Two Deliverances: Fax Gang & Parannoul, sonhos tomam conta

Studying abroad for a true Shoegaze P.O.M.E. (Product of My Environment)

A few weeks ago, I got caught submitting a Pitchfork invoice at my IRL day job. Or, more accurately, I guess I sorta kinda wanted to get caught. I was probably feeling insecure about something or other that day, most likely the vast discrepancy between the education and expertise and emotional investment required to be a registered dietitian working in eating disorders and the salary - there are a lot of factors that play into this reality, i.e., American healthcare’s dim view of mental health services in general and eating disorders specifically, especially since bedrock principles like Health at Every Size and All Foods Fit run counter to where the money actually is in dietetics, namely dialysis, “weight management” and the “obesity epidemic.” But most of all, I’ll never forget when my first boss told me how excited she was for me to enter the field - “maybe if there’s more men, we’ll get paid more.”

But I digress and I suppose training my focus on what I make in music writing is like beating myself with a hammer to get rid of a headache.

I don’t talk much about my music writing at work - not because I think it would signal a lack of commitment to a job I value deeply or some sort of conflict of interest. But I speculate that most people who spend a significant amount of time on Music Writer Twitter (i.e., any amount of time greater than nothing) feel some sort of shame about it, which is escalated by trying to explain just about any Big Narrative to the 99.9% of people they see on a daily basis who’ve never heard of Charli XCX and never will. As such, to the degree that my music writing becomes a subject of interoffice small talk, it’s most likely referred to as “blogging” and Indiecast is viewed as no different than any stereotypical podcast where two aging white dudes yap about whatever comes to mind. The less I reveal about it, the more it’s perceived as a dork-ass hobby but at least I don’t have to explain the word “hauntological.”   

Seeing the Condé Nast invoice portal changes that in a hurry - it’s fucking gorgeous, splashed with stock photos from Vogue and Bon Appetit. And this happened to be an invoice for about $1000. I will never be in a position where $1000 is not a lot of money to receive at once, but it’s still a number that can feel like a lot of money in an immediate sense and also not much at all in the big picture.

It’s an extraordinary payday for “blogging,” and seeing one four-digit invoice leads to the assumption that many, many more are out there for the taking. Which, given that most LinkedIn postings for dietitian gigs usually specify a $35-ish/hr-type salary, seeing that kind of number usually then begs the question of “why couldn’t you do this full time?” And that’s when I might not volunteer the fact that this payday was accumulated over the span of several months for like four reviews; between the listening, the thinking, the writing and the editing, I honestly couldn’t put a number on the hourly wage that wouldn’t scare me. And so, as for why I couldn’t do it full time, I just think of it this way - my day job is in mental health, but my side gig is for sickos. 

Even against that sicko baseline, Keegan Bradford and Eli Enis stand out as some of my favorite sickos - you can’t put a price on the respective advocacy they perform day in and day out for emo and shoegaze, and for the most part, they do it for free. And that’s even before you add in the fact that both of them focus on a kind of emo and shoegaze advocacy that has almost no financial upside in the current state of music journalism: non-English speaking emo and shoegaze.