Jon Garrett reflects on the evolution of music criticism in the 21st century.
photo by Nicole Miller.
In the frosted grip of pandemic winter in Chicago, Firebird was conceived amidst virtual Zoom calls and a flurry of Google Drive activity. As we assembled our first team of writers, editors and artists, I knew next to nothing about running a music magazine. I was really just elated to be building a community of people who loved music, and talking about music, as much as I did. During those early Zoom meetings, being a bunch of college students sequestered in our apartments and craving social interaction, I surely wasn’t expecting anyone else to pay attention to us.
One day, we received an enthusiastic message from Jon Garrett, a UChicago alum who was thrilled that his alma mater finally had a dedicated hub for music discussion. Our subsequent rendezvous via Zoom made it clear to me that Jon understood what made Firebird so special. This was the first time that I had spoken with someone with years of tangible experience working in music, and I found myself greatly inspired by Jon’s background writing for NME and Pitchfork, his experience managing a few indie bands, and his genuine passion for musical discourse at UChicago. Going forward, having someone on the outside with real experience in music journalism ardently supporting Firebird’s success helped compel us to keep the fire burning.
Throughout the rest of my time at UChicago, Jon and I stayed connected via occasional Instagram chats about our favorite new music and the growth of Firebird. Though we hadn’t met face-to-face, this summer I got the chance to link up with him and see Thus Love, the band he manages, in action at a tiny bar in Manhattan’s East Village. Their kinetic post-punk produced an electrifying show fueled by the band’s undeniable charisma and genuine connection with their audience.
The conversation that follows took place among Jon, fellow founding Firebird member David Feigelson, and myself, just weeks before David and I graduated. It was an enlightening discussion that touched on Jon’s rich experiences in the music industry, the contours of modern music journalism, and the effects of streaming services and algorithms on music discovery. In his sharing of candid anecdotes, insights, and even music recommendations, Jon’s conversation with us serves as a testament to the enduring power of music in connecting people, and to the vital role that platforms like Firebird can have in providing a forum for community.
David Feigelson: You've been involved in the music scene in a variety of roles for a significant period of time. I'm curious to get your perspective on how the state of music criticism has changed and how the industry has evolved. I also don't know a lot about your background, so it'd be great to start there.
Jon Garrett: Sure, happy to delve in as deep as you want to go. So, backing way up: I think the place to start would be high school. I went to boarding school and I remember feeling super isolated at the time. I was 15, and I arrived at school with nothing but my CDs—and this was back in the days where they had a 110-disc CD changer. So I arrived with these huge walls of CDs, and music was sort of my escape, my outlet, because boarding school was tough. We had pretty strict rules about curfews, study halls and such. It was a very regimented existence. Music played a really important role in getting me through that whole experience. I spent so much time consuming anything I could related to music. We had a library there, and they had issues of SPIN and Rolling Stone. I was in there like every day, seeing if they had a new issue, and I would just consume it in one sitting, all the way through.
It was also around that time that the internet was starting to take off as a place for music criticism and finding out about new music. I remember sitting on the computer terminals in the library and stumbling on these sites that are now extinct—Wall of Sound, SonicNet. And one of the sites that I found early on was LiveWire, which eventually became Pitchfork. I always joked with Ryan [Pitchfork's founder] that I was one of their first readers. I just kept checking that, in addition to reading all the normal magazines, throughout high school. That was my escape and I had a lot of time to do stuff like that.
Then, fast forward to college, I always had this idea in the back of my mind that it'd be fun to contribute and actually write about music. I'd always been into writing, but I never put those two things together before. I remember early freshman year, I was with my friends across the hall, just listening to music. I think we’d had one too many that night. It was pretty late, and I think one of us, maybe me, said, "Hey, wouldn't it be hilarious if we submitted a review to Pitchfork?"
And Pitchfork then was not what it is now. It started to get some cachet, but it was not anywhere near the site it is today. Ryan used to post whenever he needed new reviewers, a little line on the top of the website, "Hey, we'd like to get some new reviewers. If you're interested, submit here." There wasn't a job description or anything like that. So me and my friend Pete, who's actually now a published author, were like, "Let's go ahead and do this." So we actually traded lines at the computer—he would write a couple of sentences, then I would write a couple. We had a joint byline, "Beatty and Garrett." And we submitted it, and we thought it was funny. It was mostly for our own amusement. Then we woke up in the morning, and we had an email in our inbox from Ryan, like, "Hey, would you like to write for us?" We never thought that would actually happen. But then we had to make good on it and start writing reviews.
So we did that for a while. This was in 1999—we did it for a bit, then it sort of fell apart. Pete went on to do other stuff and I decided to continue with the writing thing. I started writing freelance for other publications, alt-weeklies, like Village Voice and things of that nature. I wrote on and off for Pitchfork over the years, then New Music Express. I started writing for them regularly in 2010, contributing almost exclusively to the Radar section. My last article for them was actually last year. So I still contribute, but it's pretty rare these days with the management responsibilities that I have.
Sha Frasier: That's great. You mentioned your recent work with management—can you also walk us through how you got started with that side of everything? How’s that been going so far?
JG: That's been going really, really well. I'll back up a little. I started doing stuff for the New Music Express Radar section, which is their section for new bands, in 2010. I was getting a lot of demos thrown across my desk around that time. But the thing that was frustrating was, as a writer, I was the first one to cover this stuff. But then I was passing it along to somebody else to either go on to great success or manage it into the ground. I got tired of watching that happen. I thought, "Why am I doing that? I think I can help some of these artists better than some of these guys are able to."
The first band I worked with in a managerial capacity was Cheerleader. That came to me just like that—it was a demo in my inbox. And I was like, "Whoa! This is really good," and I thought I'd be a fool not to work with this. They were crazy enough to let me do it, not having any management experience. We had a good 10-year run. Really enjoyed working with them. We put out a couple of albums on Bright Antenna Records and they toured the U.K.
The next big project I've worked on is Thus Love. In this instance, I was on Bandcamp about five years ago, and I stumbled on this demo from these kids in Vermont. It blew my mind how amazing it was, considering they were teenagers from rural nowhere. So I called them up, we chatted, and I said I'd love to see them live. I flew to see my mom in Boston, borrowed a car for a couple of hours drive, and saw this band play to literally 10 people in Brattleboro, Vermont. Immediately when they came off the stage, I was like, "Well, you're stuck with me now." I mean, they were just amazing. You could tell even then—Echo and the rest of the band—they just have this presence about them that you can't teach, even though they were only 19.
One of the challenges we've had with them was the pandemic—it really threw a wrench into things. Some artists are more about the recordings, and some artists are really meant to be experienced live. This is definitely a band that you want to experience live. We made the decision early on that we weren't going to put music out there if you couldn't also see the band live, because we feel like that's such an important part of the process. So we deliberately held back music until the pandemic was over.
SF: So, thinking more about where things are now with the band—I know you guys put out their debut record last year, and you were recently in Europe with them as well, right?
JG: Yeah. I went over with them for a bit. I wanted to be there for their London and Paris shows. One really amazing thing that happened for this band is they played a small festival in Vermont, their home state, and Dry Cleaning was headlining. Dry Cleaning saw them play—all the best things that have happened to this band have been because other people have seen them play live—and are just like, "Oh, this is amazing! We're taking you on tour." They immediately hooked the band up with their booking agent in Europe and the UK. That's how we got them a booking agency. Dry Cleaning immediately put us on the tour with them for their UK dates, and we added some EU dates on top of that.
SF: Do you have any goals for the future of your management of this band? What do you see happening this year or in the longer-term?
JG: Sure. We actually had a rather unfortunate incident recently. One of the things about management is you always have to be really flexible and highly adaptive because you're dealing with people, and things happen all the time. I got a real lesson in it this past year. Just a few months ago, we were at South by Southwest. We had eight shows planned, and right after the fourth show, the band gets off stage, and they're really excited, they're on a high. They just shared a stage with Thee Oh Sees, who were headlining. Lou, the drummer, got really excited about it, started stage diving, and wound up separating his shoulder when somebody didn't catch him. For a drummer, that's pretty difficult. It ended up being a pretty severe grade separated shoulder that required surgery. So that has basically put the band out of commission for some time, and we're having to pivot now. We were going to be playing a lot more shows, but instead, we're now dedicating the time to recording album two and starting to get demos together for that. To answer your question, it probably moves up our timeframe for the second album. We want to keep building this, and we want to build it the right way. What I've always said to people is, my hope with this band is that of the ten people that see one of their shows, every single one tells five of their friends about it, and the next time they're back, there's five times as many people at that show. I think they're strong enough that they'll be able to do that. We don't want this to be like a lot of acts these days—they have viral hits, and then just disappear. What I think is so special about Thus Love, is that they're trying to build a community through real human connection, by playing live and being who they are. I think people respond to that. It's a little old-fashioned, maybe, but I believe in it.
DF: For a band whose live presence is so important in their promotion and their success, when you need to take a step back from that, does that change your strategies in using social media? How does that kind of outreach and communication with this community they're trying to foster look when things like this happen?
JG: Yeah, the era we're living in right now is so wild because there are so many more levers, and as a result, there’s so much more noise too. Sometimes people get trapped by getting on this hamster wheel, which I'm guilty of sometimes too, and thinking, "We have to do constant content, and we have to be all these things." The reality is, it may actually be distracting you from doing the things that really will make a difference for the band. So, we certainly do social media, they're on Instagram and stuff like that, but they're not the kind of band that's doing fifteen posts a day. I think it works for them. The most important thing for any artist is just being genuine to who they are, and I think they do a good job of that.
DF: You mentioned people doing things that might not necessarily be to their benefit. What would be some examples of that?
JG: Well, I think a lot of people mistake posting constantly on these platforms for actually gaining momentum. I see a lot of people not putting thought into it—they think they can just put anything up, and that's going to move the dial just because they did it, and they feel good that they did it. Frankly, I find I mute a lot of stuff like that. If you're just putting up a lot of garbage, just to say you put it up, that's actually going to turn me off.
SF: Has your recent experience with managing indie bands changed any perspectives that you previously had on the music industry, or opened your eyes to a different side of it? Has that made you think about music or music criticism differently?
JG: I think it humanizes it a lot more. That might sound strange when I say it out loud, because I know that fundamentally it's a human art. But when I was on the writer's side of things, people could be savage sometimes, and we didn't give it a second thought. You never thought about the people behind the art. It was just, do I like this album or not? And if you didn't like it, and this is pre-Twitter, you would just be brutal. Now, working with an artist on a daily basis, I much better understand all the thought and heart that goes into making something like that. I can't imagine being able to write those kinds of reviews as easily now. It would be harder because I understand what the impact of that is on the artist.
SF: I'm also curious, then, how impactful would you say a review from a site like Pitchfork nowadays can be on an indie band? I've always wondered how much impact certain reviews can really have on a band's career.
JG: I think it's a hard question to answer these days because I feel like Pitchfork is not as interested in some things. They used to cover pretty much all those types of releases, but now they've moved on to be more of a general music publication versus an indie music publication. With that change, I feel like they're opting out of a lot of those conversations anyway, like they're not even really covering the stuff to begin with. So it's hard for me to assess what their impact is because they're just not participating in those scenes in the same way anymore.
SF: More broadly related to social media, the behavior of people on Stan Twitter seems to have swayed music journalism or music criticism to be less harsh or less willing to take on the risk of being attacked by these fans. Have you noticed that change over the years? What do you think about how this new culture of fandom has played in how we talk about music?
JG: Yeah. I mean, how can it not influence them? If I knew that my review was going to be retweeted with a negative comment from a major pop star, and receive torrents of abuse… I'm not making peanuts to write a review. Why would someone subject themself to that unless they’re a complete glutton for punishment? It's just not worth it to most people. So yeah, it's completely changed the calculus. The other thing that's important to remember is that back in the day, before Twitter and social media, the only way that these people could communicate to their fans was through these publications. These publications acted as gatekeepers—they had a certain power over the pop stars, and the pop stars had to maintain certain relationships. It's completely reversed and flipped now. I get pitches now, no joke, in my inbox, from publicists saying that if I write a review for such and such publication, it'll get retweeted by this pop star who has thousands and thousands of followers. It feels like the only purpose these reviews serve is so the pop star has content for their Twitter feed or something. It's just a piece of content for them. If you look at any of these publications, their followings are dwarfed by the followings of any of the stars they cover.
SF: What do you see as the overall role of a music publication now, and how do you think that may change in the future?
JG: It depends what you're looking for out of it. As a curation tool, I think it's really going to be a struggle for a lot of the reasons we've talked about. There's a reluctance to want to have that dialogue because of concerns people have about how some crazy pop star could take it the wrong way, and then I'm engaged in a conversation I never wanted to have in the first place. It's just a whole different calculus. As far as music reviews, I think they have far less utility than they used to, and their value is likely going to be diminished. I think publications have started to realize this as well and demote them in importance.
I still think features have an important role to play because there are limits to how an artist can tell their own story. You need an outside perspective to be able to frame things in a broader context. And that's more of a dialogue directly with the artist. So when you do a feature, it's just a different medium than doing an album review. It's not necessarily criticizing the art, but it's providing a different context in which to view it, and it's helping to explain more of who the artist is and how they fit into the broader cultural fabric. I still read a lot of features that I find a lot of value in, where it's an interview with the artist, and there's a conversation and dialogue. I admit I don't read as many reviews anymore.
SF: Another reason for that may be that now, since we have streaming, there's no entry cost to any album that you want to listen to—you don't even have to wait for it to be downloaded onto your device. You can stream it at any time. That has probably played some sort of role.
JG: Granted, some of this is personal bias. I haven't written an album review in probably fifteen years. I just lost a lot of interest in it, but I love features, and I'll write those when I have the opportunity to do it.
DF: A lot of what we've spoken about has focused on the written side of music criticism and curation. If some of these changes to Pitchfork and other reasons for written music criticism in the form of album reviews have become less relevant, I would imagine some of that has been replaced by curators and different people sharing music on social media. I'm curious what your perspective on that shift has been in general, and where you find value in that kind of work.
JG: I think one of the benefits of the social media era is that I can be connected to people all over the world and develop a web of people that I trust with music taste and get recommendations from. So my network of discovery increased by a hundredfold, and I have the world at my fingertips. For me, the modern era of music is really just a curation problem. It's all there for me to access; my problem is the amount of time I have. I physically cannot listen to every album that's released every Friday; there's just no way to get through it all.
The only way for me to make the best use of my time and find the albums that I want is to make sure that I've got the right people telling me what to try out. I try to make sure I find like-minded people to connect with, real music fans who like the kind of thing that I like, who can either give me direct recommendations or show stuff in their feed. I make sure they’re at the top of my list of things to check. A good example of this is one of the guys I follow on Instagram, @oppositemarco. He's super deep into anything post-punk—I know if he's recommending some post-punk record, I'm definitely gonna give it a listen. For me, the big challenge in 2023 is making sure you’ve got the right curators.
DF: To jump off of that, a lot of people depend on streaming platforms themselves to be curators as well, to have playlists created for them that are sometimes made by humans, but are also often just created algorithmically or by AI. I'm curious how you view the streaming model, and how you’ve seen this new phase affect musicians and the music scene at large.
JG: Have you discovered anything via an algorithm yet? I'm just curious.
DF: Not really. I depend a lot more on my network of friends that I know and people that I trust on social media to find things. One weird experience that I've had happens when I’m listening to stuff on Spotify, and honestly often I use Apple Music, which doesn't have autoplay, which I prefer. But if someone sends me something on Spotify and I listen to it, then it plays the next thing, and it's a very odd feeling where it will sound a lot like what I was just listening to. But it usually won’t be as potent, like slightly degraded, and I'll gaslight myself. I'll be like, “I really liked this other thing that I was listening to, this is aesthetically similar, why am I not getting this?”
JG: You could just take that answer and cut and paste it for my experience. I'm actually very bullish on AI. I've been playing nonstop with ChatGPT. I can't get enough; my wife is sick of hearing me type commands into it and get answers. But I'm fascinated by it, and I think it's going to yield something truly amazing for us, and it's also going to help us enter a brand new era of curation. But right now, I can't point to a single algorithm that's ever delivered me any new artist that I've been interested in. Some of that could also be chalked up to the fact that I'm constantly searching for new stuff, so I'm generally pretty ahead of the curve. By the time it gets into my algorithm, I've most likely already heard about it. And if it is something truly new to me, it's just not doing it for me.
SF: Switching gears a bit, do you have any advice for people who are looking to get into music journalism, or people who are just looking to write about music in general?
JG: My advice is the most boring advice possible, which is, start doing it. Like with anything, you get better at it the more reps you have. I look back at some of the stuff I used to write for the Arts section at Chicago, and I am truly embarrassed by some of it. But you have to be willing to embarrass yourself at the start, because it takes a long time to develop confidence in your own voice to be able to write at a high level. So that's my big piece of advice: start doing it and practice it regularly. The cool thing about this era is, if you're really good, you're going to get noticed. You could start your own Substack and just start posting your thoughts there. Start posting on social media that you're starting to post your own thoughts, and I promise you, if it's good, people will start reading it. You'll start gaining traction.
SF: Thank you. Last question—is there any music that you've been listening to recently that you've been really into this year?
JG: I really love that Crime of Passing album that came out last year on Feel It Records. I'm a big post-punk guy, so for me, I really like a well-executed post-punk record, and I thought that album was absolutely fantastic. I'm really into Royel Otis as well, an Australian duo. They remind me of early 2010s indie, really well executed. For something really recent, I just posted about this yesterday, but I just stumbled on this new George Clanton single [“I Been Young”], which I absolutely love. So good. I know he's not really new, but the direction he's taking now is pretty new. It reminds me of a record I really loved, but apparently I was alone in this at the time, Realism by Shine 2009. I think they were a Norwegian duo on Cascine Records, but it's such a smooth, nineties pop-type album. They actually got Paula Abdul to guest on it, and it was dismissed at the time, but I'm now convinced that they were just way ahead of the curve.
SF: Great, thank you so much.
edited by Kristen Wallace.
photo by Nicole Miller (@neptunne on Instagram).