I got into music writing the same way I got into anything in the early 2010s—by accident, and because I needed attention. It was the dawning of an era that promised salvation through endless self-expression, the perfect front for young “creatives” to inflict their various personality disorders upon the world. I had a Skrillex haircut, a semi-profitable online art store (funded by my much more lucrative gig as a bike courier delivering eighths of mid), and an apparently endless supply of blazing hot takes on such topics as Soulja Boy, Lil B, or a rapper called RiFF RAFF my friend put me on to—he of the dilated pupils and bad-idea tattoos, who was known to rail a line and then freestyle for seven-and-a-half minutes in a studio apartment littered with Four Loko cans. I don’t really recall angling to become a music journalist, or a writer at all. It was like I just kept typing into the void until eventually some sucker reimbursed me with $150 that would hit my account three months later.Back then, it was pure pleasure to spend the entire day, and sometimes all night, online—falling into YouTube k-holes that would last four or five hours, then emerging with a bounty of new songs by unknown teenage rappers who are now probably several lifetimes removed from their brief tenures as Chief Keef wannabes. I don’t mean to be the person who sits around complaining about how much better music was back in the good old days. (To paraphrase the cowboy in Mulholland Drive, I believe that a man’s attitude determines to a large extent the way his life will be, and that beauty, inspiration, and amusement can be found pretty much anywhere, so long as you are looking.) But I’ll always have a soft spot for the music of that time, let’s say from roughly 2011 to 2013: the Chicago drill extended universe, “Dreams & Nightmares (Intro),” Gunplay, Lil Ugly Mane, Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended, “Call Me Maybe,” Glass Swords, 2 Chainz and Juicy J’s second acts, Young Thug and Future’s first ones, “I’m God,” Far Side Virtual, I could go on and on…In the past year alone, I must’ve had two dozen conversations with other writers and musicians who look back on this era as uniquely fulfilling—some of them a few years older, some ten years younger than me. I’m not quite sure whether to chalk this up to the fact that we were young and dumb and living in cheap apartments in some kind of delusional Obama-era bubble, or that we had not yet been lobotomized by our willing participation in the “attention economy,” or that digital streaming apps had yet to replace the fun of self-guided discovery with algorithmic slop, or that frivolous pop music could be enjoyed as such without pretending it was of grave socio-political importance. Whatever the case, I don’t know too many people who would agree their life is edified by hanging out online in 2025, the way many of us would have back in 2012.I’ve tried to quit the music writing game a couple times since then, having come to the conclusion that there was nowhere left to write or I had nothing more to say, at least not on the subject of the hip and happening artists that so rarely hit like Detroit’s Doughboyz Cashout did in 2012, or Chicago’s Sicko Mobb in 2013. (Though honestly, what does?) But somehow I always find myself coming back around, although maybe not so much with the hot takes nowadays. The songs that captured my attention in the early 2010s often seemed to come from weirdos who were self-possessed enough to will their worldviews into being—little triumphs of charisma over the status quo. I suppose that I was trying to invent myself the same way, too, hoping that somewhere between my Twitter account, my secret Tumblr pages, amateur DJ mixes, and a couple hundred blog posts would emerge some sort of meaningful, or recognizable, identity.
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