This is a piece I wrote and read aloud for Caryn Rose’s New York book launch party for her novel, B-Sides and Broken Hearts. It was last night at the Soft Spot in Williamsburg. The piece makes more sense read aloud, but…well, here you have it.
The trouble with everything I’ve ever written about music is that I was awfully young when I wrote it.
One time in college, I wrote a disappointed open letter to Nick Thorburn, the frontman of the Unicorns, berating him for being such a sourpuss on stage. Another time, I wrote an altogether-too-earnest post that panned Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone because not only was she bad for feminism but she said in an interview once that when she wrote that “This Tornado Loves You,” she meant a literal tornado. And I can’t even count the number of times I’ve boldly claimed, “Andrew McMahon is a musical genius who will save the world.” I mean, with lyrics like “I don’t care if you dye your hair/you’ll always be a little redhead bitch,” can you blame me?
Going back and reading this shit is entertaining, yet also, for someone who gets paid to write now, kind of heinous. So when asked to read my own writing for the first time, out loud, to a group of kind, unsuspecting music folks. . . the horror.
So I dug through everything. And by everything, I mean everything. That includes not one, but TWO old Xanga blogs. Over the past few days, I’ve gone back and reread literally everything I’ve written since I was 16 years old. Anyone who ever kept a Livejournal knows how traumatic this can get.
Well, it turns out, the most entertaining things I’ve ever written about music were 140 characters or less.
But then I realized how easy that was for me, to search through my current blog, to sift through posts on devonmaloney.com and xanga.com/anotherdayanotherdestiny. It was all right there, in plain sight, because I am, like it or not, a member of the first digital overshare generation.
How many times in the past few months someone has said to me, “Oh god, you were how old when Nevermind came out??” (I was 2.) I interviewed Debbie Harry on the phone today, one of my first honest-to-god rockstar interviews. I felt bad for a few minutes about getting a fact wrong, but then I had to remind myself that I wasn’t alive back then.
As so many of my coworkers like reminding me, I am a baby. But for a gal who grew up in Los Angeles, where your high school band can play once-legendary rock clubs if it forks over 400 bucks; for a gal who listened to nothing but Bright Eyes and Warped Tour bands in high school; for a gal whose first concert was Lit and American Hi-Fi; I think I’m doing an okay job at playing catch-up. All I have to say to my ‘elders’ is, you are SO lucky your teenage diaries aren’t Googlable.
How I managed to fool someone into thinking I was a seasoned music writer, I’ll never really understand. But in my short time in this crazy, fucked up little world of New York music journalists, where posting words on a website means you get to do things like this, where people are standing around listening to this dribble, where OH MY GOD EVERYONE KNOWS EVERYONE, I’ve learned roughly 3.4 billion new things. For example, “There’s no greater comedy and no greater tragedy in the first world than a shredding punk band playing to a crowd of 10 awkward hipsters.” And “When you’re a journalist covering a music festival, it quickly becomes less a festival, more a party with a few hundred of your closest hey-I-sort-of-recognize-you-from-somethings.” They are lessons that will, I pray, ensure I never write a blog about how great Passion Pit is ever again. Lessons like, “Hey, Devon, if you tweet all your thoughts away the second you have them, you will have NO MATERIAL WHEN YOU’RE INVITED TO READ AT A BOOK LAUNCH PARTY.”
As a result, at least 4 of the things I’ve mentioned in this piece have been previously tweeted. I wasn’t kidding earlier about the emotional investment in Twitter. Sorry I’m not sorry.
Nevertheless, I’m getting older. I know this for sure, because the other day, I realized that for about a year, I’ve been under the impression that Selena Gomez was Demi Lovato. Maybe in ten years, I’ll be tutting around Google+ or whatever with all my 30-something friends about my new 22-year-old editorial assistant who has vaguely heard of Something Corporate as “that band the guy from Jack’s Mannequin used to be in.” And we’ll gasp. Oh, we’ll swoon.
That same dude from the Unicorns went on to write a song with his next band, Islands, called “Kids Don’t Know Shit.” That’s only partly true, Nick, so quit being so fucking negative all the time.
