Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.

This is the first September in some years that I won’t be finding myself at one of the world’s major new music showcases, and I have to say I’m more than a little nostalgic for it. (To those of you who were at BIGSOUND last week in Brisbane, thank you for all of your posts about amazing new artists you were seeing - and please, send me more!)

This year, getting things in order for the Q4 ahead just had to take priority for me. But as you might expect, I’ve still been listening to some unbelievably good new stuff, and I think we’re about due for a sequel to Club’s Choice. Just as that playlist recapped some favorites of mine from my travels over the past year, you might find its next edition to be a useful guide as the ground shifts under your own feet. Watch this space.

With so many emerging creators on my mind as the world moves into showcase fest season, today’s edition of The Club List is something I wish I could bottle up and send to every one of you as you take your next steps into the wild world of being seen.

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Handling Your Haters

I found myself browsing musician forums the other day when the dreaded, familiar topic came to the front:

“How do you deal with haters?”

The idea of what a “hater” even is has changed so much in popular culture over the years that it’s almost fully in the eye of the beholder now. Wherever a bad review exists, you might find a hater. And yet, some would consider a “hater” to just be someone who doesn’t love something they love.

Is it “being a hater” if you’re a film critic and give a 2-star review to a movie you thought was just OK? To the directors of those films, yes, it probably is. People put a lot of themselves into their work.

But in general, haters are important to have wrapped your head around if you’re going to be a full-time creator. Because any time you’re getting deep reactions to whatever it is that you’re making, you are going to be pulling at the emotions of the observer.

And if there is one constant about being a human, it’s that our emotional core contains multitudes. Hopes. Dreams. Fears. Loves. Annoyances. And inevitably, if you tug at those things, you are going to draw hate out of certain people, just for making something a human will react to. 

Like I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, my first full-time job in music was as a college radio promoter. Part of my job involved calling station directors and getting as much honest feedback about the records I was promoting as possible.

The records I worked on that didn’t get any negative comments were often also the ones that didn’t get positive comments. They would get a lot of “it’s okay, some of our DJs like it” from music directors, but never get into heavy rotation. 

Those bands wouldn’t get much radio support on tour. That still counts now, but in the early 2010s, it was an even bigger deal.

In other words, these records were…gasp!…mid.

Being mid (or, “mediocre”) is the last thing you want if you’re a developing artist. It means you didn’t grab anyone’s attention at all. It’s the kiss of death. You’re background music at that point, interchangeable with lots of other records.

But does that mean you want to only have rave reviews? Well, about that.

The records I worked on that got the most vicious negative comments were often among the most well-received overall. In fact, every album I promoted that was “universally acclaimed” or a “hit” would inevitably have at least one person with a very negative opinion. Once I managed to find that person, I knew the record had long-term legs. Why? Because people had genuine reactions to it.

My favorite example of this was an album I worked on called L’Enfant Sauvage, by the absolutely brilliant metal band Gojira. (You may have seen them open the Olympics in Paris this year.) I told an old metal-loving acquaintance about the record and begged him to listen to it, because I respected his opinions and we’d talked music for many years. He listened, alright. 

And then I got a scathingly negative review of it, over text message, that had to be portioned out over four separate SMS texts. We were in the smartphone era by then, but that’s how long and profoundly upset the texts were. Most memorably, he described the band’s sound (negatively) as “all smooth angles” and then told me he was going back to listening to Judas Priest.

I have often found the old adage, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” to not mean much of anything in practice. But lo and behold, this guy thought Gojira was Frank Lloyd Wright, and he was not pleased.

That album went on to be #1 on the metal radio charts for six straight weeks. I have a signed copy as a thank-you from them that’s one of my most prized possessions.

As long as you’re making music intentionally and with care, it’s good to be a little polarizing. If you get some hate, you’re doing it right. And as I got deeper into the business, I learned that for some records, my job or the label’s job (or the manager’s job) would be to shield the artist from the worst criticism they got, or at least filter it. That’s not really an advantage we get now, so remember something important:

Whatever you might be creating, if you are getting profoundly negative feedback, just know that being an artist on the modern Internet means you have to see what people used to be paid to block you from seeing.

That includes boomer spam comments on Facebook ads, genre traditionalists like Gojira’s hater above, and people who feel bad about themselves on some level because you’re putting yourself out there and they resent you for doing so. That latter group has always been a thing at the hyperlocal level - nearly every scene I’ve dealt with suffers from some degree of “crabs in a bucket” thinking - but now it’s fully online.

So, you have to keep a sense of humor about the work you do, and know that some negative feedback just means you hit the emotional core of someone, the way you probably wished to do from the beginning.

One person who seems to get it on a deep level: noted graphic designer/noise rocker David Yow of The Jesus Lizard, who just did a fresh interview with The Creative Independent that I found especially illuminating. This quote, from a fantastic full piece, is everything.

You might not expect someone known for nudity during his performances to have such a grounded take in this situation. And yet, here we are. Yet another reason I feel that nearly every kind of creative business has room to learn from each other.

One Thing You Can Use Today

In my experience, one of the single hardest parts of starting any creative process involves setting your intention. Whether you’re a startup or a sculptor, you need to be able to shut out outside noise and focus yourself.

It’s important to create an artist statement for anything you wish to do, even if it will only be seen by you, yourself. Corporate work also refers to this as a vision statement. The end goals are similar.

To do this, it’s useful to take a page from conceptual art and consider Lawrence Weiner’s 1969 work Declaration of Intent. An installation of this piece greets visitors to Dia Beacon’s gift shop, across its upper walls. It is one of the more profound statements of purpose you are likely to ever read, and it adds important context for a lot of the abstract modern art Dia famously contains.

This is its full text.

The whole thing is profound, but mull over that last sentence for a bit. Consider the freedom it allows you. 

Track of the Week

Grin - “Midnight Blue Sorrow”

Berlin is a part of the world I tend to associate with synth-driven club music, but Grin challenges that heartily. Splitting a taut difference between sludge metal and very heavy psych rock to make “cosmic doom,” Grin is officially a duo but has more going on than just bass-drums-vocals on record, and the results sound enormous. Their newest album is called Hush, and despite this style’s penchant for long songs, nothing on the record cracks the 4-minute mark despite all being profoundly Big Riff-driven. Its shortest song, “Midnight Blue Sorrow,” sounds way more massive than nearly any 80-second song I’ve probably ever heard a band make and is a killer entry point. Most bands that do the whole “Black Sabbath but with the volume on 20” thing are nowhere near this versatile or varied, and it’s why Hush is one of the finest metal records to hit this year.

Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

List of Clubs

These are the kinds of clubs I’d like to be in around NYC! Wherever you might find music, art, or a compelling experience under one roof, that’s a club to me. I only list clubs I’d enjoy going to. If I list a client, you’ll know.

Friday, September 13 - The Buttertones w/ New Misphoria @ Bowery Electric
The second band on this bill is New Misphoria, a Tucson-based femme duo that’s just guitar, drums, and one of the hugest voices I’ve ever heard from someone under 30 playing indie rock. The odds you see this band playing anything other than a headlining show by the time they’re in NYC again are slim.

Saturday, September 14 - Dance Planet: Kim Ann Foxman, Eli Escobar + Synthicide (Justin Strauss + Andi) @ Paragon ($5 before 11pm)
I’ve listed Eli Escobar, Justin Strauss, and Synthicide all separately in this section at different times. If you aren’t here, you’re not trying to dance.

Wednesday, September 18 - Geneva Jacuzzi @ Elsewhere
Equal parts synth pop and performance art, Geneva Jacuzzi is the missing link between the experimental indie scene of the late 2000s and the current darkwave-and-adjacent scene. If you enjoy either of those things, it’s worth it to see her at literally any opportunity you get.

Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…

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