As I’ve realized over the past year that I want to perhaps parlay this nebulous concept of writing I enjoy into a career of some kind, I’ve paid closer attention to writing in general. Newspaper articles, blogs, magazines, the one novel I read last year, and over a dozen short stories have all caught my attention with regard to how writing (whatever that means) is done. It’s very easy to discern which type of writing is which, and the fundamental premise at work is the axiom to “know your audience.” Newspaper articles are very distant and descriptive, whereas blogs have more of a direct relationship with the reader, and so forth. Magazines are the wild card. Every magazine has a different, often niche audience, a different subject matter, and a different writing style.
I got out of the habit of reading music publications. The judgment of a record is in the eye of the reviewer, whether he’s beholding or not, so I’ve taken the approach to read descriptions rather than judgments and let my own ears decide what’s good and what’s not. Metacritic is a godsend for those who wish to navigate pop culture, combing through the extremes and averaging them out to arrive at a semi-arbitrary number that can help to a degree. The reviewers’ slant is mitigated, their spicy prose neutered in the process of grade assignment.
So, really, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the writing in the latest issue of Paste. It was the same rock journalism that Almost Famous halfway parodied, with a reading by the editor of Rolling Stone toward the end of the movie: “I’m flying high over Tupelo, Mississippi with America’s hottest band…and we’re all about to die.” The response is, “Dark, lively,” when it should have been “Hyperbolic, overwrought.” Cringeworthy. I found myself cringing and sputtering sighs of incredulity at the smarmy prose in Paste. Oozing self-importance and lacking humor, it’s everything I turned away from when I stopped reading music journalism. Any publication touting “Signs of Life in Music, Film & Culture” is an entity taking itself way too seriously, enjoying every minute of dressing in hipster attitude.
So when it comes to writing, the lesson of the past year, as an amateur student of the amorphous concept: it’s good to take note of what works and discard the rest. «»
