I’m blogging this as a link because I’m not sure I’ve ever read a (thoughtful) essay about this topic before. The overarching thesis, then, being:

Somehow, amazingly, I had written 1200 words for a magazine, and the only thing I’d managed to clearly convey was the exact thing I didn’t believe, and was making a point of not saying.

What makes this especially interesting to me is that Nitsuh Abebe, the author, wrote the original point-of-contention piece with an editor, and that even with two sets of eyes moving along one train of thought, the readers still managed to get all derailed.

More often than not, I wonder what it would be like to be completely misinterpreted, and this is, I imagine, a vexing situation for most writers: Am I saying exactly what I mean, and more importantly, am I saying anything I don’t intend to say? The answer to the latter is yes, always, so it’s really more of a measure of degrees. The answer to the former is no, always, because words can only convey so much meaning by themselves — whether its polemic or criticism or thank-you-note for that beautiful baby shower the other week. At some point, the reader will intervene.

What’s more surprising about this story (if I may go on a tangent here), is that there are existing readers still discursively invested in defending Wilco or Feist from what they deem as a slight — people to whom, even though Nitsuh never actually said this, suggesting that these artists have become “NPR Muzak” is a wage of insult. So for the non-controversy mongers out there, a few facts of reality: Wilco and Feist are favorites of NPR because NPR largely serves a segment of middle-class thirty- to forty-something-year-old people interested in global politics and liberal social ideas. Furthermore, Wilco and Feist not only attract middle-class thirty- to forty-something-year-old people interested in global politics and liberal social ideas, but are, in fact, middle-class thirty- to forty-something-year-old people interested in global politics and liberal social ideas. Indie rock is no longer the exclusive domain of in-the-know young people who read Brooklyn Vegan and go to shows at the Silent Barn, but a generation-spanning subculture whose marginal status is not so marginal anymore; it is a style of music that is enjoyed by moms and dads and daughters and sons and Billboard charts alike. None of this can be disparaging if it’s true.

In other words — and let’s see if I don’t fuck this up — we are the new adult contemporary. Nitsuh didn’t mean to say it, but I did.