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jennyeliscu 03/23/2007 12:27:00 PM
My biggest objection to Romano's piece is the fact that she and Lewitinn have a closer personal relationship than a journalist and subject ought to. Romano has responded to the criticism of her lack of journalistic objectivity by saying that she and Lewitinn know one another only on an "air-kiss basis" -- a turn-of-phrase that makes me want to air-kiss my toilet. Besides, even if they're not BFFs, plenty of people could tell you that they are tight enough for this to be a conflict of interest. More troubling is the fact that, one suspects, Romano pitched the piece herself. (Somehow, Lewitinn inspires these lapses in journalistic judgment. Her buddy Marc Spitz wrote a glowing item about her in Vanity Fair last fall.)
Whether one loves, hates or is entirely indifferent to Lewitinn -- and whether that opinion is based on knowing her personally, professionally, tangentially, anecdotally, or not at all -- seems to me beside the point when it comes to assessing the overarching shittiness of Romano's article. It's a crappy puff piece that never should have materialized. From the standpoint of reportage, it's weaker than the sales figures for Lewitinn's Stolen Transmission label.
I know that the VV is a New York City paper, but it's also got a decades-old rep for addressing issues that interest folks outside our lil' burg, and addressing them in a way that makes their extra-NYC relevance apparent. Does anyone outside NYC -- and, dare I suggest, above 23rd Street -- know or care who Lewitinn is?
Then there's the content, based on a ridiculous conceit which goest like this: a handful of people posting on messageboards nobody else reads are writing nasty comments about some D-grade NYC downtown celebrity nobody else has heard of. Isn't that what people do on messageboards? They're havens for ego-challenged web surfers hiding behind their computers and spewing vicious -- and, sometimes, vulgar -- remarks they'd never say to the person's face. That's just how it goes. It's nothing new or specific to Lewitinn, and certainly doesn't offer any empirical proof that she is any more maligned than any of our city's other rampant self-promoters.
And even if Romano's conceit that UG needs defending is true, why does the Voice care to take up that battle? Aren't there more interesting, influential, culturally relevant, controversial, morally ambiguous people to "defend"? Doesn't Alberto Gonzales have any "air-kiss" friends at the Voice who could write a thinly veiled puff piece about why he's not as much of a schmuck as everyone says? (C'mon guys: Stop calling Alberto "Ultrattorrrrney" Gonzales "carb face." Really, he's such a nice guy. You know, he totally predicted which U.S. Attorneys would be fired. He's like an organic listening machine!)
And so continues the Voice's slide toward irrelevance. I harbor no illusions about the presumed objectivity of the media. "Conflict of interest" is a tricky thing, and readers often are blithely unaware of the extent to which journalists and their subjects are somehow personally familiar. STILL, I find myself feeling somewhere between mildly chagrined and outright shocked that the top editors at the Voice didn't hold Romano's story, in particular, and their paper's coverage, in general, to a higher standard of journalistic excellence and ethical uprightness. Then again, maybe the editor-in-chief is secretly advised by the Misshapes?
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worm 03/21/2007 1:52:00 AM
Shut up, shut up, shut up. PowerJugs2000 shut up, people who hate her but can't realize that powers her(like the darkside you morons) shut up, and all of New York shut up.
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perfectlist 03/19/2007 8:42:00 PM
When writer Tricia Romano sent out an open appeal on a music mailing list for help with an article she was doing, I thought that I'd respond not only as a friend since she had helped me out before but also because I respected her work. It turns out that she was digging around for negative comments about Ultragrrrl without revealing the real gist of her article where she was looking to prop up her subject. There�s nothing criminal with it per se but this is still a dubious practice.
I gave her an initial response and then when she replied "Ok are you willing to say this on record?" and I said that I wasn't. I soon gave her a printable response that I asked that she use instead and would be of more use. She decided to use the initial response without reviewing it with me. Again, not illegal but again dubious. This is actually what I said for my second response:
"The one thing she's definitely good at is self-promotion: people in the industry know who she is but that's because she makes such a spectacle of herself. Not that it's a rarity in the music biz but for a writer, it's pretty crass unless you're as good as say Hunter Thompson, which she isn't. As such, I lobbied to keep her off a music conference media panel because I didn't think she'd have anything constructive to add and would just pat herself on the back the whole time."
After my responses, she replied as such:
"Jason thanks although I don�t think I can use this. She's not a writer/never claimed to be even with the two paragraph blurb in spin."
That is to say "she's written a column for a national magazine but you can't call her a writer!" Again, very dubious.
To top it off, in her e-mail, you'll note that she didn't think my comments were worth using. She obviously changed her mind and decided to use them in the article though I only learned of this once the article was published. In the past, even when I've written a letter to the Voice, I've been fact-checked but not at all in this case. That was unfortunate since there's information in the initial quote she used from me which I couldn't verify about a panel which is why I modified it out of second quote I gave to her- as far as I know, she never verified the information herself. That's extremely dubious.
Romano has written excellent articles for the Voice about NY nightlife but in this case, she side-stepped good journalism practices in a desperate effort to get her story across. To say that I'm disappointed with her is an understatement. This kind of questionable work is worthy of our disgraced attorney general, not a long-time columnist of a noted national publication.
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victoria 03/18/2007 7:16:00 AM
she's so insignificant there's really no reason to "hate" her. only saddened that the voice continues its downward spiral in caring to feature her at all.
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monroe 03/17/2007 9:14:00 PM
The ability to predict just what crappy music American kids will fall for next is an ability to be admired, celebrated, encouraged, and traded upon, even? This SHOULD be like asking the question, if you could go back in time and kill Hitler before he rose to power, would you? except without any ethical quandaries whatsoever, but ...
My Chemical Romance? The Killers? Fall Out Boy? The Strokes?
Jesus wept ...
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chris-ott 03/16/2007 7:22:00 PM
Tricia,
As a Voice contributor - and participant in the I Love Music discussion you mention - I find it curious and not a little convenient that you did not think to reach out to me for a quote on this story. My views on Sarah are public, and far from anonymous. In fact, the two times I have spoken of her, my email address was displayed at the foot of the message (as it is here).
If not for the ILM thread in question, you have essentially written a cover story lionizing budding music magnate Sarah Lewitinn's resilience in the face of nasty blog comments. Others have noted, with varying incredulity, how totally ridiculous this is.
As a subject, Sarah is definitively Now, a sociopathic solipsist born of the easy, indulgent self-celebration made possible by the internet, where the insecure desperation of thousands of young people manifests itself through the public display of how many "friends" they have. Would that your piece was an examination of this terrifyingly unreal situation - how the definition of friendship has been diluted to the point of meaninglessness, leading to a vacuous culture of familiarity (which, Tricia, you've made your name promoting) - I might have enjoyed it.
Instead, it's another manipulative sell job involving Marc Spitz, Sarah's former something-or-other at SPIN. Not very long ago, he floated the same "Ultragrrrl" hype in Vanity Fair (with a much better photo shoot - and retoucher). These two have long engaged in closed-loop pull-quote make out sessions, and this makes two mainstream publications that have been hijacked for their ends. How many times must we groan through "Marc was my mentor, he's a total genius"/"Sarah heard the Killers before me, she's a total genius." The L.A. Reid anecdote, all the industry types lining up behind her - this is not happening without considerable cognition. There is a vested interest in developing Sarah as an icon, a pusher who can penetrate the marketing-resistant sheep grazing in the fields of MySpace.
I respect that you reached out to Jason Gross for at least one substantive counterpoint, but he is only one of many music junkies who find Sarah Lewitinn repellent. Like so many unserious musicians and promoters before her, she tries marginalize negative reaction by inventing a closed definition for "rock critic" - as if rock writers aren't all in bands, putting out records, going to shows, making the scene...you know, look up Nick Kent some time. Neil Tennant, Chrissie Hynde. Even DeRogatis was in the Ex-Lion Tamers.
I should also note that, to each other, we are not at all anonymous. The fact that you couldn't identify (most of) the participants in that ILM thread is either denial in service of framing Sarah's persecution, or evidence that you're out of your depth. The Voice is complicit in not making a determination there.
Now we see that the week this feature runs � having been in the cooker for ages � a band on Sarah�s label (the Horrors) is playing the Village Voice 2007 SXSW showcase. If Nick Sylvester can be fired because someone he lampooned turned on him, what do we do with you, Trish? Is not the new management accountable for using the paper�s reputation to engender this short-sighted �brand synergy�?
The Village Voice is not a blog, and cannot be wielded so carelessly, or treated as a brand. Its history and still-vast readership stipulate strict observance of and adherence to journalistic ethics. I stood up when it was unfairly attacked during the tumultuous transition from the Robert Christgau and Chuck Eddy eras, and have twice been cited by Christgau, in print, as a capable if not sterling cub. However this feature, and the collusion surrounding it, obliterates whatever hope I held that the next generation of music and culture writers could convene around the Voice�s lately revolving door, fomenting a future where the paper could live up to its past.
Adieu,
Chris Ott
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emery.johnrobert 03/16/2007 8:25:00 AM
Let me state, for the record, that I'm a kid from Nashville and my tastes are more Uncle Tupelo than the Killers. I'm pretty eclectic, though, and I'm no redneck.
Let me also state that Sarah is good looking, quite disarming, highly intelligent, and articulate without being self-conscious. It's easy to see how she got where she is.
But Sarah suffers from Myspace Syndrome. Or, as famed Microsoft nerd Robert Scoble puts it, she is in an echo chamber. She has her ear to the ground, sure, but "buzz" is a very incestuous thing. All of her pet projects are the sort of "alternative" MTV2-friendly bands that we've been inundated with since everybody took a second to think about Korn and said in unison "This nu-metal shit sucks."
Of course these bands generated buzz. They sound cool, but sounding cool is a quite different thing than sounding good.
Sounding "cool" is about aping post-punk and hoping kids don't realize that Franz Ferdinand is Gang of Four run thru Pro Tools. It's about having just edgy enough of a sound so that you can get shelf space in Hot Topic, but not enough to alienate the 14 year old girls who spend their days on Livejournal slavishly posting back and forth. Its about stylization over musical substance. It's about a sound that's "different" but still homogenized.
Sounding cool is what Sarah is good at, but what about sounding interesting? Or, heaven forbid, finding sounds outside this "cool" orthodoxy? Taking risks in order to bring forward performers who generate buzz based on the power of their music rather than the power of their image, or (more truthfully) the power of their image to give their listeners a sense of elitism?
Don't get me wrong; I'm a snob. One of the joys of living in flyover country is getting to look at people like they're dumb when you ask why they've never heard of Pavement. (Insert any well-celebrated indie act for Pavement. The gag still works.) But Sarah, dear, elitism is the double-edged sword that makes Ultragrrrl possible and also makes her a pretty target for all that vitriol. (If there's anything snobs love to do, it's hating.) It might even be her undoing. The joy of that elitism, however, is that right now you've got more mindshare than Jay-Z. You're the cover story in the Village Voice, for fuck's sake. Why sit at the right hand of a guy whose greatest artistic triumph was getting ripped off by Danger Mouse? That seems awfully stifling for someone who prides her label on being an incubator for the next big thing. Break out of that tiny box and see what happens.
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mkwrk2 03/16/2007 7:43:00 AM
I feel Sarah Lewitinn is too biiiiig even for Broadway, NYC.
Michael Kerjman
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sono_palermo 03/16/2007 1:39:00 AM
Here is my issue with Ultragrrrl. She seems to be more interested in paling around with her bands and being worshipped than really working them. Seriously. I mean, when does she have time to be shitfaced and update a blog while running a label???
She is totally obnoxious. I have come up to her a few times to introduce myself, as I also work in the music industry and like to know my colleagues. Every time, without fail, she is always too cool, she barely shakes my hand and sort of does the whole "yeah nice to meet you ahuh" thing. She is always, always drunk and she and her gaggle of equally annoying friends are always taking one anothers pictures and linking them on each other sites.
Why do we think this is cute, when its basically self love and the fact that real jobs dont allow you to be a drunk mess with no skills other than self love.
Now imagine that Rich Kleiman and Jay Z and Jimmy Iovine did this... it would be a laughable joke (ohmygod, Rick, another gold record for Christina? Here let me take this photo of you a little slanted and post it on my blog. Oh, Jimmy, thanks so much. I am totally going to hype Gwen and her new tune on mine as well, titter titter).
Seriously, that little clique of messy eyeliner brats are going to wake up one day, age 30, and realize they are screwed.
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noamsc 03/15/2007 8:49:00 PM
By all means, defend Ultragrrl. Enough with the ad hominem attacks, enough with the envy-hate. She�s just someone who is pretty good at what she does. But a cover story in the Voice? Really? Come on now. Pretty good at what she does, but what she does is not interesting. It�s not creative. And it�s certainly not doing anything good for the music industry.
Let�s call a spade a spade: in the music industry, having a �good ear� is not the same as having good taste. Taste does not enter into this equation at all. An �ear� is the ability to hear similarities between what you�re listening to and other music that has already become popular. It�s about knowing what will break big because you know will never challenge the public, what will gratify people�s milquetoast tastes because they have heard stuff like this before. This is not good taste. This is good marketing skill, exactly what an a&r person for a ho-hum label should have. But why should we care about the a&r people, especially those who are not pushing any envelopes but only giving the people what they have been told that they want?
It�s so very comforting to know that, despite the promise that the Internet holds for shortcutting the monopoly of the labels and the radio stations and actually getting new, interesting, creative work out there to a wide audience -- and in light of the fact that bands like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have managed to use the Web to do just that -- that the record industry has looked into the wide sea of the Internet and found and promoted the least challenging of all bloggers, the one who was tailor-made to be in the industry already, thereby continuing the industry�s relentless drive to the middle. Yawn.
But I _am_ surprised at the Voice; you disappoint me. I can�t believe that this, of all publications, can�t see through this for what it is. It doesn�t have anything to do with music, and it�s certainly not news.
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blackbinder 03/15/2007 8:41:00 AM
but her boobs
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blackbinder 03/15/2007 8:41:00 AM
look so big
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ackelley72 03/15/2007 8:30:00 AM
i worked with her when she was the supposed music nostradamus intern at spin. i assure you that she was forgettable. you should make a cat turd your cover next week, it would look better in that dress.
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blackbinder 03/15/2007 7:51:00 AM
good point phillyovernyc
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jester6404 03/15/2007 6:25:00 AM
moar74 said it. And just in case you missed how hard this article tries to make a martyr out of S.L., the Voice has helpfully provided a graphic depicting her as the Joan of Arc of the music industry. How tragic.
Also, to clarify: "Early Stolen Transmission picks like the Spinto Band and Louis XIV were less than memorable." The lone single the Spinto Band put out on Stolen Transmissions might have been more memorable if it was actually mailed to the people who ordered it. I have several friends who sent money to Ultrathief and, to this day, have received nothing but the shaft in return. Talk about a stolen transmission. "Lewitinn can't afford to fail" - she already has.
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mipalan 03/15/2007 2:33:00 AM
dude, that dress may be made by Bonaparte, but i want to bone all her parts!!
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bailyknight 03/15/2007 1:00:00 AM
This is the story of someone who really isn�t bringing anything new to the industry. It�s very sad, and the DJ phenomenon is growing tiresome. As if the music industry wasn�t filled with enough hype, we now have more smoke and mirrors. It�s shame that other hard working promoters in the Lower East Side music scene like KerriBlack, who booked and promoted The Strokes & Stellastarr* in their early days, as well as a slew of other notable quality artists that actually have talent, hardly ever get nods from the press. What about Jin Moon, the manager of Dirty On Purpose? There�s someone else who works her tail off and gets nothing. Where did the hard-nose artistic integrity of the Village Voice go?
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speed.to.roam 03/14/2007 11:22:00 PM
People hate S.L. because her taste (while "prescient") is completely middle-of-the-road at best and yet she's celebrated for it, to some degree. The story about her isn't how she's got amazing taste, it's about how somehow she's marketed herself into a commodity despite coming across as one of the more uninspired sorts who posted on makeoutclub.com circa 2002. Is this scenester-defending-their-own bullshit what we can expect from the new Village Voice from now on?
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speed.to.roam 03/14/2007 2:51:00 AM
people hate on Ultragrrrl because she's got absolutely mediocre and dull taste, and she markets herself (and is marketed by writer friends) as being special or ahead-of-the-curve on great music, when she's merely a little prescient when it comes to liking music other mediocre sorts will enjoy. the shit ain't bad all the time, but cheerleaders for MOR music are a dime-a-dozen.
