Failed Pilot

This is old, but worth reading. Idolator continues to be one of the only music sites that doesn’t irritate the shit out of me.

This has also been around for a while, but shows a type of non-fiction that I’d like to see more of. Eugene’s book, a project that will see the light of day in November (cuz Harper Collins read this piece and approached him….THAT’S how you get a book deal, and he deserves it), will be based on this feature. Maybe all of the pussies are starting to get to me.

I’m not so hot at fighting. If action needs to be taken, I’d rather hit someone with a chair. Over the past three years, I’ve challenged at least four musicians to a fight, in print, and in my Magnet column “Where’s The Street Team.” I find it funny. Some people just need to be punched, like Anton from the Brian Jonestown Massacre, who anyone could take down, or Liam Lynch (actually, I think I wrote that he needed to be “hit in the back of the neck with a roll of quarters”), who I probably wouldn’t hit but might personally tell him he’s a merchant of shit re: movies and music.

Oh, if anyone gives a hoot, I’ll have some record reviews in the next issues of both Vice and Spin. Lunch is on me!!! Not really.

Uh…did I mention that Grandma’s Boy was funny?

I stare at a lot of magazine racks. What stares back? Countless mid-level publications with innocuous titles. It’s as if the internet never happened. WRONG!! The internet did happen, it just killed the zine world. What’s left is a glut of glossies with respective readerships comparable to any zine from the mid-90’s. One can count on boring graphics, boring interviews (interviews are always boring, trust me, I written plenty of boring ones) with boring bands, and boring record reviews. Just imagine if Pitchfork was exploded into a hundred print magazines.

Of course, I’m not referring to the magazines that I write for. They’re awesome. They’re also the only magazines that I actively read, because I get comp copies. My favorite music mag, though, is one that I no longer write for. I wrote for Decibel Magazine, issues 2 and 3, but after a few months of unreturned e-mails and rejected pitches (I still try every two months or so, just for shits and giggles), my name disappeared from the masthead (funny note: it remained by mistake in the masthead for issues 4 and 5). Still, I continue to get comp copies, and I read most of each issue. AND…..I enjoy 50% of that “most.” That’s a pretty good hit rate for this relationship between myself and a mid-level music glossy, especially one that couldn’t find room for my sizeable talents. And I’m sure that’s what it was, an space issue. I mean, no one can write a crappy, marginal metalcore review quite like me (Eugene of Oxbow had some funny things to say about writing for Decibel…scroll down).

Overall, Decibel writers remain a more caustic, humorous lot than what’s usually available in this insular bubble (made even more insular by the fact that Decibel covers “extreme” music, or rather, metalcore, death metal, grindcore, flimsy “art” metal, and the thrash revival). It’s miles above Revolver, which maintains a average IQ of 71 from cover to cover and remains stuck in 1998. Decibel gives way too much space to over-intellectualizing “intense” pretty-boy boneheadedness like The Red Chord, As I Lay Dying, A Life Once Lost (and any band that could share its name with the title of a made-for-Lifetime drama) plus other garbage that’s one dinner away from Hot Topic fodder. Outside of this, I manage to read enough entertaining writing to briefly expand my “to steal from Soul Seek” list.