I Hate My Own Work

Three days ago I wrote a piece about Turnstile, a band that I don’t like. I have regretted publishing that essay from the moment it went live.

But I know that once something exists on the internet, you can’t get it back. Barring new developments about the topic of choice, there’s not really a commonly accepted way to take a new stab at an old topic. I will live with what was a hand-wringing piece that I wrote in a cowardly state in the pursuit of nuance.

My actual opinion, and the piece of criticism I wish I had written this week, is that Turnstile sucks. I hate them. I think to ascend to the heights that they have without presenting an actual point of view flies in the face of the actual value of the genre they are constantly praised for reinventing. The origins of punk music were to express righteous anger. The Ramones sound like music for children now, but they wrote songs about the CIA.

Minor Threat — whose name explains precisely how they saw themselves in position to the ruling class — burst onto the scene by being absolute fuckin’ haters.

They hated you. They hated themselves. They really, really hated American establishment norms and the insidiousness of political decorum. They refused to sell merchandise. They hated that they accidentally started the straightedge movement, which grew into such a rigid way of thinking that I would call it a replacement for religion.

They even hated being a band so much that they barely existed at all. Yet Ian MacKaye, the band’s frontman who you can sometimes find at the Capitol in his hometown of D.C., wrote and screamed those songs with a fucking torch. What’s the point in listening to music that is grating, loud, and intense if it’s not a performance of an honest perspective?

I hate that Turnstile has nothing interesting to say and that they have chosen to water down their music to make it more accessible. It’s not like the true chug-chug breakdown hardcore bands that came before them were particularly eloquent, but they were deliberate. Madball, Hatebreed, Strife, Earth Crisis, Agnostic Front — just the names of those bands plainly state what type of sound and message they want to put into the world.

What is a Turnstile? It’s something ever-rotating, a slight inconvenience for people who want to get from one place to another. Say something that means something, or don’t bother at all.

But the fury I feel toward Turnstile is more about the fury I feel toward myself. I listened to their new album, I watched the videos of people losing their minds at their shows, I searched my soul for a way to embrace the new direction of the style of music that has made me who I am today.

What I came up with was “they should put guitar music in nightclubs.” I do mean that part — I think artists should crank up the cross-genre exploration. But that’s not what I actually care about. It’s not what I actually have to say.

It was a piece of writing without a point of view. It was a piece of writing that obscures what I actually think and believe in pursuit of being open, generous, and nuanced about — let’s be real — a type of art that relies on shredded vocal cords and power chords.

I am in a bad place with the relationship with my own writing. I no longer know what I offer of value to my readers or to people who don’t know my work yet — or the established editors and publications I’d like to fold back into someday (soon). I’m very thoughtful. I’m very curious. But I have not felt proud of my own work lately and I don’t know why anyone would find it interesting if I don’t find it interesting myself. Turnstile and EDM, give me a fucking break.

This tension I feel is inextricably connected to what we call the “attention economy” and my own economic crisis that happens to be playing out during a full collapse of the industry where I made my career. I once knew how to differentiate myself and create work that was additive to the perspective of my readers. Am I changing anyone’s mind now?

A huge part of that skill was based on becoming an expert in a narrow field that I no longer find interesting enough to write about exclusively. I don’t hate sports — I like them more now than I did during my last few years covering baseball full-time — but I do not want that to be the only topic on which I can write anything of value.

But I feel now that I am musing into the abyss because, honestly, that is where I spend my days. I am in the abyss. I am floating around in a place where I have no traction, no direction, and very few lifelines.

It’s no wonder that I think my work sucks now. I am exploring subjects in which I worry I have no credibility and I am holding onto an anti–hot-take mentality that seems to have died roughly an entire decade ago. I’m trying to balance doing work that feels like a representation of myself and work that other people with money will find interesting, too.

In that balancing act, I am finding only muddy, insincere, and pointless writing. It’s the very dilemma that drives me absolutely crazy about a band I tried to write about this week. I know my commentary on this band is bordering on unhinged, but it’s because the way I feel about their say-nothing work is the way I feel about my own. They’re emblematic of my refusal to let it rip.

I’d rather seem thoughtful than incisive. But I’ve overlooked the reality that those two things can co-exist. I’m also just trying to hide from myself the potential that I might just not have the skills to bring them together right now.

In the (now many) months since I began the project of reorienting myself as a writer, I’ve ridden waves of emotion that would make a deep sea captain shudder. The problem is me. The problem is my industry. The problem is America. The problem is the tech freaks who I hated when I lived amongst them in San Francisco. But until this point, the only element of my work that has remained on a stable, upwards trajectory is my confidence in my ability as a writer. Suddenly, that crashed back into the inferno as well.

I think the act of writing, or creating in general, is to be at constant war with yourself. Artistic agony often comes from the struggle to translate the concepts in your mind into the medium of your choice. Something is always lost in that act, but it is a feat of genuine success when you come even close to executing it properly.

So, I am struggling with a sense of self-betrayal. Not only am I routinely failing to skillfully represent my own point of view — I’m failing to attempt to do so at all. I am scared to be critical or complimentary. I am scared to strike out with the confidence that comes from building up expertise over a period of many years.

My fear of saying something that I might regret — or worse, will make me look like an idiot — is the mechanism that is causing me to write things that do just that. Inauthenticity offends me to my core. Now, the only artist who is truly offending me… is me.