also points to the fallacy of avoiding first person - the technique assumes that it's the specific use of "I" that makes music writing solipsistic or uncommunicative. It also suggests that that the choice is between solipsism and objectivity (I accept that specific publications may have other reasons for disliking it).

But it's not hard to write a review that avoids using "I" but still reads like the writer has never thought to question their personal reactions, their prejudices, their assumptions.

Learning to adopt a critical perspective w/r/t those things has a lot to do with how you relate to music generally, how you try to convey what the music is actually doing etc. etc.

Kogan is a good example of a writer who puts himself into the story but still makes the music's potential to affect different people differently the star attraction.

The tendency to lean toward the first person is usually an indicator of a writer being green but not always of self-obsession. A lot of these throw away 'I thinks', 'I feels', 'as I was saying to x' etc come from a nervousness about stating an opinion without a crutch or without reflexively reminding people that, it's just, like, their opinion, man. All reviews and value judgements are obviously the opinion of the writer. We can tell because it's prefixed with a byline. It's just that if a writer is all apologetic and constantly reminding people that it's all subjective innit, they won't get ripped to shreds on the internet. Or not as much anyway.

But it's a writer's job to be authoritative. In, er, my opinion it is anyway.

It's more acceptable in features but then the reasoning still has to be solid behind it. I've been stabbed during or around three interviews. Once accidentally by a member of a band while we were larking about, once purposefully by a band member during a play fight that got out of hand and once after getting so drunk in an interview I got thrown out of the hotel by security and got stabbed randomly outside.

The first piece was written third person with only passing mention of boisterous high spirits. The incident was unremarkable. Barely drew blood. The second time was pertinent. The guy was a loon and this helped to illustrate that. Some of the piece was written in the first person. It was impossible to write it neatly otherwise. The third incident was ignored and the piece was written in the third person. A good pub story perhaps but nothing to do with the band or the story.

Once I got to an interview with Matt C from The Bronx to find out that we'd both broken our noses the night before. That was kind of on the cusp. Could have been written either way. Just about interesting enough as a jumping off point to be worth including.

As a rule you shouldn't do it unless it's an on the road/reportage piece or you have a unique involvement in the story that no one else has (or at least your readers don't). That said - and I'm twisting Eric Arthur Blair to my own ends on this - I'd break any rule about writing I have rather than write something barbaric.

(And house style rules. If you can't write a piece around I said/we said/Rolling Stone said and still make it readable, maybe you shouldn't be writing. It's fairly straightforward after all.)

Co-sign everything that guy said about a variety of voices on a magazine.

Re. "authoritative": should music writers attain a certain level of knowledge of music before setting up as arbiters of taste?

Not necessarily because knowing loads about music doesn't necessarily give you good taste in music and beyond that 'good taste' is a bogus concept on its own.

It's up to the individual writer not to make a fool out of themselves/magazine that's hired them. Canonical thinking is the enemy of good music writing but that doesn't mean you shouldn't know about this stuff anyway. I mean, I hate the Beatles and a lot of other big groups from the 60s and won't write about them as a rule but it doesn't mean I don't have a basic grounding in them.

Some writers set up this completely false binary of the job being fusty old rock professors with their "facts" and everything and young, free spirited rebels who don't know about the music but who can "feel" it and "live" it. Somehow suggesting that the more you know about music, the less you can actually appreciate it, which is obviously not true.

good for you for fighting the power

i can't believe people are still arguing this stuff.

^^^ probably listens to the beatles

i'll fight you for that.

with a broken copy of rubber soul.

i dont think u have earned the right to fight me

It's more acceptable in features but then the reasoning still has to be solid behind it. I've been stabbed during or around four interviews. Once accidentally by a member of a band while we were larking about, once purposefully by a band member during a play fight that got out of hand and once after getting so drunk in an interview I got thrown out of the hotel by security and got stabbed randomly outside. And once in the arm with a broken record by the ghost of a well-known music bloggist after I made some heavy accusations.

for example's sake, here's a review i wrote last year that uses the first-person twice in the first two sentences, and then never again. especially writing in that venue, it felt honest and useful to state up front my own skepticism about the band. it tells the reader -- whatever their own position on the band -- where i'm coming from, and also establishes a little bit of critical tension. i'm sure i could have written the same thing without the first-person, but it would have been less direct, and i don't think would have improved anything.

It works fine, tipsy (and your review is first-rate).

that is a really nice review, but I would have edited the first sentence out if you had turned it in to me since its burying the lede. Ppl are picking up the article to read about DBT, not tipsy mothra.

oh man i would gladly swap one of my old long embarrassing thoughts for one of yours any day of the week. i find that not looking back at all is the key.

I know at least one really great ilxor writes for the site and I'm a dedicated daily reader so I don't want to bash them for a touch decision but, uh, seeing that Aquarium Drunkard is transitioning to $10/month for future access makes me really fucking depressed about the future of the internet.

Like, maybe that's not much, but when I'm suddenly being asked to pay $10 a month for every site I read? That's unsustainable.

"tough decision"

Don't get me wrong, paying writers to provide good, thoughtful criticism is totally valid!

Maybe it's just fatigue of being constantly bombarded by substacks and other outlets asking for money as well. I get it, the media landscape is fucking bleak. I don't know the answer. Just looking through my inbox right now, to buy in to all the great writers and thinkers I'd want to follow in an ideal world it'd cost me over $100 a month. That's not a sustainable solution, for anyone.

I grant that AD posts a lot of stuff, and it's mostly really good, but $10 a month is a lot.

I had a dream last night that a conglomerate that owned a lot of different media brands was going to be hiring writers for their publications and, I think, Chuck Eddy gave them my name. The thing was, you didn't know what publication you would be interviewing to write for. I got a call and I was interviewed with two other people. They were both much younger than me. One of them mentioned that their favorite live concert performance that they had ever seen was by Kelly Rowland. I felt totally unprepared. I was hoping i didn't have to answer any questions. Finally, they did ask what people thought about a release being "overhyped". I said that manufactured enthusiasm for a release was as old as time and a PR firm's number one priority but that the internet had created a monster of hype for EVERY release and that there weren't enough eyeballs or enough money to make that anything more than noise that people learned to ignore in favor of algorithms that did all the consumer's thinking for them and thus took chance or even possible disappointment out of the listening equation. The interviewer looked at me like I had three heads. i shut up after that.
The name of the magazine I was possibly being hired to work for: Formica Magazine

sounds like a dream job!

Jon, I think about that a LOT.

I subscribe to the substacks et al of a few friends but can’t really afford to do more than that. I feel bad about it.

It’s the decentralization of media, analogous to what’s happening to TV.

“What if you didn’t pay $120 per month for cable anymore? What if I told you that instead you could pay $200 per month for a variety of online services?”

Not the fault of the writers, or the creators, of course, but you know what I mean.

(I haven’t started a pay site of my own - or even a non pay site - because I’m not quite self-directed enough, and kinda need assignments and deadlines from others. I need the pressure! I salute those of you who can make self-schedules happen.)

Like I said, I get it - I want sites like AD to stick around in this bleak as fuck online media landscape and I 100% believe in supporting the writers. $10 just seems like a huge ask.

It just makes the future feel so bleak. Almost daily I like to check out AD, The Quietus, Stereogum for the metal and jazz columns, Pitchfork (for the occasional worthwhile review or feature), The Obelisk for stoner rock news, to name just a few off the top of my head (and set aside your personal opinions of each for now, or feel free to enter your own favorite daily bookmark). Are we looking at a near future where doing so costs me $45-50 a month? This isn't even considering individual substacks, Patreons or mailing lists that have a cost. I know everyone is scrambling to find a way in the current landscape, but this feels massively unsustainable.

I keep seeing enthused comments about the paywall saying things like, "what's the big deal? it's less than two cups of coffee a month!". Which, yes, correct. And that's fine if it's literally the only music site you care to pay attention to, but I don't know any music obsessive that limits themselves to only 1 or 2 sites.

Yeah it's a tricky thing. I subscribe to a few Substacks but right, I can't subscribe to every single person I like.

I mean, I live on the subscription model, literally — all of my income for the past 5 1/2 years has come from subscribers. So I am an evangelist for it, but I also recognize that what we're really talking about broadly is trying to backfill the loss of advertising revenue. And that was ~ 80% of the revenue that most print media used to rely on. So, are there enough individual subscribers out there who can afford to support the number of writers and reporters of any kind who used to be supported by advertising-driven print vehicles? Absolutely not.

I have a regular job (three of them, really), so writing Burning Ambulance is entirely a labor of love. Yes, I am willing to accept payment, but free and paid subscribers get the exact same thing, at the exact same dosage. Honestly, if everyone was reading the newsletter for free, but 10% of them bought a CD on the label, I'd be overjoyed.

I think I'm one of the last of the old school '00s bloggers, and I'm not sure I have it in me to charge for the service.

(I don't intend this comment as passive-aggressive anything against anyone here who does)

Well to be clear, the work that I charge for is NOT stuff I would do for free or out of love. It's going to County Commission and school board meetings and writing about budgets and zoning and state legislation and all that kind of thing. My free writing is all the movie/music stuff I post on Facebook (or ilx!) when I'm procrastinating from the day job.

tipsy, your stuff in particular enrages me! You should still be a staff writer covering a government beat. But it also works out: you've got editorial independence.

Yeah, it's a trade-off for sure. We're very fortunate there are people who will pay us to do what we do, but of course we lack a lot of resources. And, like, can't ever take a day off. Sad lol.

But to steer back to the music writing, and arts writing in general, which has gotten so hard to sustain — has anyone explored putting together some sort of cooperatives? Joining forces via mutual subscriptions, that kind of thing? Subscribe to any 3 of 5 for $10 a month, I don't know, I'm sure there are a lot of possible revenue-sharing models.

I suppose eventually you would just end up reinventing music magazines.

It's been fifteen years since someone asked about this, and that poster was interested in hearing from people who've been paid for their music writing, while I'd like to hear from anyone who has noticed themselves improve:

How do (or did) you get better at music writing? -- whether it's in terms of insight, voice/register, structuring, anything. I figure that, as with anything else, you've gotta write a lot, but that isn't quite enough, is it?

Curiosity and prolificity.

read a lot. of everything.

I barely do any music writing anymore, but when I was more regularly, I found that some of the writing I felt best about came via assignments — albums or shows that I might not have even listened to or gone to except someone asked me to. I think in those situations I was engaged critically in a way I maybe wasn't as much on things I was more enthusiastic about. A little bit of detachment from the material? I don't know.

But anyway I suppose even absent an assignment that could be replicated just by choosing to write about something that you normally wouldn't think to.

you can even do it here for practice! hey, at least 10 people will read it. that's pretty good for music writing these days.

Listen to an album you've never heard by an artist you never listen to and then tell us about it!

I will say, as someone who is currently working on a piece for Aqua Drunkard - and who has written many articles to paywalled websites in my lifetime - it is slightly de-motivating to know that this is going to publish and ... I guess the band won't be able to see it without subscribing? I'm sure far fewer people will read it than would've two weeks ago.

I support the effort fully and think everyone should be paid for their work, for sure. I just can't help but feel a little bit like I'm going to find myself directing some pitches elsewhere. Which is a bummer.

Yep. How many $70 paid substacks plus paid websites can people do although yes writers deserve to get paid