Whistle While You Work

It is certainly true that music magazines remain committed to music criticism without a lot of strong evidence that anyone is all that interested anymore. But I couldn’t let Pete Carbonara’s dismissive comments about our mutual former employer go unanswered. Someone needs to defend Spin’s honor, I think.

First, no one expects Spin to be The Nation or the New Yorker, and yet they still make an effort to publish a certain amount of “real journalism” in every issue. (And, with some honor, try to enter the Ellies every year, where sister pub VIBE regularly hogs the glory.) While I was an editor there, the magazine published the first major article on a little-known drug called Oxycontin, for example. Spin published the first national article on satellite radio, and it was the first periodical to exhaustively explore the legal, social, and cultural ramifications of digitized music. If memory serves, it was even one of the earliest-maybe the ONLY-national (non-gay) magazines to have a monthly column on the HIV-AIDS epidemic. And yes, there were always a few CD reviews thrown into the mix. Things may have changed after Carbonara left, but no one who has worked at Spin in recent years would argue that there is a lack of editorial rigor under the able and even legendary hands of Alan Light, Sia Michel, Will Hermes, and many others. (A young man named James Truman got his start there.)

One of my personal frustrations with the music mag business was the albatross of newstand sales, almost always tied to the alchemy of predicting which current release will be a massive hit with the kids, in order to maximize newstand sell-through. In other words, a large part of the feature well, and much of the rest of the magazine, was dictated by which albums (films, games, gear) were in current release. True, that is an insidious way to run an edit meeting… unless your passion, your beat, is popular music. Unlike other media, music magazines had the space, time, and interest to cover a lot of material that would otherwise get no press whatsoever — so for the true music enthusiast, it was a presumably a salve.

I too left Spin under unhappy circumstances, but I don’t blame Spin — I blame myself, for inexorably growing up, having kids, not listening to enough music or seeing enough shows, and not continuing to be very good at my job as a result. But it’s not fair to suggest that journalism and music journalism are mutually exclusive. Hopefully, my departure — and Pete Carbonara’s — made a little room at the bottom for someone like Krystal Grow. (In my experience at Spin, Spin’s interns were some of the finest young journalists of their generation, many feeding directly from Medill and Columbia and all the other canonical j-schools. I think Grow’s main problem is not recognizing just how difficult it is to make the cut — and if you’re not both a serious journalist and pop-culture enthusiast, you really HAVE dodged a bullet by not gaining one of the prestigious vacancies. There is a funny story from a few years ago about several enterprising young people just showing up at Spin claiming to be “the new interns.” I don’t know how far they got with the managing editor — I heard they’d claimed a couple of empty desks — but it’s good evidence that Grow is niether the first nor the last desperate applicant.)

I notice that good old James Poniewozick—one of the great unsung heroes of populist criticism, and an old friend—has weighed in on this matter as well. As ever, putting me to shame with his lean and powerful prose.