Only since leaving the college paper where I worked as an A&E journalist/editor for 3 years did I realize that Minneapolis has an implicit code when it comes to entertainment journalism, most specifically criticism. This code is best described as “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” This is enforced at most local publications for many reasons, the first being that Minneapolis is generally small, and the people you bash will undoubtedly find out about it, feel crushed, and then glare at you for the next 7 years whenever you inevitably run into them at a bar.
Music journalists are best friends with musicians around here, because they have to interview them all the time and hang out at their shows and probably end up banging one another’s friends, because journalism and music are great ways to network and meet sexy people.
The other reason why criticism is so taboo here is because “celebrity” in Minneapolis is not the same as you grow up understanding it. It’s at a very sensitive point that involves everyone in town knowing who you are (we don’t have that big of celebrities here so we grasp desperately onto the ones we create), but it’s not rewarding enough to make up for countless people being overly opinionated about you when you’re just trying to make music or whatever. For example, if someone insults Tyra Banks on Twitter, she can just say, “Well I’m rich and a household name!” That’s if she even notices. If someone insults a local musician on Twitter, they will just say, “I defaulted on my college loan payment this month because my gigs are drying up and everyone’s torrenting my fucking album. Fuck you.”
All celebrities are real people, but in Minneapolis it’s especially apparent that they are.
Sometimes I laugh looking back at my college arts and entertainment department because we were so pure and innocent in our willingness to be mean. Most of us got that job at age 20, had spent our teenage years reading Rolling Stone and thinking we were going to be the next Pitchfork critics (although if asked we would have cited more specific/ alt publications). We thought that being in a band meant you had earned your rewards in money, fame and getting laid, and that anyone in a band would be way too important/ busy to read our college paper review of them anyway. We also barely knew any local musicians, and did not consider them our bar buddies.
Beyond that, the fact that we were at a college paper meant our editors were adamant about being as professional and “grown up” as possible, which meant a couple things for the bastard child entertainment writers who showed up hungover every sunday:
-We were absolutely forbid from covering people we knew. There was no chance we were going to give our buddies a break cuz we could not put our buddies in the paper, ever.
-We were absolutely encouraged to piss people off. Any journalism that was considered too friendly to someone’s publicist was highly suspect. They wanted us to be as objective and honest as possible. This will come up later.
So how mean was our department? Well, we literally drove one musician out of town. He actually wrote a blog post before he left citing my friend and assistant editor Jay Boller as the reason why he had left Minneapolis.
So what went down?
1. Jay writes a review of this musician (whose last name is Herstand) called “Herstand Hersucks.” We thought this headline was super funny but apparently he didn’t. The review makes fun of a track for having the title “Blanket Go Round,” among other things.
2. Herstand gets very, very, deeply upset and sends Jay a series of Facebook messages.
3. In our semester-ending satire edition, Jay writes a satire about Herstand getting testicle implants to cure his lack of balls.
In retrospect, we had clearly missed many memos about what happens when you insult a Minneapolis musician. Jay received physical threats and also threats that he would “get fired,” by people who knew him and claimed to know people at the newspaper. Beyond that, the guy’s feelings got really hurt. We hadn’t really realized that local musicians would give a shit what we said about them. We were wrong.
A couple other times we were blissfully, innocently mean:
1. We wrote a Worst Local Bands list for a Freshman survival guide insert. We hadn’t realized all the bands were represented by the same publicist, and that the list came out a day before a big show featuring all of them. The publicist called me and accused me of purposely trying to foil the concert, which I had never even known about. She also requested that Jay Boller be fired, a request that our editors thought was hilarious, causing them to pat him on the back for pissing off a PR person. This was always a goal at the paper.
2. I wrote a blog post about a band that should “change their visual branding,” causing them to immediately re-skin their MySpace and begin a long, strange conversation with me.
Since leaving college, I have come to know a lot of local musicians, local music journalists and yes, even PR people, and consider many of them my good friends. They do not find my stories about the good old days back at the college paper very funny at all, but just look at my with their head cocked wondering just where I get off.
I do regret my younger self’s inability to realize that creative people in the public sphere are still people, people who are struggling and insecure and are not reaping the rewards of fame I assumed they were. Now that I write here I am occasionally subject to the same criticism, and sometimes I just want to say, “Sorry … I didn’t think what I was doing was that perfect either.” I now realize that people actually read the shitty things you say about them, and think about them, and get bummed out by them. As Rob Delaney once said, “Every day people on the internet call me fat. I always have a good chuckle & then am quiet & sad for 4-6 hours.”
But at the same time I miss being able to be boldly critical. I think the world needs criticism. I don’t buy any of the hatred of critics that is spewed by people who believe critics are nothing but people who failed at creative endeavors and resent creative people. Criticism is itself an art, and we have our own heroes of criticism. Criticism helps us understand and rationalize the flood of media around us, and it helps us articulate why we love something or virulently hate it.
I think people creating stuff in public need to take one for the team and give up a bit of their egos. Once you start creating things for society, people view your work as something to have an opinion about, something to talk about on dates, something to impress people with by analyzing it in an original way. And sometimes they’re not going to like it. And sometimes they’ll forget that there’s a person behind it. But at least they are thinking about what you do. I want to live in a world where some college journalist can write an article called “Herstand Hersucks,” and I’m willing to deal with some criticism for it.
Leave a Reply