Negative press

As someone who doesn’t shy away from the occasional negative writeup, I’m accustomed to seeing disgruntled messages in my inbox demanding I take down a review or adjust a % rating on Metal Archives. Recently, this escalated to a threat of legal action in response to one of my reviews from an individual who will remain nameless.

Negative press is hard. It’s hard to receive and – for all the satisfaction of stinkpiece vitriol – it can be hard to deliver. I’m sometimes praised for “telling it how it is”. But I genuinely take far more pleasure in a positive writeup. I actually want the music I cover to be good, I want there to be good books written about it, and I enjoy discovering new artists and using this – admittedly small – platform to shine a light on them.

Music is now distributed through a social media ecosystem, it relies on networks of mutual support, collaboration, and amplification. It functions on organic, voluntary PR and good vibes. What role can negative press play in this environment?  

Ultimately, people like me are playing the same game as the artists they’re reviewing. They’re trying to build a platform and get their name out there. Negative reviews are detrimental to this. They are less likely to be shared by the labels, bands, and PR companies sending them promos. Whatever platform you’re writing on could be cut off from an audience as a result.  

The reviewer is faced with a dilemma then. Buy into the illusion that all content is good content in the hope that your profile is raised off the back of people sharing your positive writeups, or risk ostracization.

I’ve argued at length that social media has made the entire metal fanbase behave like small business owners, managing a brand, selling products increasingly detached from any tangible value. But are they really brands, these platforms drifting through the social media aether, collecting likes? Or are they actually just hobbies?

Everyone is entitled to a hobby. What they’re not entitled to is validation from strangers. Sharing your creative side in order to build a profile that demands adoration is a double edged sword.

This website is a hobby. I do it in my spare time and I enjoy writing about the music I love. But it’s not entitled to an audience. Hate Meditations is built off the back of one guy’s opinions on music. If I have any authority at all, it rests solely on how many people read and take these opinions seriously. Nothing more.

The newfound litigiousness of creators is partly a result of an obfuscation between a hobby and art worthy of critical scrutiny. It also arises from the new social media contract stipulating that we all engage in unconditional mutual support.

You can despise them all you want, but the traditional gatekeepers of culture – publishers, record labels, radio stations, magazines – served an important role. They weeded out unserious artists before they reached a certain level of public scrutiny. Any artist that did reach this level was battle hardened and (usually) capable of dealing with negative press when it inevitably arrived.

Negative writeups are difficult to deal with. Having a PR team or label behind you to manage all this serves an important role.

But if no one is guarding these borders, creators suddenly find themselves exposed to uncomfortable truths, and some are unable to handle the fact that not everyone appreciates their work.

If there really is an audience for what you’re doing, they will find you, no matter what people like me have to say about it. For all the fuss people make about gatekeeping, it’s actually incredibly difficult – and pointless – to stop people liking what they like.

So is negative press just being mean to people ill equipped to process a bad review?

Yes, but also no. A prospective audience certainly won’t pay any heed to bad writeups. But audiences are also exhausted. Overwhelmed by choice and volume, accepting with resignation whatever is put in front of them cos it’s probably the best they’re gonna get at this stage.

Here, negative press, or at least platforms willing to honestly critique new material instead of paraphrasing PR blurbs, has an important role to play. In spite of the good vibes, media outlets – from big legacy publications to microbloggers – handwaving  anything and everything that comes their way are actively harming the music they claim to love.

Equally, for the creator, however upsetting a bad review can be, and however litigious you may feel, it’s important to contextualise it as one person’s opinion. It’s not the last word on anything. And some people who respect the writer’s opinion may actually find it useful in cutting through their daily decision paralysis.

In my capacity as a metal-speaky-guy I’ve had my fair share of negative feedback (go and scan the comments on my Politics and metal video for a taste), but if what you’re doing is valued by others, it’s easy to filter this out.

A lot of content demanding our attention is amateurish and ill conceived. Some things are just not fit for critical review. If you pretend otherwise it will drain your hobbies of fun.

And if you genuinely think what you’re doing is not a hobby, but content worthy of our attention, then ask yourself why you spend more time agonizing over optics, trying to sue away bad press, demanding positive feedback, obsessing over reputation management. If that’s the case, maybe your creative side – however valuable it is to you as an outlet – should never have seen the light of day.