Sincerity is scary
On liking what you like and writing about it
In 2015, I quit my job as a staff writer at Alt Press. My editor told me I couldn’t write about the then-mostly-underground band PUP, whom I loved, because I had to write a listicle about scene bands’ Halloween costumes, which I hated. That was when I knew it was over. I couldn’t scrounge the love for it anymore. I called my editor one night from my bedroom, nervous about the possibility that I’d never write about music again, and quit the job I had wanted for years. The next morning, I drove around Monmouth County with a coffee from Starbucks and listened to that PUP album, trying not to think too hard about why I liked it.
I got into writing about music when I was eighteen because all of my friends were in local bands, and I wanted to write them into exposure. By the time I turned twenty-one, most of my friends’ bands broke up. By twenty-two, the blogs I had come up reading and writing for had all shut down. I took a big step back from music writing and went to grad school, deciding finally that I didn’t want to edit Pitchfork or write a cover story for Rolling Stone anymore. I realized that most jobs in music writing don’t give the writer much opportunity to write about what they actually want to write about, and they certainly don’t pay enough to make that compromise feel worth it, so I decided to give up. I went to grad school, seeking an MFA.
I spent my first semester wonder if the whole thing was a mistake—I didn’t make many friends during my first few months in the program, and I wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted to create the type of writing that Sarah Lawrence’s non-fiction program teaches: personal essays and memoir, mostly. I really wanted to write about what made me like that PUP album so much, the way I felt while listening to “Resevoir” the day after I quit my dream job. I wanted to write about the shows I attended in high school and college, the nights that made me feel alive when I was depressed into suicidal ideation. It took me a long time to gather the courage to do it. I didn’t want to get laughed out of the room.
Here’s what I wished I knew then: the most universal language of writing is the personal. I learned that after reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us over winter break that year. When I feel disillusioned with my writing practice, I read the introduction to the book, written by poet and scholar Eve Ewing:
…Hanif Abdurraqib is something between an empath and an illusionist. Among the thousands who have read his work, I am confident that I am not alone when I say that Hanif lured me in with a magic trick—by apparently knowing the textures of my relationship to songs and athletes and places that I love. He knows our secrets. He has an uncanny ability to write about music and the world around it as though he was sitting there on the couch with you in your grandma’s basement, listening to her old vinyl, or he was in the car with you and your high school friend who would later become your boyfriend, singing until you were hoarse, or he was on the bus with you when you sat in the back with your headphones on trying to look a lot harder and meaner than you really were. He seems to know all about that summer, that breakup, that mix she made you that you lost when someone broke into your car later that year.
It’s that feeling, that the writer was there with you during the biggest moments of your life, that makes good writing sing. This paragraph makes me remember what incredible writers like Hanif are capable of, what I am capable of when I try. It makes the blog-world feel small and petty. I think about this paragraph when I need a reminder that I’m the only one who gets to decide if my writing is sincere or not.
This line of work doesn’t pay much. The rejection can hurt. Sometimes, it is that “magic trick”—that feeling that the writer knows exactly how you feel, and gives you permission for feeling it—that makes writing about music feel worth doing at all. When I first started to read They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, I couldn’t believe that someone allowed Hanif Abdurraqib to write poignant, earnest, deeply-personal essays about the music that I grew up listening to, feeling more strongly about than anything, about Fall Out Boy, about The Wonder Years. It took me too long to learn that, in order to write like that, the only person I needed permission from was myself.
I published an essay about Fall Out Boy’s Infinity On High in Catapult Magazine last year. In drafting that essay, I tried to avoid writing about the way that album sounds, its place in the Fall Out Boy discography. Instead, I tried to focus on its place in my world. I wrote how it came to me during a time of economic and personal uncertainty, how it makes me miss all of the people I loved who moved away after the Great Recession hit, how something as simple as burned CD dropped in my lap by a friend created an entire world within me. I wrote it in grad school to please myself, to feel like I was getting away with something by writing about pop-punk in my Very Serious Grad School Workshop. When Catapult published it, Pete Wentz read it. He even shared it on Twitter, complimenting the exact thing I was going for:
When I read that tweet, I collapsed the floor, dumbstruck not by the fact that Pete Wentz read my essay, but that he got it. That he glossed over the part where I admitted that I didn’t care for Folie a Deux too much when it dropped because the heart of the essay—the sincere part, the part that was hard to write—resonated.
I guess what I’m getting at is that I’m tired of the game. It’s easy to write about music; I’ve been doing it since before I could drive. It’s also easy to say that someone’s work isn’t sincere because you don’t agree with it. It’s difficult and terrifying to write what’s true. I’m tired of the way that music writers treat cynicism like honesty, that way sincerity and uncorrupted enjoyment, sentimentality, nostalgia, is scoffed at as a ploy for retweets.
The truth is, there’s no glory in being the coolest kid in the room. If there’s an in-crowd, I want out. We’re all broke at the end of the day, anyway. I don’t want to be the first one across the indie rock finish line. I’d rather read something personal, something about how a top 40 emo-pop album got you through a difficult time, or how one Bright Eyes song allowed you to come out to yourself, or how Lorde’s Melodrama convinced you to drop your abusive partner. I want to know about your life. I think that’s a million time more interesting than whichever indie band’s bandwagon we’re all hopping on this week. I’m more concerned with your textures—the memories associated with music that make music feel like something more than some files on our iPhones—than I am with finding another band I’ll listen to once and abandon. If you need permission, here it is.