Long live Noisey Canada
I’ve underlined so many short, sharp sentences in Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, but one passage has stayed with me for days:
“My life, which exists mostly in the memories of people I’ve known, is deteriorating at the rate of physiological decay. A color, a sensation, the way someone said a single word—soon it will all be gone. In a hundred and fifty years no one alive will have ever known me.”
How somber—to realize your life, your everything, isn’t something with enough time passed.
It is, however, a lovely little book of just over 90 pages that packs a wallop. Manguso confronts her attempts at remembering; her near-impulse to chronicle everything in journals for over 25 years, if not longer. She writes in Ongoingness that these diaries, these intimate moments, banal moments, are things for her. “I wrote it to stand for me utterly.” I relate to this entirely. As our new year rolled over, I began my 25th journal. I’ve been keeping them for most of my life—nearly 30 years if you count the ones I had at age seven with stickers of cats on them. My diaries, my journals, aren’t the same as when I was small, or even a decade ago. They chronicle tarot and astrological moments; movies I’ve watched and want to remember; books I’ve read in any given time period. What I remember and what matters enough to write down are different. Is it selective on purpose? Or do I care less?
What stood out for me in this book, trotting along sentences and ideas of what remembering is, who it’s for, and how our selves collide is how we shape our stories from it. No matter how meticulous the chronicling, there’s always something missing, or some part that remains behind us in any given moment. That remembering, that writing to remember, or writing to capture, won’t continually be accessed. You have to do the work, ultimately, to go and remember those moments.
Manguso writes:
“I just wanted to retain the whole memory of my life, to control the itinerary of my visitations, and to forget what I wanted to forget.
Good luck with that, whispered the dead.“
I finished the book the night before I spent a couple of hours downloading all of the articles I’d ever written for Noisey. My family from VICE, the brothers I never knew I wanted but deeply needed nonetheless, alerted me that the site was going down that day. (As of writing this, it’s still live but for how long?)
This brutal company, yet another establishment torn apart by private equity and the allure of traffic or clicks or video (in 2017, it was Facebook video, now it’s TikTok), was going to layoff the majority of its staff, and shutdown the CMS, the one where I remember building shitpost after shitpost, pasting copy from a draft and fiddling with images to make it look good enough to scroll through to the end.
I travelled home from getting something in my old neighbourhood and spent hours before therapy exporting every article I cared about into a PDF. I saved some videos, too, remembering that I once stood before a camera and said a lot of words, some nonsense, who knows. The video we did on fans at a Nickelback show had over one million views at its peak. I remember seeing a man with a Confederate flag tee, the arms torn off, walk across the bridge at Lakeshore Blvd and towards Budweiser Stage, and thought about what we might be platforming, who these people were. But it was fun, right? There’s merit in remembering that.
~
As I selected which articles to save (the one Albert Hammond Jr. reshared, that tweet on my wall saying it was the most he’d felt understood) and the ones I would let drift into nothing (video or song premiere after premiere), I really thought about this period in my life. How the years I spent working for men who didn’t like me, who looked down on me, who thought I wasn’t “viral” enough had shaped me. The external validation I sought. The way listening to music meant getting clicks, not being thoughtful, not liking something because I liked it but because there was a reason for it. I remember my editor, my friend-now-brother, telling me once that he’d seen me shift back and forth from Twitter to a document, and noticed how I’d been waiting for engagement on a piece. I felt my face go hot. He wasn’t supposed to see that obsessive side of me.
People don’t really know the me at VICE. In a similar thought, barely anyone in my life knows me from when I was single, and not in a near decade-long relationship. I remember all of it though, holding every self with love and contempt and concern. Talking about my journalism years is almost like reciting a myth. Did it happen? How do I know? It’s often felt like I’m trying to convince someone I became the thing I most wanted.
Becoming a music journalist was always the goal. Talking to musicians, being present with creatives, being in these worlds I had longed for from my small bedroom in Kitchener, Ontario—that was my North Star. I became one. Then it was hard to swallow how people want things from you, that your relationships are predicated on a kind of currency that is sometimes tickets and sometimes writing something for someone, sometimes introductions, sometimes other things. I mattered for a moment in this ecosystem but not really. None of these people were friends. I don’t remember half of them and I bet you they don’t remember me. Someone once said to me that I was a good writer but, unlike one of my close friends with dozens of thousands of followers, I didn’t have the same kind of audience. They shrugged as if that was a convenient truth we all knew. That’s why I made a better editor, was the thought. I wondered then about how my value was perceived in who I bring in and not why.
It’s defeating to see yourself as only a number to someone. That’s what this period in my life made me feel like. My thoughts needed to align with the business, with the editorial strategy, with the fun that needed to arrive for clicks, with whatever was set out in front of me. I formed parasocial relationships. I made enemies out of people who never knew my name. My guiding principles changed from writing for the person who loved music to a person who needed to win. I never really won, though, and that’s comforting. I’m not competitive and I never will be.
Music made me exhausted. My relationship with it has permanently altered. I’m listening to jazz as I type these words. John Coltrane is on right now. I’m waiting for the Chet Baker song I love. I kept on repeating one Duke Ellington song in Paris last year that I listen to now to bring me back to waking up to the smell of baking croissants and that crisp blue Parisian sky. I want to remain back and not go forward. What’s new? Do I care about the algorithm? What TikTok deems worthy? No, I don’t give a shit. It feels particularly Gen X of me to say that out loud—to complain about the state of the music industry today. It’s not that, rather, it’s the constant need to become a number and remain there, and refuse to pay people fairly. It’s a cruel business.
But, what am I choosing to forget when I continually think of this period as difficult?
Well, I met Laura Marling. I have the recording on my phone still. We sat in an old pub in Chelsea, she ate mac and cheese. We talked about Rilke and femininity and tarot. Then I spilled my guts to her and told her all of the ways I loved her music, and how her music had changed me, shaped me, made me. She looked at me with kindness. Two minutes of straight rambling. She hugged me tightly at the end of our chat—the sort of hug you know is meant to make someone feel better.
Alison Mosshart of The Kills loved a piece I wrote about her. Her publicist sent me a note saying Alison had loved it so much and was deeply appreciative. It was the last essay I wrote for Noisey.
Carly Rae Jepsen once told me she was in Italy alone, after a break-up, and that it was okay to be alone but she missed having people to talk to so she liked talking to me, wishing we had more than fifteen minutes that day to speak.
I’m not saying these things because of clout, even though that’s what this industry felt, or still feels like, to me. Rather, they are moments of real humanness. Memories that combat the other harsh ones I like to tell myself instead. When connecting to another person felt genuine. There are local and national artists with whom I felt that. I loved talking to Vivek Shraya; she’s one of the most brilliant artists in our country. Ellis, too, what a beautiful soul. Editing Béatrice Martin’s columns was incredible.
(Justin Timberlake was rude as hell but Jonathan Demme was a dream.)
There are only a handful of places where critics can be critics anymore. Where art writers get to cover these worlds. The distribution of writers and publications has shrunk so much. Where one could write long and thoughtfully, there’s now (and then, too) the need to write and think fast, faster if possible, to get the content out. I don’t know if I agree with all of what I wrote at Noisey. I wrote it fast, I wrote it with what I thought might hit, not what I actually thought. Not always but a good part of the time. The more I could simmer on an idea the better I thought the piece actually was. What do we lose when we rely on artists to tell us about their work on TikTok and not in a piece of writing? What connection is lost?
It’s a period of my life that was the strangest and most beautiful. It was the one where my career meant everything to me; my identity, my purpose. Being a music writer was me and I was it. That’s all I could say. What happens now when a huge portion of my career, this self, might be erased by deleting a website?
~
I’m not really a music journalist anymore. I still tell people I am—Uber drivers making small talk, people I meet in passing. It is true that this is a part of me but it’s not active. I miss it all the time. I miss the parts where I felt excited instead of depleted by the realities of being part of this industry. I stopped being part of this when I left the Polaris Prize jury. In 2020, I was on the Grand Jury that named Backxwash the winner. I said once I’d made Grand Juror, I would quit and make room for other writers to be part of this community. I didn’t think it would end so soon but I made good on that promise.
I still write bios for artists as a way to fulfill a need to understand a process, art, or a project. I love doing it. It’s my favourite project. (Talking to Martha Wainwright from my mom’s dining room table felt unreal to me.) Freelancing has given me the ability to tip-toe back to this self but I’ve dedicated a lot of my time to my book, to thinking through that body of work instead. Still, that past self is knocking on my door.
Journalism is ephemeral. Someone said that to me yesterday. Another website I wrote for deleted its contents a couple of years ago now. My interview with Billie Eilish? Gone. The somewhat heated interview I had with Maggie Rogers? Also gone. That self, my self in those moments, is gone now, too, from the internet. But she lives within me, right?
I think most things are really ephemeral. That self who wrote about Drake with earnestness wouldn’t do that now. This news about the VICE website hits in a way I didn’t think it would because I hadn’t thought about the woman I was in so long. That woman who walked into a big office every day and pretended to belong. Tried to belong. This moment, too, is ephemeral. Fleeting.
Being confronted with the reality of a part of my life gone from the internet stirred up something old in me. Do I like understanding if I matter through this lens? No, not at all. It’s what I can point to as evidence that it happened. All of this really did happen. It’s not a myth, I tell myself over and over.
~
“Someday I might read about some of the moments I’ve forgotten, moments I’ve allowed myself to forget, that my brain was designed to forget, that I’ll be glad to have forgotten, and be glad to rediscover as writing. The experience is no longer experience. It is writing. I am still writing.”
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