A little girl named Pity who decided more than anything in the world she wanted to be green

[koganbot]

Can you imagine Teena Marie writing for The Singles Jukebox? —Well, she's dead, but I mean someone of her social type and sensibility.

Or Trey Songz or Ty Dolla Sign or Taeyang or Sturgill Simpson or Enrique Iglesias?

Actually, I could imagine a few Sturgill Simpson types doing so. Not the others, though I don't know much about them so perhaps I'm wrong. But a combination of selection and self-selection would keep most of them out.

I'm six days late on this, but The Singles Jukebox is looking for writers — go here for the full pitch, and yes I encourage you to try. Here's an excerpt:

We are not a Pitchfork or a Rolling Stone; we are an international site that thrives on diverse voices and opinions. We are particularly interested in applicants who are under-represented in music writing and strongly encourage women and people of color to apply.

Except the additional women and people of color they get will end up resembling the people who already write for the site, and I don't think the Jukebox could do anything about this even if it (they/we) wanted to. Don't know how many people involved in the site know how to go about wanting to, though.

I don't know if I know how to go about wanting to, but I do have a good idea what "wanting to" means. It means wanting the Jukebox to read more like the comment threads on gossip sites and YouTube but ideally, in utopia, with even more self-reflection than the Jukebox already has.

Gossip sites and YouTube comment threads frequently scare me.

If you're going to think about diversity you have to have to have to think about social class and social types and social conflict, or you're just not serious. How many bank officers write for The Singles Jukebox? How many house painters? How many who back in high school had been called rocks, hoods, greasers, grits, burnouts, dirtbags, jells, farmers, rednecks? (Showing my age here. Don't know the current terminology.) How many of the socs, debs, preppies, jocks?

The Jukebox is volunteer; nobody gets paid; so it's all in people's spare time. What sort of people are socialized to do this in their spare time?

In the pitch, the Jukebox asked applicants to blurb two from a list of tracks. That's where I got my performers above. Here are all of them. So, how many of these performers — i.e., members of their social sets — can you imagine writing for the Jukebox? Or posting on a koganbot comment thread, for that matter? Or posting at Freaky Trigger?

Trey Songz
Nicki Minaj
Migos
Brett Kissel
Kira Isabella
Blake Shelton
Gwen Sebastian
Skepta
JME
Kasabian
Faith Evans
Missy Elliott
Sharaya J
Annalisa
Black M
Jennifer Hudson
Timbaland
Taeyang
Zoe Muth
Ty Dolla $ign
Wiz Khalifa
Sturgill Simpson
Enrique Iglesias

To my embarrassment, there are six names here I don't recognize. I can kinda imagine Nicki Minaj and Blake Shelton getting a kick out of doing something like the Jukebox, though don't know how many in their prime audience would want to themselves.

Teena Marie "Lips To Find You"

Watch on YouTube

[I'm not at my home computer, so I don't have the quote exact, but I'm doing a variation on an old riff of mine from 1987, from my fanzine Why Music Sucks, some of whose readers and writers also wrote for or edited at the Village Voice. I said that coverage at the Voice was broad but tone of voice wasn't. Could you imagine Teena Marie or Merle Haggard writing for the Village Voice? Music editor Doug Simmons read this and told me he'd love to print Teena and Merle. But over the years, Teena and Merle types never ended up as Village Voice writers. Fuller Teena quote, from the liner notes to Emerald City: "Once upon a time there lived a little girl named Pity who decided more than anything in the world she wanted to be green."]

*I could be someone helping to run the Jukebox, if I had time and made it a priority. But have barely even posted in half a year.

Comments

[belecrivain.livejournal.com]

hi! sorry! have been meaning to comment on this, but my LJ-mobile app is terrible for going back and finding older entries, and I had to get my act together in front of an actual computer.

(btw, Iain the new co-head is soliciting general inputs, mostly but not exclusively on how the behind-the-scenes stuff is going, if you so choose.)

anyway -- you may or may not find this old news, but there's actually a very similar problem that happens in planning as well -- as in, you solicit input from "the public" and only a very small percentage of "the public" shows up. Where I live, for example, planning decisions seem to be dominated by a very specific (well-off, older, and resentful in a particular way) part of the population, because that's the part that has the time to show up (i.e. can make it to 6 p.m. public hearings because their children are grown and not starting the bed protests at 7) and the knowledge of the system to know that showing up and protesting loudly at a public hearing can be an effective way to prevent the happening of something they don't want to happen. If you're a conscientious planner, then you're troubled by the lack of input from other segments of the population, but recognizing the need for their input and actively getting it are two different things.

When I went to ACSP* in 2008 there was a woman who presented on doing visioning exercises in central California and making sure that immigrant/rural/poorer populations were included, and she was great, and now of course I'm completely blanking on her name.

(* Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, which is the academic/scholarly organization; as opposed to the American Planning Association, which is the trade organization; most planning academics worth their salt attend both the ACSP and the APA conferences every year; end inside baseball.)

as for the specific question, I was saying to Iain yesterday (via email) that there's a tension between the Jukebox as world's coolest co-ed sorority, full of in-jokes and having-your-back-ness, and the Jukebox as place of "diverse" opinions, because the more diverse the opinions get the harder it becomes for everyone to join in on the in-jokes. And then the in-jokes risk becoming exclusionary, despite the participants' desire for it to be *in*clusive. I don't have a solution for that, myself (and it would be hypocritical not to admit that I enjoy/have benefitted from the in-jokery, etc. etc.

(The K-Pop Writers' Workshop is maybe a little closer to what you're hoping for? Though it does come with an expectation that everyone participating wants to keep writing and improve their writing.)

[koganbot]

Well, you get the in-jokery everywhere, including Sports Illustrated comment threads, not to mention in my old Why Music Sucks fanzines and Phil Dellio's Radio On (the nearest progenitors I know to the Jukebox, though I can't tell you if Will ever knew about them) and ilX and poptimists and Freaky Trigger. But such venues did attract newbies.

Anyway, it's not the in-jokes that keep the Rick Ross types away from the Jukebox, or keep away gang members and fratboys and jocks and evangelical Christians and Republicans and strippers and teenyboppers and middle management types and anyone I'd ever see flirting or telling drunk stories at the back of the 31 Federal or the 15L Colfax bus lines. Even if they were to somehow come across it, and somehow want in, and somehow think they'd be capable of doing it, none of which is likely, they'd correctly think they weren't actually welcome and that to be themselves would be to provoke continual social clashes. And obviously they're keeping away from way more than just the Jukebox. I'm guessing taking the parents of your kids' friends, even those parents who had a special affinity for you might look at something like the Jukebox and say What The Fuck?

[koganbot]

What is the K-Pop Writers' Workshop?

[belecrivain.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing taking the parents of your kids' friends, even those parents who had a special affinity for you might look at something like the Jukebox and say What The Fuck?

in the process of figuring that out -- I've put links on Facebook to, say, the TSJ podcast I hosted, and did not get any WTF? to my face. it is entirely possible I get a fair bit of WTF? to my back.

(but that brings up a separate, non-Jukebox-y issue, which is that trying to cultivate friendships with your kids' [potential] friends' parents turns out to be ridiculously hard. at least for me.)

What is the K-Pop Writers' Workshop?

oops! sorry. direct link. Nicole Rivera of Pop Reviews Now is the founder; I think Iain and I are the only alumni from TSJ.