Justin Davidson to Dave DiMartino
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Dear Young Music Journalist,
Let’s start by agreeing that: 1) there are easier and more lucrative ways to pay the rent than writing; 2) there are easier and more lucrative writing careers than focusing on music; 3) you are trying to storm a crumbling castle; and 4) the businesses of music and journalism are both changing so quickly that any advice we fogies have to offer is probably already obsolete.
Okay, now that we’ve gotten the bummers out of the way, listening to and thinking about music is still a pretty appealing way to make a living, and if you do it well enough, you have the chance to give cultural and artistic life a verbal dimension it wouldn’t otherwise have. Everybody has opinions, but not everybody takes the time to work them out, articulate them, and express them in vivid prose, and many readers are grateful for the effort. Here are a few principles that work for me.
1) Do everything. Journalism, and arts journalism in particular, requires versatility.
2) Your first draft is not good enough; rewrite.
3) You’re never the most expert person in the room. Accept that you’re responsible only for your own opinions, even if you suspect they might be wrong.
4) When appropriate, make an argument, strongly. Disconnected critical observations do not add up to nuance—they represent an incomplete thought process.
5) Don’t hedge. Well, maybe sometimes.
6) It’s still not good enough; rewrite again.
7) Demand of yourself the same decisiveness, passion, and technical control that you demand from artists.
8) Feel free to ignore all of the above, except #‘s 2) and 6).
BOB DAVIS (editor—Soul Patrol; broadcaster—Radioio)
I write about music & culture, not because I am a writer—I suppose that I do so because I am passionate about music & culture. But mostly it’s because I think that I have something that is worth saying. Today, there are far too many people with nothing to say, who are writing just to write, and I am quite sure that you don’t want to be one of those people.
If I have any advice that is worth even a moment of your time, it’s to make absolutely certain that you have something that is worth saying. If you do, there is a chance that someone else will want to read the things that you write. And if that happens, it makes all of the hard work and destruction of brain matter involved in writing as a means of expression worthwhile. That’s because it means that your ideas will have connected with another person.
While you may never have the opportunity to meet and have a dialogue with that person, you will have created a bond with that person that will last a lifetime. And when that happens, it’s one hell of a reward.
JIM DEROGATIS (author; co-host—Sound Opinions; PopNStuff blog)
The two pieces of advice I give my courses in “Reviewing the Arts” at Columbia College Chicago—indeed, the advice I give any writer, in any field, whenever I am asked—are deceptively simple (though both are easier said than done).
1.) Read. Read everything, inside and outside your chosen field. There is no such thing as a good writer who is not also a voracious reader. Read the greats, and read the clueless; read the old stuff, read the new stuff, and read everything in between. When you see something that works for another writer, steal it. By this I do not mean plagiarize; I mean examine what that writer did—the technique, not the specific adjectives or sentence structure—and then try it out yourself. If it works for you, once you’ve put your own spin on it, put it in your tool box, along with all of the other stuff you’ve acquired. This will be the basis of your own style.
2.) Write. Write, write, write, write, write. And then write some more. Don’t worry if it sucks. Don’t worry if anyone is reading it. The great Nick Tosches once told me that an aspiring writer cannot be afraid to make a mess on the page. So just stop whining about it or over-thinking it or wondering if you’ve got it or not. Just do it.
Repeat, obsessively, for the rest of your life. If that seems daunting, find another hobby or career. If you want to be a writer, you’ll just as soon be able to give up breathing or eating than writing. Such is the curse of this racket/passion.
DAVE DIMARTINO (executive editor of Yahoo! Music; former editor—Creem, 1979-1986)
I’m not sure my advice to younger music writers—or those interested in following that pursuit—has changed much in the past 25 years, though everything else certainly has.
The basics are, and always have been, know a lot about music, have personality as a writer, and never promise something you don’t plan on delivering. If you can do it part-time, as a hobby, because you like it—which in 2010 seems an inevitability—you’ll probably end up a happier human.
Knowing a lot about music: Access to music is easier than ever, of course, and that’s fantastic—not a mixed blessing, no matter what anyone says. When I was growing up in the late ‘60s, knowing about music—really interesting music that wasn’t played on the radio—often meant having enough money to purchase it. In practical application, this meant holding the Grateful Dead’s Anthem of the Sun album in one hand and HP Lovecraft’s second in the other, having heard neither, and choosing the one with the cooler cover. Lather, rinse, and repeat. Regular readings of early Hit Parader, Rolling Stone and Creem supplied apparently informed reviews of music by people who’d actually heard it, and this was good—but you’d be surprised what they missed. And how often they were wrong. To oversimplify: one of the reasons I grew up buying albums by Can and Soft Machine was because I was curious and there really wasn’t much being written about them. I could afford it, and I had the time to seek them out—because back then I couldn’t go to Rhapsody or Lala and immerse myself in the complete works of Elvis Presley, Muddy Waters, Johnny Cash or Terry Riley. Young music writers: you can.
Have personality as a writer: I’m fortunate that I spent my earliest professional years working at Creem, as there has never been another music magazine with such a distinct personality. Yet each of the writers there was nothing like the other; some knew much more about music than others, others were expressive, hilarious writers, whose work would be enjoyable whether it was about the Blue Oyster Cult or collecting bottlecaps. The best writers there knew music, didn’t bore readers by flaunting their knowledge, and could consistently connect on some level with each individual reader. It is not an easy balance, and the number of writers today who actually can successfully convey their personalities via their writing, and appear to be jerks, is frightening.
Never promise something you don’t plan on delivering: Speaking as someone who’s been an editor as opposed to a freelance writer since the ‘70s, this last point seems obvious. Unfortunately, it had more meaning when deadlines were not self-imposed by people writing content for the own blogs. But regardless of whether you’ve promised a paragraph on the new Christina Aguilera album in exchange for a copy of her new album or 10,000 words on Tim Hardin’s army years for $2,000, if you told someone who wanted it you’d supply it, and you don’t, you blew it.
With all that said, the future of music writing looks very strange. The number of websites out there offering comprehensive and informed perspectives on Can, Soft Machine, the Grateful Dead, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash—as well as every garage band in the world that recorded a single track in the late ‘60s—is just as staggering as an afternoon spent trolling the long-tailish reaches of Rhapsody. And as anyone who’s trolled the infinite number of fantastic MP3 blogs out there at the moment knows, Rhapsody offers only a fraction of what’s actually available. For free.
So, at Yahoo, where I now work, here is what happens with music writers at this very moment. They can write excellent and thought-provoking pieces that are read by only 3,000 people. They can increase that readership by displaying an appealing personality that will draw fans regardless of their subject matter, and maybe draw 30,000. Or they can write a similarly great—or not so great, sadly—piece that, because it is linked to Yahoo’s highly-trafficked front page, will be easily read by more than 3 million people. But—and here’s the important part—they never really know who will be reading them. Which means they have to write for both audiences, large and small, without turning off either. It means not spending too much time writing about Holger Czukay, but at the same time, never allowing your more musically sophisticated readers to presume you wouldn’t write about Holger Czukay if it were called for.
In the same way that today’s imploding record industry has put everyone on equal ground—indies and majors that is, and the majors are losing—the incredible number of outlets for music writers today means that there are more opportunities than ever for the best ones to surface, and, ostensibly, be successful. They will likely know a lot about music, have conspicuous but agreeable personality in their writing, meet deadlines whenever they arrive, and have difficulty paying their utility bills.
So how exactly have things changed?
