Certain harrowing thrills never go away. The moment before my band strikes into our opening song, we all look at each other and nod that we’re ready, and it’s quite a rush (when you play in small clubs, you never REALLY know how that first note is going to sound–it usually sounds horrendous).
I get a similar rush of adrenaline every time I post something to PCMag or AppScout. I’ve posted hundreds of stories to those sites, but there’s still that little bit of fear that maybe I just wrote a piece of total crap that everyone’s going to call me out on.
It’s not the random hate-spewing trolls that have me worried. Everyone who ever creates anything online has to deal with those morons, and they’re easy to ignore. No, I worry about the commenters who might read my article and find either factual errors or glaring flaws in my reasoning. Luckily, that’s only really happened once that I can think of off-hand (it was a doozy though).
Much more terrifying than writing for tech publications is blogging for By Common Consent, a blog frequented by friendly but crazy-smart mormon lawyers, historians, and scholars.
Even scarier than that is a new gig I got through my friend Jeff–writing album reviews for PrettyMuchAmazing.com. Tell you what, reviewing cameras and music players is NOTHING compared to reviewing a collection of music. There are no objective lists of specs and features to fall back on, no quantifiable performance stats, just a bunch of notes and words. You have to decide whether you like those notes and words, and then be ready to defend yourself against the inevitable horde of fans or haterz who think the album is amazing/awful–the only thing they’ll ever agree on is that you’re full of crap.
As I told Jeff this week, music criticism is a terrifying hobby.
In any case, it’s one I’ve just recently picked up: My first review for Pretty Much Amazing went live tonight, a review of White Denim’s new album “Fits.” White Denim is one of those polarizing bands that people seem to either love or hate, so I guess we’ll see which crowd comes out in greater numbers in the PMA comments.
