I frequently get correspondence and calls from students and young freelance writers requesting tips, connections and work. (Apparently, America's colleges will soon be graduating so many hopeful entertainment-industry scribes that our law schools won't be able to produce enough attorneys to sue them all for libel.) It's really cool, but at the same time, it's a little disconcerting. Because all the queries could be boiled down to a single question:"How do I get your job?"
Well, I'm not gonna tell you that. Not for free, anyway. To learn all the tricks and secrets, you'll have to order my all-inclusive home-learning program, which is guaranteed to put aspiring young scribblers on the fast track to (nominal) fame, (relative) fortune, and a dozen copies each of The Gita's Feature Presentation and the new Karate album.
But I will provide my Ten Commandments of Music "Journalism" here, for your perusal, at no charge. These tenets comprise the foundation of my foolproof system. Read on, and remember — operators are standing by.
THOU SHALT CHURN OUT RECORD REVIEWS FOR FREE UNTIL THE HIGHER POWER SEES FIT TO REWARD THEE.Writing about music is like playing it in a lot of ways — in the vast majority of cases, ya gotta pay your dues, man. It's tough to get gigs when you don't have any experience, and it's tough to get experience when you can't get gigs. Writing album reviews (and getting them published somewhere, anywhere) is like an internship — very few people are going to pay you to do it, but it's an accessible avenue to building a resume. The chances of your byline ending up in print are good, too, provided you've got the knack; after penning countless reviews themselves, established writers and editors tend not to mind relinquishing some of the review page.
THOU SHALT NOT REFER TO THYSELF AS 'MUSIC JOURNALIST."It might've sounded halfway plausible during the '70s, but Madonna and Britney and the like have graced far too many magazine covers since then for it to sound anything but ludicrous these days. There are only three situations in which music writers should ever invoke the title of journalist: when trying to get into a function with a dress code, when speaking with a police officer or other representative of civic authority, and when applying for a credit card, mortgage, or job at a daily paper.
THOU SHALT SWITCH THE NUMBER OF HOURS THOU SPENDETH SLEEPING WITH THE NUMBER OF HOURS THOU SPENDETH ATTENDING SHOWS.You are living proof that an eight-hour night's sleep is the province of the feeble. You are a machine.
THOU SHALT THICKEN THY SKIN BY PAINFUL DEGREES.If you don't get a little hate mail now and again, you're not doing your job. Sure, it's a little weird the first few times somebody spits on you in a bar, or mails you used toilet paper, or calls for a write-in campaign to have you fired on coffeestain.com. But after a while, that mall-gangsta voice threatening your life on your answering service because you dissed Insane Clown Posse again, yo, is just funny. And it's not just the readers who will test your self-esteem; you see, there are these men and women known as editors …
THOU SHALT LEARN TO LOVE THY ADJECTIVES AND THY SUFFIXES ABOVE ALL OTHERS (BUT NOT TOO MUCH).Even when a music critic is avoiding a straight-up description of a band, they're often still describing something — how the sound makes one feel, or what it would look like were it a box of cereal rather than a sound, or whatever. Ergo, a lot of adjectives are going to come into play. Know 'em, know when to use 'em, and know how to use 'em wisely. Don't overdo it. But remember, there's a fine line between dodging adjective-overload and lapsing into arty clutter. "Willfully Flaming Lips-esque" may be a little trite, but at least it ain't "a sugar rain dancing from the speakers, a candy shower for sweet-toothed ears."
THOU SHALT CAST ASIDE FOREVER THE NOTION OF 'THE SPARE BEDROOM."Maybe you had one, maybe you harbored dreams of having one someday. Well, forget it. "The spare bedroom" is now "the music room," and it will forever be jammed with the swag you just can't bring yourself to sell, the discs no used-CD store would accept, and the myriad instruments that music writers inevitably pick up along the way, whether or not they can actually play them. Move your desk in there and call it "the office." It really does make you feel better.
HONOR THY INDIES.No band that can sell out a venue with a capacity of 5,000 or more needs another feature written about them. Give underground and overlooked acts their due. Getting a letter from someone who found a new favorite band through something you'd written is the best, and if something you pimp early on breaks out, you look like you actually know what you're doing. Don't worry; you'll have plenty of opportunities to talk to huge new rock stars who suck when you move up to the glossy mags.
THOU SHALT GET USED TO BANDS EITHER NOT SOUNDING ANYTHING LIKE THE BANDS THEIR ONE-SHEET SAYS THEY DO, OR SOUNDING EXACTLY LIKE THE BANDS IT SAYS THEY DON'T.Just tell yourself that maybe "BIO" means something other than what you thought it meant.
THOU SHALT NOT INVENT CLEVER MULTI-ARTIST SIMILES, BECAUSE THEY AREN'T AS CLEVER AS THOU, UH, THINKETH.Does Interpol really sound like what would happen if Joy Division took a picture of The Cure and Bauhaus having sex in a Berlin disco's bathroom while Kraftwerk played, then rolled the photo up into a joint and smoked it with the resulting love child? Well, OK, yeah, they do — but it doesn't make reading that shit any less irritating.
THOU SHALT ATTEMPT TO GET USED TO HEARING THE PHRASE, 'JUST MAKE US LOOK COOL."I'll get you for this, Cameron Crowe.
scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2004.