When I was a junior in high school, I wrote music reviews for the school newspaper. They probably weren’t very good, but that didn’t really matter; I enjoyed what I was doing. I went so far as to daydream about going to NYU to major in English -- it was a book of classes in the guidance counselor’s office -- and maybe one day be able to catch on with Rolling Stone or Spin and write reviews for them.
I ended up going to UW-Whitewater (still majoring in English), not writing for the newspaper (or anything but classes, for that matter) at all and the dream died.
I never really stopped writing about music, but I’ve never thought about it as anything more than a hobby. Furthermore, I’ve read more music criticism than I care to admit over the years, whether at mainstream publications like the aforementioned RS or Spin, rock-centric magazines like Hit Parader and Circus, and more recently at indie-leaning web sites Pitchfork and Onion A.V. Club. I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t have what it takes as a writer to do what those writers do.
For instance, the vocabulary of music is foreign to me. I don’t know what “angular guitars” are. I couldn’t identify a coda or an arpeggio or even the “middle eight” of a song. And let’s not even get started on major and minor keys. The pros know this stuff inside and out (or at least pretend that they do). I am decidedly amateur. I’ve reread a lot of my music writing and most of it comes across less as a thoughtful critic and more as a dorky fan regurgitating things I’ve read somewhere else. Any idiot with a blog can and already does do that.
Placing music in its proper context is also a point of contention with me. I am completely serious when I say I listen to all kinds of music, but my knowledge of most artists or genres is admittedly entry-level at best. Perhaps more damning as a wannabe critic is that I really don’t care to dig much further than that. Sure, I’ll always be willing to listen to new music or if something’s really good I’ll search for the back catalogue, but my passion for music only runs so deep. There are only so many hours in day, and I don’t want to spend all of them looking up influences and contemporaries, as rewarding as that might be.
So I’ve just explained (perhaps a little too much) why I am a shit music writer. Why should you read me?
If you’re looking for how an album sounds, you should probably read those other guys. I probably won’t add much to the equation. If your interested in how listening to an album feels, you might be in the right place.
In planning out what I wanted to do with this site after letting it sit dormant for two years, I discovered that aside from the music itself, there were stories connected with music that I wanted to tell. I envision it as a hybrid of rock criticism and memoir. I might not be able to place an album in musical context, but I will try to place it a context of the world at large or at least my world at the time of hearing that album for the first time or even today.
Taste Validator (I still love that name, by the way), I hope, will be just as much about the music as it is the man writing about it.
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