MOBY “Wait for Me” Dir. Jessica Dimmock and Mark Jackson, 2010
If you’re unfamiliar with Jessica Dimmock’s work, start here. As a photojournalist, her most recognized piece is a series called The Ninth Floor, in which she followed a group of heroin addicts who were squatting in a Fifth Avenue building over the course of a three-year period. For this music video, Moby gave Dimmock $5,000 and complete creative control — and the story speaks for itself: The subject of the video, Jessie, is one of the Ninth Floor addicts, and unlike a few of her roommates, she never got clean.
About two years ago, I (like you) decided to go back to school after an extended absence. An absence of six years to be exact. During that period, I came to the realization that I wanted to pursue a career in (music) journalism. Which doesn’t seem like a great idea right now, but I digress. My question is: As someone who was a music journalist, do you have any words of wisdom or advice for someone like me?
Thanks for your time, Michael
I wasn’t sure I wanted to tackle this question on my own, so in the spirit of internet collaboration, I sent an instant message to my friend Trevor Kelley and tried to hash out a real-time reply. Trevor, like myself, is a recovering music writer whose work has appeared in Alternative Press, Spin, Paste, and others; these days, he is one of the editors for MySpace Music. He’s also one of my best friends whose opinion I greatly respect. Here’s how we covered — and veered — from the topic.
I don’t really like to talk about school so much, but I’m only in the second week of a new semester and, obviously, I haven’t yet figured out how to write on the internet and read 300 pages a week with this schedule. I should, in fact, be reading the rest of Winesburg, Ohio right now, but whatever.
There is supposed to be a Snowpocalypse here in New York tomorrow — so scary that New York City’s public schools have already announced a snow day for students. I guess when you’re only five feet tall, six to ten inches of snow is kind of a big deal. (I also realize that when I say the words “six to ten inches of snow” combined with the words “kind of a big deal,” I am somehow invoking the Clipse, who have absolutely nothing to do with this.) At any rate, I think snow is romantic and if Drew Barrymore ever starred in a rom-com about two unlikely lovers trapped in a blizzard in Brooklyn, I would pay good money to see it.
So yeah. As long as I’m freestyling, can we talk about a young adult novel called The Perks of Being a Wallflower? I had to read it for a class over the weekend, and I still can’t shake the bad taste from my mouth. Apparently, we’re dying to find a “new” Catcher in the Rye so badly that we would anoint praise on a book that depends more on establishing the presence of lazy teen tropes than actual story development; the issues raised by its author are, for the most part, only important to the narrative in that they lend the sense of significance or gravity without actually functioning as significant or grave. It’s like trying to argue that the lyrics for “We Are The World” are somehow deep because the proceeds of its sale are going to a good cause.
Or maybe I’m just sensitive because I remember being an awkward fifteen-year-old and actually contemplating the world I was in to the point where a book like this might have felt patronizing. When one of my classmates countered this argument by asking, “Did you actually think deeply about all of these issues when you were an adolescent?” I had no choice but to tell her my truth: I basically renounced my teenage life and became a monk shortly before my seventeenth birthday. “So yes, to answer your question,” I said.
Elliott Smith once sang, “I can deal with some psychic pain, if it will slow down my higher brain.” I’ve always felt like that, for as long as I can remember, and for a long time I thought I was the only one. But the longer I work with teenagers, the more I realize that these kids are really thinking. Perhaps it’s the adults who need to convince ourselves that the adolescent world begins and ends with Twilight and Gossip Girl, or that a high school-aged reader is not sophisticated enough to contemplate the issues that make his parents socially uncomfortable. If so, books like Wallflower are more for us than they are for them. But that’s not the outlook I choose to subscribe to. While I’m positive that many New York teenagers will spend tomorrow’s snow day at home playing video games, I’m equally as positive that someone will be reading Howard Zinn or listening to Dead Prez or googling feminism. The old guard would rather you not know this, but it’s true.
I’ve been keeping up with last week’s internet back-and-forth concerning Jessica Hopper’s (apparently) incendiary write-up on Vampire Weekend, and for the most part, it’s been interesting. Nitsuh Abebe’s second response (the first being far more impulsive) is the best counter-argument you’ll find to Hopper’s essay — which is, essentially, a commentary on class, race, and cultural appropriation — but I don’t think you’ll find anyone who believes this is the kind of sociological conflict that can be resolved by music journalists. Which is why I won’t bother getting involved. There are, however, a few persistent points I needed to jot down:
This conversation is fascinating because it is the polar opposite of the Jay-Z/Esquire debacle from last month in which Jay-Z’s cultural “blackness” was defined by his actual skin color, how little his demeanor mirrored Barack Obama’s, and whether or not he liked to curse. (He does.) In this case, however, “whiteness” is defined by education, family legacy, and whether or not Ezra Koenig’s admiration for Ralph Lauren comes from its position as a class signifier or, as he tells Rolling Stone this month, from the story of Ralph Lifshitz — the son of a Russian-immigrant house painter done good. No one, as far I’ve read, has thought to give him the third, most likely option: Koenig might just like how Polo shirts look.
Aziz Ansari had an awesome joke in his recent special for Comedy Central. He talked about going to an R. Kelly show with a friend, and the friend turned around and said, “We’re the only white people at this show!” Aziz Ansari is, of course, not white. But some well-intentioned white folks have this weird tendency to speak to people of color as if we have attained some sort of honorary whiteness — as if we’ve been awarded with some sort of post-racial badge. “I know you’re not,” I’ve been told, “but, you know. You’re basically white.” I won’t go into the myriad of reasons why this is completely offensive, but I certainly feel for Rostan Batmanglij, who — despite his Persian background — has been forced to submit his sociocultural identity for amateur scrutiny.
Absent from this conversation has been the recent disclosure of Batmanglij’s sexuality. Not that he needs to prove he isn’t on either side of the white heterosexist power structure to anyone, but let’s be serious: Being a gay Iranian-American is certainly going to afford one less privilege in this country than, say, that of either of the dudes in MGMT. Batmanglij is, in fact, less privileged than the overwhelming majority of writers who will criticize him this year.
I’ve always thought that the worst mistake an artist can make is to wait around and be “discovered,” but the conventional wisdom has always countered that the traditional record company system is the only route towards financial solvency. Not so, says Mike Masnick, who cites the success of both the famous (Nine Inch Nails) and the not-so-famous (Jonathon Coulton) as two examples of a clearly viable formula:
So, let’s look at Corey Smith. In the earlier part of this decade, Smith was a high school teacher, playing open mic nights on weekends. But then, he started focusing on building his music career. He started playing numerous live shows, and really worked hard to connect with fans. He gave away all of his music for free off of his website, and used that to drive more fans to his shows. On top of that, he offered special $5 pre-sale tickets to many shows, which has a useful side effect: his biggest fans would convince many others to go as well, building up his fan base, and getting more people to go to more shows. He tried pulling his free music off of his website as an experiment, and saw that his sales on iTunes actually dropped when he did that. In 2008, mostly thanks to live shows, Corey was able to gross nearly $4 million. While giving his music away for free. Connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy worked wonders.
My friend (and former bandmate) Jonah Matranga has been working with this model for over a decade: He created a community around his music, he maintained direct contact with (and input from) his audience, he wandered around the world playing in people’s living rooms, he established a sliding-scale payment system for t-shirts and records, and most recently, he created the “Unique Recordings” series — in which he makes exclusive studio recordings commissioned by the fans. (The suggested price range is $80-$100 per original song and $90-$140 for a cover.) In the process, he also makes a living — and, in fact, a better living than some of our friends with major label deals.
Coakley bristles at the suggestion that, with so little time left, in an election with such high stakes, she is being too passive.
“As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?’’ she fires back, in an apparent reference to a Brown online video of him doing just that.
In other words, success is no longer who you know. The new paradigm dictates that if you want something, you’re going to have to stand outside in the cold shaking hands.
There isn’t much to say here that the video won’t perfectly illustrate, but in terms of conceptual CD packaging in 2010 — it’s not dead! You can’t do this with an MP3.
