I Was Slop Before It Was Cool

Two weeks ago a colleague called my Ted Lasso interview slop, and I wrote a whole essay about it. What I didn’t say is that it wasn’t the first time. The first time was fourteen years ago, it came from Brooklyn, and I had it coming.

The list

In the fall of 2012 I was twenty-seven and had just quit a job teaching creative writing at a rehab center, a stable entry-level salary, to freelance full time. I wanted a career as a journalist, and I needed to make money from it. We were living in Long Beach, California, on 3rd and Redondo, in a place that was safe and that we could afford, which at the time was the whole list. I’d started a blog where I wrote every day, tracking my journey to becoming a journalist. And I wrote about anything anyone would pay for: video games, a congressman nobody liked, a port strike, a K-pop show my wife shot because we couldn’t afford a photographer. I needed the checks.

But it wasn’t only the checks. I knew what I was making: copy for a digital world. SEO mattered. Traffic mattered. The papers paying me were trying to survive, and I could feel that world coming down around me. So I did the one thing a traffic farm couldn’t. I put myself in the piece.

One of the places paying me was the OC Weekly. I’d read a piece at the LA Weekly called “Ten Jazz Albums for People Who Don’t Know Shit About Jazz,” and I thought: I have a different ten. I’d played drums in the jazz band at Stetson under a seventy-year-old trombone player who believed drummers should be metronomes, seen and not heard, and who eventually banned me from the bass drum for hitting it too hard. I knew which records had cracked jazz open for me. And I knew who I was writing for: a kid in Orange County, nineteen or so, googling where do I start with jazz at midnight. Not the old guard. The kid.

So I wrote “Ten Jazz Albums to Listen to Before You Die.” Kind of Blue. Blue Train. Mingus Ah Um. Time Out. Monk’s Dream. Bitches Brew. Ella and Louis. Head Hunters. The Bridge. The Shape of Jazz to Come. I embedded every album in full from YouTube so the kid could press play without buying anything. I explained what the Williamsburg Bridge was, because Sonny Rollins practiced on it and my reader had never been to New York. No Bird. No Dizzy. Their fingerprints were on every record, and the kid would find them on his own.

And I wrote it the way I’d write anything I cared about: as memoir. Not a critic ranking records, but a kid from the drum chair telling you where each one found him. The first time I heard Kind of Blue I was sitting in my car outside my grandparents’ house, after a family member had been hospitalized, and I remember how vivid the colors were on that dreary day, the rain accumulating on the windshield, the drops draining down the glass. That went in the list. A listicle with a person in it. A small thing to insist on, and I insisted.

The legs

Then it grew legs. The LA Weekly ran it. The Dallas Observer put it in print. I remember thinking: good. More kids.

A week or two later I opened my blog stats, which I checked in those days the way you check a slot machine, and there was a spike. I hadn’t posted anything. It all came from one link, so I clicked, and it was a forum of music writers taking the list apart bolt by bolt. Naive. Nineteen. Who let this child into a historic conversation. I pictured them swirling brandy in Brooklyn apartments, which was unfair, and which I am still, a little, picturing.

They kept calling it “the Voice piece.” I didn’t have a Voice piece.

That’s how I found out The Village Voice had run my list. The Voice. The paper of Gary Giddins, the mother of every alt-weekly I’d ever written for, had picked up a listicle built for teenagers in Orange County and published it in New York. Where everybody already knows what the Williamsburg Bridge is.

An editor at Spin tweeted: “Any smart 19 year old with access to a public library has heard enough jazz and can die now.” A critic I respected, Anthony Dean-Harris, wrote an essay called “On Wheat and Chaff.” It was good. I could tell, even while it was about me. The internet, he argued, would eventually sort the real writing from the rest, and the rest was me. I was the chaff. NPR’s jazz blog, I’m told, put the pile-on in its top five stories of the week: nothing before the LP era, nothing after the early seventies, every pick obvious.

And I made the mistake every young writer makes once, if they’re lucky. I read the comments. All of them. Somebody in there wanted my grandma to die.

What nobody in Brooklyn knew

Here’s what I couldn’t say then, because I was too busy being hurt and pretending I wasn’t.

They were right about the list. It is a beginner’s list, the ten records on the first page of any search. That was the assignment. I didn’t write it for them. I wrote it for the kid, and for the check, and a little for me. The memoir was the part Brooklyn couldn’t see, and the part I’d still defend.

Not one word changed between Orange County and New York. In Orange County it was a door. In Brooklyn it was slop. The only thing that changed was who was reading.

So here is my definition of slop, and I’ve carried it for fourteen years: slop is what you call something that wasn’t made for you. The kid never called my list slop. He couldn’t have. It was built for him. Brooklyn called it slop because they’d heard every record on it twenty years ago, and a door you’ve already walked through doesn’t look like a door. We used to call that hackwork, then pulp, then listicles, then content. Now a machine can make it in a second, so the word is everywhere, and we’re all going to be a bit weird about it for a while.

But the thread and the fifteen thousand likes agreed on one thing. People had read it. You can’t learn a craft in private. You put the work in front of strangers and take what comes back. The likes said it worked. So did the hate. Nobody starts a forum thread about a piece nobody read.

Then Herbie Hancock shared the list on his own Facebook page. Head Hunters is number eight on it, and the man who made Head Hunters hit share. And for several years, if you typed jazz albums into Google, my list came up first. Not the Voice’s copy. Mine. The critics said chaff. Herbie said share. And the algorithm, which has no opinion about Brooklyn, decided a list made for a kid at midnight was the best answer on the internet. It isn’t anymore. But for a while the machine and the master agreed, and the thread was outvoted.

The list is still up. Somewhere there’s a person who heard Mingus for the first time because of it, and I’ll never meet them, and that’s fine.

— Joe

P.S. Write me and tell me the first thing of yours somebody trashed: joseph@josephlapin.com. I read every one. I don’t read the comments anymore, but I read these.