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Speaking of sexism and writing about music

Speaking of sexism and writing about music. Here about is a comment, probably my favorite of all time, from Gorilla Vs. Bear. When I worked at Pitchfork I saw comments on his posts all the time from anonymous readers saying I had ripped off his posts, when everyone gets the

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Speaking of sexism and writing about music. Here about is a comment, probably my favorite of all time, from Gorilla Vs. Bear. When I worked at Pitchfork I saw comments on his posts all the time from anonymous readers saying I had ripped off his posts, when everyone gets the same press releases, and if a post was reblogging someone else’s MP3 find or whatever, we would link back to that post. It was the early days of Pitchfork’s MP3 blog trial, it was a work in progress, but I always tried to attribute work.

I saw lots of comments like this one on Gorilla Vs. Bear before I started full-time at Pitchfork and long after I left, but I never quite saw any like this, comments that accused the writer of having gotten their job by sleeping with the boss during their internship.
I had never interned for Pitchfork. I wrote a trial news post for them when they still had open calls on their site, because I was desperate to get out of Arizona and write about music. They hired me to write news (for free!) while I still lived there, and so I would go out to my car during my lunch breaks from my job and do interviews in my car. The air conditioning would be too loud while I was trying to interview musicians, so I would turn it off and just ask questions. By the time Pitchfork had hired me full time, I had worked at CMJ as a news editor, I had written pieces for Pitchfork, Nylon, the Village Voice, Paste and Blender. I was (and still am) inexperienced, but I was proud of my work because 90% came from cold pitching — sending clips to editors I had never met or talked to and hoping they would hire me only because they liked my writing. And I did get asked to write for places. So when I started seeing comments like this, it really hurt to have all my work reduced to “you slept with your boss.” I had written about music since I did zines in middle school, I had been on the school newspaper staff since I was in forth grade, I had done interviews in 100+ degree cars, had moved to New York with a suitcase and worked full-time at a music publication for less than $19,000 a year; I had, during that year in NYC, spent my lunch hours laying out clips and mailing them in manila envelopes to editors in the city, and written and interviewed people all hours of the day and night because I didn’t have money to go out or own TV anyway. But whatever, I was just some girl who slept with her boss.

By the way, if you can find me one angry post about a male Pitchfork reviewer that implies that they slept with their boss to get their job, I would LOVE to see it. I mean, you could send me 100 angry take-downs of Pitchfork writers, but I doubt any of them take that route.

I’ve got a lot more examples, so maybe I’ll dig them up and share them. But I’ll end this with a comment on an ABC Amplified interview I did with Donald Glover.

He did not! The human race is over.

[via Tumblr]

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I was hacked and it sucked

A couple weeks ago I was doing a little lite self-Googling when I found a new link on my website: Viagra UK. I clicked on it — I mean, how could you not? And it brought me to a Canadian-based online pharmacy. I had been hacked with the Pharma hack. This

A couple weeks ago I was doing a little lite self-Googling when I found a new link on my website: Viagra UK. I clicked on it — I mean, how could you not? And it brought me to a Canadian-based online pharmacy. I had been hacked with the Pharma hack. This hack is particularly vicious because it only works when you click on a link from Google, and it only works on certain links. I think it had been coming. I hadn’t updated my blog in a while, hadn’t updated the WordPress installation. My plug-in folder was a mess.

Normally I’m very good about solving WordPress problems myself. My first attempt at installing WordPress took 18 hours. It sucked, but I stuck with it. I couldn’t solve this one on my own, though. This hack it affects your template, your database, vulnerable plug-ins. So I hired someone via the Internet — I think he’s in the UK — to fix the persistent hack for an ammount of money I will miss for awhile. His name is Neil, and I recommend him. He cleaned it all up and then resubmitted my website to Google. I am, as of this week, Viagra-free.

Anyway, this is all to say I am going to start posting in this blog again. I’ve got to make the whole hack-to-not-hack thing worth it.

And please let me know if I turn into a Viagra sales-lady again.

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Guys, I'm the worst interviewer IN THE WORLD!

Watch worst-interviewer-in-the-world/Pitchfork staff writer Jessica Suarez interview the Black Keys in their hotel room. It is fairly entertaining to see how high they are. If you need an example, they take the people in Oprah’s life and assign them roles as McDonald’s characters. MP3 below.-It Fits

Guys, I'm the worst interviewer IN THE WORLD!

Watch worst-interviewer-in-the-world/Pitchfork staff writer Jessica Suarez interview the Black Keys in their hotel room. It is fairly entertaining to see how high they are. If you need an example, they take the people in Oprah’s life and assign them roles as McDonald’s characters. MP3 below.-It Fits Good

LIKE ANYONE CAN EVEN KNOW THAT.

I never get a lot of writing-related hate mail, and when I do it is mostly from superfans offended over a single mediocre review. I’ve responded to maybe four of them since I started. But this irked me because I’m proud of most of the interviews I’ve done. I’ve salvaged even the worst ones, really loved and cherished the best ones. Now, the Black Keys thing was awkward, I know. What you don’t see in the interview is an hour of “yes” and “no” answers to all my music-related questions. So, the editors cut it and kept in all the tangents and non-sequiturs. It was smart and kind of the Pitchfork.tv staff. I was, of course, a lot less awkward in my Mastodon / Neurosis interview, though most of my questions were cut out to keep the “bands talking to each other” concept consistent.

The above blog doesn’t have any comments except for three people pitching their bands. I don’t want to link to it because I don’t see much point. But for my vanity, here are some of my favorite past interviews:

Kevin Blechdom – Pitchfork Media
Feist – Pitchfork Media
Beck – Nylon (um, I have a clip, no link online though)
Clipse – CMJ New Music Monthly (online somewhere, also in PDF form on my work page)
Gnarls Barkley – CMJ New Music Report (One of my first in-person interviews, Cee-lo called my boots ‘crazy’ — ZANG!)
Islands – Pitchfork Media
Man Man – Pitchfork Media (of course)
Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson – Paper Thin Walls

Pitchfork is one of the few places that I’ve done long Q&A’s for. Another place was Rhino online. I had a great new Linda Ronstadt to transcribe. She’s famously brusk but we got along wonderfully. Then my laptop was stolen. Tragedy.

Note: I didn’t say this was the worst blog in the world, because LIKE ANYONE CAN EVEN KNOW THAT. But, I probably do, I have a lot of RSS feeds.

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Music fanboyism

“Only a critic that submits to fanboyism can match his readers’ earnestness, grasping the pinnacles and depths experienced by us, the fans ditching school to camp out for concert tickets, the people who listen to music for fun.” —Making the Case for Music Fanboyism, Orr Shtuhl, The Morning News Some

Music fanboyism

“Only a critic that submits to fanboyism can match his readers’ earnestness, grasping the pinnacles and depths experienced by us, the fans ditching school to camp out for concert tickets, the people who listen to music for fun.”

—Making the Case for Music Fanboyism, Orr Shtuhl, The Morning News

Some quick, jumbled thoughts on this old piece:

Later in the essay, Shtuhl concludes that the only way to compromise between distance and unabashed fanboyism is the takedown, the piece where you write about how your fav band’s disappointed you. It’s strange though, because the takedowns I remember, ones that people talk about, have mostly come from Pitchfork. And when these takedowns happen, the main reader criticism is that the author must not have been a fan, they must have been asking as Pitchfork critic first (for some reason, people always refer to reviews as from Pitchfork, as if from a giant machine instead of from individual writers. which is also why people seem to freak out when a track review contradicts the LP review). Readers send emails that say things like: “they obviously never listened to their last album, Pitchfork just hates things other people like (there’s the all-encompassing SITE VOICE again), they don’t know what they’re talking about because they didn’t know that [obsure band fact].”

And not being a fanboy is fine, preferable I think. Disappointment is a result of fanboyism: you had expectations, personal expectations, and they weren’t met, so you were let down. But if this was the result of true fanboyism, then, as I’ve said earlier, I think you’d be obligated to work through it, make excuses, and move on. And obviously those are all things critics shouldn’t do.

Also, the main example Orr uses throughout the piece is Radiohead (and Pitchfork’s steady fanboyism of), but I feel like so many more examples exist in hip hop criticism (Clipse, Lil Wayne most recently).

Finally, while looking up some old reviews, I noticed Marc Hogan wrote a lot of the most contentious takedowns…and his blog is now invite-only. Coincidence? If you grabbed a slice of pizza with Marc, as I have, you’d find out he’s one of the nicest dudes around.

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Girls Gone Wild

This is a somewhat-old L.A. Times article about Joe Francis, the founder of Girls Gone Wild, and how he assaulted the writer outside of a night club. When I was a reporter for my college paper, I interviewed Joe Francis. Francis and his party bus and camera crew stopped

Girls Gone Wild

This is a somewhat-old L.A. Times article about Joe Francis, the founder of Girls Gone Wild, and how he assaulted the writer outside of a night club.

When I was a reporter for my college paper, I interviewed Joe Francis. Francis and his party bus and camera crew stopped at a local club (called, predictably, 8 Traxx) and looked for competition-worthy girls for the Girls Gone Wild national pageant. My town was just another regional stop (full of interchangable blonde sorority girls) on their way to nationals in Hollywood. It only took one email to the Girls Gone Wild website to get access to the event and Francis, a terrible and awkward surprise after I thought no one would answer an email sent to their general ‘questions and comments’ address.

Three photographers from the college paper came with me, even though one was more than enough (the staff was all male). So somewhere, in their archives, there’s a photo of me in a Girls Gone Wild mesh trucker hat, sitting on Joe Francis’s knee with a whiskey on ice in my hand. They normally never take photos of staff members while they’re out doing stories, but they couldn’t resist–mostly because they knew how embarrassed I was.

This L.A. Times article mentions how charming and pursuasive Francis can be, but I don’t know if there’s a way to explain it, really. I guess I was naive to think the same guy who’s gotten several thousand women to take off their tops on camera for no money wouldn’t try to steer the direction of the interview. Anyway, here’s my old college paper story. Now I’d appreciate it if someone could step forward with the photos, because I need something for my CMJ bio.