When Robert "Moniker Records" Manis asked me to start this li'l music blog to help beef up the Moniker brand or whatever, I jumped at the chance, figuring it would be at least a tentative step toward music writing, an occupation I've flirted with but never gone for whole-hog. So, to get a better sense of the job, I attended a panel discussion this evening at Depaul University featuring some of Chicago's more-or-less "professional" music scribes--and holy mackerel!, what a sorry-assed racket music journalism turns out to be. The sparsely-attended event, featuring writers and editors from Pitchfork, Gapers Block, Loud Loop Press and some other web-deal called Chicagoverseunited (the Reader's Miles Raymer was a no-show) was a fascinating, cautionary window on this supremely geeky world, and a taste of what more marginal writers like myself are missing.
I had numerous objections throughout, but this was, for me, the real rub: as a sort of prelude to the conversation, the moderator screened a well-worn clip from Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous: Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs, proselytizing on the pitfalls of rock journalism--some sort of invocation I guess?, Bangs being the grandaddy of rock crit. Yet in the two-hour rap sesh that followed, the panelists proved to be vehemently, diametrically opposed to the whole Bangs school of music writing. With alarming schoolmarmishness, today's music scribes came down heavy on the side of objectivity, professionalism and politesse, armed with a whole list of rules (ethics, they called 'em) by which would-be music writers are supposed to abide: don't write about your friends (even if your friends make really good music); don't be needlessly negative; for that matter, avoid anything that smacks excessively of personal taste or opinion; essentially, excise all life, personality and colorful verbiage from yr. work to the point where you're basically re-tweeting press releases. Cuz today's web-scarred readers don't have time for a bunch of murky insight, OK?--they want the deets on Odd Future's latest digi-download, in fifty characters or less. So horrified was I by this ultramodern take on music writing that I practically leaped out of my chair when they opened it up for Q & A. So, y'all started out by invoking Lester Bangs or whatever, I queried, the founding father of rock writing, whose hallmark was extreme subjectivity (not to mention stylistic eccentricity), but then you turn around and espouse this whole journalism-school fantasy of professionalism and (god-help-us) objectivity... so, uh, what gives? The panel members offered various depressing responses, but it was the chick from Pitchfork who bummed me out hardest with her glib one-liner: IF LESTER BANGS WAS AROUND TODAY, she practically sneered, HE WOULDN"T HAVE A JOB.
Of course, she's probably right. Certainly no one would be paying him for his Romilar-fueled screeds (then again, ha-ha, no one is paying the music editor from Gaper's Block, either, except in Radiohead swag). But what I think she meant is that he wouldn't have an audience; no one would take him seriously. Because in this modern age of a billion 'blogs, you're either authoritative and by-the-book (read: Pitchfork) or you're just a crank, some guy with a laptop and a loud mouth. At the end of the two-hour talk, that was the basic take-home.
That said, I appreciate the admittedly modest platform that Robert has given me to write about music in whatever cranky, ill-informed and journalistically-unethical manner I please. Any illusions I might ever have held of being a legitimate music-writer are pretty well out the window at this point; even if I could swallow the bitter pill of professionalism, my garbled prose would infuriate any revenue-minded editor. Which leaves me free to do what I do best: write about my friends' bands, shit-talk music I've never actually listened to, and lace my criticism with run-on sentences and obtuse slang. Whatever noble intentions they might purport to harbor, the Pitchforks and Loud Loop Presses of the world are essentially just cogs in the, uh, entertainment machine; and while I might envy their readership, I certainly don't envy their obeisance.
I had numerous objections throughout, but this was, for me, the real rub: as a sort of prelude to the conversation, the moderator screened a well-worn clip from Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous: Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs, proselytizing on the pitfalls of rock journalism--some sort of invocation I guess?, Bangs being the grandaddy of rock crit. Yet in the two-hour rap sesh that followed, the panelists proved to be vehemently, diametrically opposed to the whole Bangs school of music writing. With alarming schoolmarmishness, today's music scribes came down heavy on the side of objectivity, professionalism and politesse, armed with a whole list of rules (ethics, they called 'em) by which would-be music writers are supposed to abide: don't write about your friends (even if your friends make really good music); don't be needlessly negative; for that matter, avoid anything that smacks excessively of personal taste or opinion; essentially, excise all life, personality and colorful verbiage from yr. work to the point where you're basically re-tweeting press releases. Cuz today's web-scarred readers don't have time for a bunch of murky insight, OK?--they want the deets on Odd Future's latest digi-download, in fifty characters or less. So horrified was I by this ultramodern take on music writing that I practically leaped out of my chair when they opened it up for Q & A. So, y'all started out by invoking Lester Bangs or whatever, I queried, the founding father of rock writing, whose hallmark was extreme subjectivity (not to mention stylistic eccentricity), but then you turn around and espouse this whole journalism-school fantasy of professionalism and (god-help-us) objectivity... so, uh, what gives? The panel members offered various depressing responses, but it was the chick from Pitchfork who bummed me out hardest with her glib one-liner: IF LESTER BANGS WAS AROUND TODAY, she practically sneered, HE WOULDN"T HAVE A JOB.
Of course, she's probably right. Certainly no one would be paying him for his Romilar-fueled screeds (then again, ha-ha, no one is paying the music editor from Gaper's Block, either, except in Radiohead swag). But what I think she meant is that he wouldn't have an audience; no one would take him seriously. Because in this modern age of a billion 'blogs, you're either authoritative and by-the-book (read: Pitchfork) or you're just a crank, some guy with a laptop and a loud mouth. At the end of the two-hour talk, that was the basic take-home.
That said, I appreciate the admittedly modest platform that Robert has given me to write about music in whatever cranky, ill-informed and journalistically-unethical manner I please. Any illusions I might ever have held of being a legitimate music-writer are pretty well out the window at this point; even if I could swallow the bitter pill of professionalism, my garbled prose would infuriate any revenue-minded editor. Which leaves me free to do what I do best: write about my friends' bands, shit-talk music I've never actually listened to, and lace my criticism with run-on sentences and obtuse slang. Whatever noble intentions they might purport to harbor, the Pitchforks and Loud Loop Presses of the world are essentially just cogs in the, uh, entertainment machine; and while I might envy their readership, I certainly don't envy their obeisance.
©2012 Moniker