In a message dated 1/18/99 4:51:09 PM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
writes:
<< Once that relationship crosses the line, it challenges a writer's
ability to speak freely in print about an album or an artist. And tainted
opinion is the last thing music journalism needs.
>>
Challenging, true, but doable -- and often in a more meaningful way precisely
*because* of the relationship with the artist. I think Peter Blackstock's
cover story on Whiskeytown was a pretty great example of how this works. Ryan
knew he was gonna get written about; Peter made it plain that he had gotten
pretty close to Ryan. The risk is always to the relationship (friendship,
acquantanceship, whatever) and I think everybody has to know that going in.
Lots of artists are justifiably wary of befriending writers for that very
reason, lots of artist try to suck up for that very reason, I imagine.
Sometimes you just have to make up your mind in advance, I think, that you're
either never going to write about a band because the relationship is that
important, or that there's always that possibility, so you keep everything on
the table.
Nobody's Dan Rather, here, and nobody's covering Congress. It's not the
Federal Budget or some Police scam, it's a life-- expressed in music. The
music and the artists can't be separated. What there is to be objective about
is a pretty tiny part of the whole enterprise, it seems to me. Sometimes I
think the best you can hope for in writing is to do a really good job of
imparting your subjectivity. It's all on a continuum, none of which is about
facts--it's about anger, love, hate, grief, heartache, grit, passion, stories,
landscapes, poetry, beauty, grotesqueness, fear, truth, lies--all personal,
and none of it objective, irrespective of genre.
I know what I like and what interests me, and I'll do the best I can to tell
you why. That's about it. There are people I won't write about, people I'd
write about and not tell anything that's nobody's business anyway (I mean, as
long as they're not U.S. President), and a whole bunch more music I'd write
about whether I like the people or not and probably still be able to give you
an idea of what I hear in it that you might like or not, which is just about
all I can think of that a music writer's supposed to do. You all do that,
here, I think, all the time.
What is that fear: That because a writer knows an artist, the writer will
hoodwink you into buying something awful? You think a writer wouldn't know a
friend was making bad music? See the issue isn't about anything external; the
entire potential conflict resides between a writer, and the writer's own
aesthetic, and the writer's own bathroom mirror in the morning.
Linda, who (don't tell anybody) thinks music journalism is an oxymoron, or
else something you'd look for in a Barron's story on the Polygram merger.
