Describe What You're Hearing

Describe what you're hearing. Describe something that's invisible.

Describe the emotions triggered by the series of sounds, of noises, and try not to sound cheesy. Fuck it. Sound cheesy. Write what you want, as long as you don’t sound like anyone else. Just don't be derivative. And don’t get your head too twisted by how “meta” it is that you’re scrutinizing your work in real-time, work that’s intended to, itself, scrutinize the work of someone else. Feel the sensory rattle of recognizing how one human, maybe three or four humans, poured their proverbial hearts and supposedly their souls into the condensed duration of recorded music that you’re intimately, or exactingly spending your own time with, and how you have to summarize, reduce, discount, build up, expound, translate, champion, canonize, dispel, dramatize, or contextualize in all in 300 words.

Writing about music never got easy. I think I became increasingly more attuned (pun intended) to the compositional mode I had to move into whilst typing under the influence of snug headphones. And anyone within a 3-5 year radius will all too eagerly tell you about how they came of age “before the Internet.” That’s pertinent when, as an 18-year-old, you’re trying to be a serious surveyor of mythologies. I’m talking about anything from the Beatles to the Pixies to Kool Herc to Fugazi to David Byrne to Malco;m MccLaren to Lester Bangs to Prince to the Belleville Three to Lou Reed or Lauire Anderson or Frankie Knuckles or Bjork or you name it… I had to become a student of music; specifically of music mythology. And “in my day,” that meant finding old copies of Magnet, Spin, or NME, scouring used book stores for copies of “Please Kill Me” or “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung…” Every “idol” I researched was portrayed upon a page I physically turned with a pinched index and thumb.

So I easily started romanticizing “eras” and “subgenres” and “pioneers” and wizardly recording engineers… When you have to do any kind of journey that goes beyond a Google search to learn about the ground laid before you, then, yeah, the artists you read about start to elevate in your regard to a “founding-fathers” status… Or, at least, the work that you are doing as a music writer, feels elevated. You are the documentarian, now. And you are following in the type-strokes of hyper-stylized writers that came before you…

But I can recall, with a bit of bashfulness, how my first big article was a deep dive into the implications Myspace had on modern music. Myspace, the proto-social-media platform that presaged Facebook, a hybrid of blog, bandcamp, and Twitter, dating back to the summer of 2003; the year I started writing about music. Labels still retained their end-all/be-all rank among aspiring musicians; brick-and-mortar record stores chains, yes chains, were still a thing (Tower, Harmony House), Radiohead and Beyonce were still several years away from their surprise “drop” (read: release) of albums online… Anyway, what I’m getting to is that Myspace felt like the choppy rapids that my canoe was entering, only to then go over a waterfall’s edge into what would crystallize as my future’s predominant workload.  That metaphor’s problematic, because it implies a descent…

What followed Myspace was the “blog bands…” Bloggers, like me, (I mean, I am and was a “blogger”) were discovering that they could discover… You could leap from band profile to band profile and swiftly sample the 4+ songs they had embedded onto their profile page. Said-music-blogger could then ascend to “tastemaker” status, but portraying their next post as a momentous unveiling of an independent band or artist, tacitly implying that they might not be signed by a big label, but they’re still worth your attention. And I won’t debate whether or not a majority of them were or weren’t…But the game fucking changed. Here we were, 2004-2005, and a band could see a new blueprint forming; they could, in a pre-Facebook sense, “build followers,” over the Internet.

And you know what, I’m going to jump us ahead right here, because I’m getting bogged down in the minutiae of music history, and I can tend to do that when I’m left unchecked. My point is, I was not in any mythological era, writing about a set amount of already-famous bands; I wasn’t going to be Lester Bangs writing about Lou Reed, and I wasn’t going to be writing about my generation’s David Bowie… I was going to be writing about as many bands as I possibly could! Because I could. Because I am now able to hear anything. How do you stay a normal or traditional music journalist when you can explore, can document, can pass by, or fall in love with anything, at any time, whenever you want…

…with so much access, it wasn’t long before users in the comments’ sections started asking: “…do we even need music critics anymore?” And they’re right to ask that, because anyone with a Wordpress account could be a music critic; there’s no hipster-accreditation needed there, but more than that, listeners are empowered by the glut of options—it means they can bloody well decide for themselves what’s good and what’s not. And this is tied into my becoming an all-but-exclusively-local-focused music writer. Yes, I am enamored with, and revere the history of Detroit’s music: Motown, punk-rock, techno… Yes, I was excited to “continue the story” after the White Stripes (remember, I didn’t really get going until 2004--). But it was more in response to how I could stay here in my own neighborhood and still be able to write about two new bands per week, for 15 years straight! This was local culture, and I wanted to document it in real time.

But I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t going to push myself to write about everything. I wrote about what drew me in, what moved me, what excited me. I wrote about what I thought was breaking new ground. I wrote about songwriters who poured their fucking hearts onto their sleeves—albeit in a chorus. I wrote about noise-artists that scared me. I wrote about hip-hop artists that enlightened me. I wrote about country artists that could reinvent the wagon wheel. I wrote about what I wanted to write about….So that’s why I “never wrote a negative review.” I got that question a lot. And I always say: …that would have been a waste of my time. It would have been a waste of your time. You can decide for yourself when something’s bad. It’s more invigorating for me, as a writer, to make a case for something. Or, at least, to describe how it’s making me feel…

I can’t write about everything though. And freelancing for magazines will never pay the bills—so I’ve always been busy with 2 other day jobs. I still keep finding the time to write about a new artist, with a new album, with a new sound, etc… I can’t tell you why because I’m not listening to music as I write this. I can’t explain it to you, not now. I just know that when the music starts, I start typing.