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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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The redesigned SPIN is like a Lana Dey Rey song

A month ago SPIN debuted its new, redesigned, bi-monthly format. As both a music editor and a former writer of music reviews for SPIN, I was curious about it, though in a personal-low-stakes kind of way. If I were still freelancing for SPIN, I’d worry about their decision to

A month ago SPIN debuted its new, redesigned, bi-monthly format. As both a music editor and a former writer of music reviews for SPIN, I was curious about it, though in a personal-low-stakes kind of way. If I were still freelancing for SPIN, I’d worry about their decision to remove most reviews from the print edition, but now that I’m full-time employed I can enjoy it as a reader and music fan (disclosure: I wrote a review for SPIN’s website last month).

I also wanted to check out their ambitious print redesign as someone who does not buy print magazines. I let my SPIN subscription end. I haven’t had New York magazine since they gave it away for free with a MediaBistro subscription. I owned a Kindle and now I have an iPad but that whole obsession with the touch and feel of real things has never, ever, twinged me except when it comes to say antique furniture and leather shoes. (When people mention these things when lovingly talking about magazines or records I simultaneously hear Zooey Dechanel’s ‘Cotton’ song and picture that scene in Amelie where she sticks her paw in some beans.) The touch and feel of a real iPad is all I need.

So, the redesigned SPIN. It was made to be purchased as a physical thing, and it does feel great in your hands — there’s thick paper stock, rich, matte ink, and a pleasant gasoline-like chemical smell. SPIN wants you to hold it in your arms and manhandle it a little bit, like a Lana Del Rey song (the ‘opening act’ letter even asks you to drop it on your coffee table). Everything Type Company, who redesigned the magazine, simplified the cover and removed a lot of the text, which brings it more in line with their old design actually.

Compare this:

to this:

Getting inside, you see an immediate commitment to diversity in its pages. Past the lily-white Sleigh Bells on the fold-out cover, Frank Ocean and Santigold are the first two faces you see. There’s also a commitment to covering a lot more than music: the table of contents teases film coverage, a television show review, a newsy SOPA story, art and comic book coverage. Plus old sections, like In My Room and a labeled but very similar to “Breaking Out” are still in there.

And now to the writing itself: The long, reported, piece by David Bevan on K-Pop’s structure and ambitions is truly awesome. Likewise, I enjoyed Simon Reynold’s essay on Lana Del Rey, a ”free-floating half-life, or afterlife of pure style. Dated yet timeless beauty.” “Dated yet timeless” seems to be the theme the entire magazine bets on — there are no more album reviews, but it’s packed with longer essays, reported pieces, and long-form reviews. “Stories you can enjoy today and four months from now,” promises that same letter, which of course makes any essay about (or jumping off from) LDR hilarious in that, because of Internet Standard Time, she already felt dated by the time the magazine came out). Still, she’s more jumping-off than focus point in this piece about the cyclical nature of music trends. The next page has a gorgeous color-coded infographic on how genres reference past genres. (The company who made the infographic designed the rest of the magazine, and so the same bold, easy-to-read colors section off the magazine as well (example: the long reviews in the back are all in blue ink).

The few problems I had with this issue are also going to be dated, since they’re almost all issue-specific. For example, I don’t like Sleigh Bells on the cover, since, basically, everyone should have figured out that they are a good band without a backstory. There is nothing wrong with being nothing wild, but there is when you’re publishing a cover story about this gun-toting rock-and-roll band that is basically sibling-like, half-engaged, and perfectly sweet. Charles Aaron notes in his editor’s letter that the issue revolves around bands that “recombine signifiers” and man, Sleigh Bells are a band of purely visual signifiers if there ever was one.

I generally liked the Breaking Out-style pieces on Frankie Rose, Escort, Perfume Genius, etc., but they needed to be longer. I loved Breaking Out for the mini-stories and small, telling moments and details from each piece, and here there’s barely enough room for a few puns and a free-floating quote. The magazine, when I first flipped through it, made me think of a nerd with a brand new hot body, (like when Rachael Leigh Cook takes off her glasses in She’s All That, or like, T.I. when he puts his glasses on). But they will have to find the balance between good looks and good words. I don’t think these mini-features hit that balance.

Also there is a piece that consists of life advice from The Shins’ James Mercer, where he boldly reveals how he got older and finally got the self-confidence to FIRE ALL HIS BAND MEMBERS. The greatest love of all!

The remaining print reviews combine 2-3 releases into one tied-together piece. It turns their review section into another opportunity for deep-thinking and trend piecing. I do miss the cleverness and many different voices of their old print section.

Overall I like the redesign SPIN and the changes they’ve made. I will have to update this in four months to really know whether it is, as promised, filled with things I still want to read in four months. Perhaps then I will finally find every use of ”Lynchian” in the magazine (I found four already!). Now I’m off to check out the SPIN play app.

 

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How I judge music

Pitchfork’s internal editing system lets me see my past review scores all in one place. Since I don’t review stuff very often for them, I was a little surprised to see the numbers all in one place like that. It turns out I’m a high grader. Or

How I judge music


Pitchfork’s internal editing system lets me see my past review scores all in one place. Since I don’t review stuff very often for them, I was a little surprised to see the numbers all in one place like that. It turns out I’m a high grader. Or rather, when I write about things I know I like (because that’s what I want to write about, if I can), then I tend to give it something in the 6-8.8 range. That makes sense to me. But it’s harder to make sense of what makes an album truly terrible. So I wanted to go down some things that most music writers have internalized, but that I feel like a lot of Pitchfork’s audience still can’t recognize when they scan a review.

Here’s Robert Christgau’s old grading system explained:

An A+ record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening with new excitement and insight. It is unlikely to be marred by more than one merely ordinary cut.
An A is a great record both of whose sides offer enduring pleasure and surprise. You should own it.
An A- is a very good record. If one of its sides doesn’t provide intense and consistent satisfaction, then both include several cuts that do.
[… further explanations, then …]
A D+ is an appalling piece of pimpwork or a thoroughly botched token of sincerity.
It is impossible to understand why anyone would buy a D record.
It is impossible to understand why anyone would release a D- record.
It is impossible to understand why anyone would cut an E+ record.
E records are frequently cited as proof that there is no God.
An E- record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays repeated listening with a sense of horror in the face of the void. It is unlikely to be marred by one listenable cut.

(taken from 43 Folders)

After having written about music for a few years, and having attempted to write and play music myself, I can say for sure that putting out music is like putting out babies: every one deserves to be born.

What does this mean? I believe that creating music is inherently good and positive, and using criticisms like “this band should just quit” or “singer x would do well to pay her label back for this mess,” is lazy and unfair.

However, this does not mean your music shouldn’t be judged. My mom sews curtains and pillow cases, but she’s not trying to sell them or be Martha Stewart. By making and selling records you have agreed to the critical process.

So what is a sub-4 record to me? I believe that good people can make really bad music. Bad people can make really good music. But when bad people make bad music, they get sub-4.0, two stars, whatever, because when bad people make bad music, they are usually making harmful music, stuff that did not deserve to be born. They are usually also making music in a way that rings false with their personalities and reeks of desperation or pandering.

This is music from a band like Louix XIV, who began as an alt-country band, then switched to doing vaguely racist, totally misogynist sleaze rawk (Nick Sylvester rightly called them spineless in his review). Or lately, it’s bands like Brokencyde or Millionaires, kids so careless and attached to their own privilege that they feel fine picking and choosing tropes from hip-hop without acknowledging where they came from or why they exist (it is okay to brag about getting paid when your parents have always paid your bills?).

These are easy targets for sure, and it gets harder once I think about the genres I usually write about or that Pitchfork usually covers. The problems there are less about big red flags–racism, violence, etc–and more about authenticity. Now, I once had a track review cut and replaced (it was of “Intervention”), because it felt inauthentic to me1 , and my editor said I could never judge the “motives” of the band, because I couldn’t know what they were thinking. I say it’s hard, but not impossible, unless your internal sensor is just totally off. Anyway, that’s sort of like saying you can’t judge bad acting (hey, maybe they wanted to be unbelievable on purpose). Inauthentic music is the worst because it’s a rift between who you are and who you want people to think you are. And isn’t that hard enough to cope with in real life, with our friends and boy/girl friends and jobs, without writing it down, practicing it, committing it to tape, packaging it, and selling it? These records and songs, these are the ones that should have never been born and they’ll always be the ones most critically savaged.

I’m losing track of what I wanted to say here, so it’s basically this: I hardly ever give low ratings to albums or hate bands, but when I do, it’s because of a falseness that crosses from the artist over to their music. But I try to not judge music on whether it should have been made in the first place–the answer is nearly always “yes,” though sometimes “no.”

  1. This is a problem with a lot of sophomore albums: they made the first one while no one was watching, now they’re, whether they know it or not, looking over their shoulders. And to me, by the second album, a lot of Arcade Fire’s chest-thumping was for chest-thumping’s sake.↩

 

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What's going on in Austin?

Three years ago, which was about five months into my “professional” music writing career, I personally put a manila folder of clips into Rob Tannenbaum’s inter-office mailbox at Blender. A few days later he emailed me some nice comments, and also a little critique: You’re writing within the

What's going on in Austin?

Three years ago, which was about five months into my “professional” music writing career, I personally put a manila folder of clips into Rob Tannenbaum’s inter-office mailbox at Blender. A few days later he emailed me some nice comments, and also a little critique:

You’re writing within the biosphere of your enthusiasms and subjects; the reviews communicate in a code that’s shared by a coterie that only feels large when you’re in a rock club.1

Now imagine that club is 20 clubs, and imagine they all line a couple of connected streets.

There’s been some mention of how the recession doesn’t seem to exist down in Austin right now; parties are just as huge, gift bags just as gross, bands just as plentiful. And while there’s something sweet and anachronistic about that, part of me thinks that it only proves that this, smaller world, is still in the business of making itself feel large, talking to itself at the exclusion of everyone else, no matter what it costs. A lot of time is spent laughing at bonehead moves made by major labels, but I wonder if these labels/publications/bands are making the same moves.

CMJ, as poorly run as it is, still has a clear purpose to me: it’s a way for small-town college radio kids to visit New York and see bands that would never make it to their city.

I don’t see that with SXSW. I think it should be the reverse: big city publicists/labels/writers come down to check out the bands that can’t afford to do big tours, so everyone can come back with something new to followup on. Right now, I’m digging through Twitters and blog posts to find those recommendations and observations. But 90% of coverage I’ve read online has been devoted to bands that have already been covered heavily in the past.2

So this is what I want to see from SXSW coverage: What’s new and what’s good? And from the panels: What’s going to change, or what has to change to keep people reading about and buying music? Hiring one less photographer or skipping the free t-shirts in your gift bags this year isn’t going to save your label or website or magazine. It seems silly to me that anyone would know where the best tacos are found, but couldn’t tell me where their industry will be in a year.

Or maybe I’m reading the wrong sites. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

  1. Besides that lesson, Rob told me to never use the word “anthemic” in a review ever again. I think I’ve used it twice since then.↩
  2. I’m guilty of this too; though the one time I covered SXSW and in my CMJ coverage I tried to pick at least one band a night that I thought deserved more attention.↩

 

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I am testing that dream.

Seeing Weezer for me is probably like seeing My Bloody Valentine for a lot of other people–or maybe not. Maybe it’s really like seeing Liz Phair, where you know there’s something great there that got sorta misplaced or deferred or scared out of the person, or maybe

I am testing that dream.

Seeing Weezer for me is probably like seeing My Bloody Valentine for a lot of other people–or maybe not. Maybe it’s really like seeing Liz Phair, where you know there’s something great there that got sorta misplaced or deferred or scared out of the person, or maybe that something great was the flash so there’s nothing really to return to because that was the detour. I talked about the Weezer show last night here, but one other thing I wanted to mention about “El Scorcho” was that Rivers Cuomo did sing the first few lines, but with his hands over his face, half covered, half shielding his eyes so he could gaze at the audience. I don’t know what this means.

Meanwhile, I’m working on some other freelance stuff, thanks to this:

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But it is not free of any cost or obligation.

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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.