Thinking out loud about food and music and blogs
Spurred by this post of Dave’s! I’ve been thinking about this lately—why, when there are so many “personalities” and individual critics associated with music writing, have so few been able to establish online outposts specifically centered around their own personal music-related narratives? Why are most music writers still working in either the blog framework (the here’s an MP3, here’s a review, here’s a tour update thing, generally on the press-release grind even when it’s coupled with more substantive personal/journalistic writing) or the writing-for-more-traditional-outlets framework?
I was thinking about it specifically in regards to food blogs, with recipes kind of being like the MP3. In both cases, the writers blog about the item in question, discussing its origin and the usefulness of it and what tweaks they might recommend, referencing other things as a matter of comparison/contrast, etc. It’s a service. Readers appreciate it.
But also a huge part of the most successful food blogs that I know of is just the pure aesthetics—the photos, the writer’s voice, the stories they’re able to tell about the food they’re suggesting you make. I’ve read nearly every word of every post on Orangette over the last several years, same with Smitten Kitchen, but could count on my left hand the number of recipes I’ve made from their archives. And that’s just mostly because I’m not a great in the kitchen. I know excellent home cooks that love those sites, too, and it’s not just about recipes—it’s about taste and editorial curation and storytelling.
And many food bloggers (the ones I mentioned, plus, perhaps most notably, The Pioneer Woman) have been able to turn what they do into a full-time job, or at least a very dependable side-project. Molly from Orangette is writing her second book—not a cookbook, exactly, but a collection of essays and recipes. (I read the first one and loved it.) Deb from Smitten Kitchen, from what I know, does the blog full-time and is working on a cook book. I’m going off the top of my head here but I know many food bloggers have parlayed their success online into gigs writing for print media, too, or bigger outlets online, while still keeping up their own main project (which always seemed like an unspoken goal of the people I’ve known who started music blogs—that they’d incubate there for a while and then move along to something bigger/better). They become able, financially or otherwise, to support bigger projects, quit their jobs, to support their families, partly or entirely.
Is it just that the way we interact with food and music, as components of our lives and therefore things to tell and be told stories about, is so totally different that it’s just naturally given rise to two very different models for how those things are written about online? Or were food-writing and music-writing just such totally different beasts to begin with that of course their manifestations online would be totally different too? Or is it that the pace and expectations to keep up with the pace of music “news” cycle just kind of screws writers up in a way that food writers don’t have to worry about? (Although, really, wouldn’t you think depending on search hits for stuff like “apricot clafoutis” would be just as dodgy, or moreso, than depending on “Obscure Band X”?) Or is it just that no one in music writing land has really tried the “here I am, a person, writing about this piece of music in both a personally narrative and service-y way, on a regular basis, at this one place online where I also sell ads”? Do food writers just feel less constrained by some arbitrary, publicist-churned news cycle? Or is it more about the music industry, especially the independent music industry, being so shit that no one’s out there to buy ads on those kinds of sites (unlike food bloggers, which have the whole “lifestyle” industry, which is not suffering the same fate currently)?
Questions!
Few thoughts:
A) Some writers are doing or have done this excellently — people like glenn mcdonald when he wrote regularly, people like Tom Ewing or Nitsuh Abebe now, a lot of people on the Jukebox. You’ll notice how most of this is independent or unpaid, because:
B) of how much personal voice you can sneak into the churn. This is hard. If your job permits it, it’s still hard to do this without being cliched or, in my case, Yet Another New York Writer In Her Twenties who doesn’t have many intersections between how she relates to music personally and what she’s comfortable blogging about. Which gets at something else:
C) I suspect this might be a gender/audience thing in part. All the writers you mentioned are female; I suspect a lot of their readers are female as well. Most of the recipe blogs I read seem to specifically tailor their writing with this in mind, not purposefully but as a byproduct of who’s writing. There’s a lot of, for lack of a less stereotypical phrase, “girl talk.” (I say this as someone who has Smitten Kitchen and several baking blogs bookmarked and who has made several recipes from them.)
Ah, of course you know I have to say something about this. Amusingly, I went back and read some very early Rich Girls posts earlier today, for a completely different reason, and they were very much news + mp3 = post (very different from what Shannon, Andrea, and I tried to do with Depraved Fangirls); over time, that evolved into the writing style I was best known for: the exhaustive, rambling personal narratives that gave me the reputation of being an off-kilter name-dropping groupie weirdo who listened to a LOT of music, all the time. 75% of this assessment was true. But, as the ladies above point out, this is no way to make a living. This was a side-project only. I never wanted to monetize it; getting into shows for free was enough payment for me. It was!
But what people don’t talk about when it comes to maintaining an online music blogging persona is that it’s exhausting, physically and mentally. No other kind of lifestyle blogging, no matter what stripe — food, fashion, interior design, makeup, whatever — demands that you go to very, very late-night events every night — sometimes two or three a night — to stay on top of what’s popular. In the heyday of Rich Girls in Austin, I would seeing six or seven bands at three different venues almost every night. When I wasn’t going out, getting ready to go out, or coming down from going out, I was listening to new music. Lots of it. Constantly.
This state of overstimulation was exhilarating. If you’re reading this, you know. But, goddamn, it’ll wear you out. And by the time I moved to Brooklyn and discovered that it’s just as exhausting (and expensive, even if you are on the list and the bartenders are good to you) to go out maybe once or twice a week here as it was to keep up the jillion-shows-a-week schedule in Austin, that you’ll get home past 3am no matter how hard you try to get in earlier because you need to leave the house at 8am to be at work by 9am, that you just can’t keep that shit up past the age of 30 and be healthy and sane and not drunk all the time.
Which is to say, if someone actually wanted to pay me a decent salary to be a girl-about-town again (this time sober) and write my little heart out about music, I’d take it. In a heartbeat. But I’d also demand car service reimbursements (no waiting for the F train to Jay Street at Delancey ever again…) and an clothing allowance and and and.
Obviously, this would never happen.
So I keep posting here, despite my endless attempts to KILL CINDY HOTPOINT DED ONCE AND FOR ALL; I entertain the notion of getting back into serious writing, of reviving superseded, of doing something more meaningful than reblogging pretty pictures and songs other people have posted. To write about my relationship with music, almost a decade into this game: battle scared, tarred and feathered, cranky.
I was getting there with the Jukebox, but fortnight without DSL and then a weird few weekends knocked me off my schedule there — I swear I’ll get right back to it soon. Baby steps, I guess.
