Media Blitz
Debates over "hardcore ethics" typically turn our focus to major labels or ticket prices. Meanwhile, the ethics of doing an interview—on either side of the table—have gone grossly under-explored.
I.
I was barely sixteen years old the first time I interviewed anyone. Agnostic Front’s Roger Miret had been arrested in 1987 for trafficking cocaine and had just been released after serving 20 months in prison for it, so in my mind, interviewing him exactly at that moment seemed like a great idea. In retrospect, it was. Roger could have been jaded or hardened by the experience, but instead, he was immensely kind—and his experience with doing interviews grossly compensated for my naiveté. It wasn’t a great interview, but I’ve read worse.
Since then—between Anti-Matter, writing for magazines like Alternative Press and VIBE, an untold number of press bios, a short-lived stint as host for a gay pop-culture show on Here!TV, and some behind-the-scenes work for film—I can say that I have interviewed literally hundreds of people. I have also been the subject of interviews, for my work as a musician and a writer, at least an equal number of times. This is a unique vantage point to have, and perhaps even a singular one. Just talking to people has essentially been my currency in life for the last 35 years.
So I can’t exactly pinpoint why I was taken aback last month when, during my interview with Craig Wedren from Shudder to Think, a long story about the mental and physical unraveling that he went through after the release of Pony Express Record was preceded by an unpublished note that many of my conversational partners have implied over the years, but few have ever verbally articulated: “I am not sure if this is all appropriate to print, but I'm just going to share it all with you,” Craig told me. “I trust you. I trust that, if anything seems weird to you, you’ll know what to leave out.”
The quality of every single conversation you have, whether it’s on the phone with a friend or on-the-record for an interview, is determined by a base level of trust; it is predicated on an acknowledgment of responsibility to and for each other. This is especially true on a community level. For most of my life as a writer, I’ve tried my best to do no harm. So when Craig explicitly handed his trust over to me—whenever anyone trusts me with their story—I take that responsibility seriously. Because none of the interviews you read, week after week, are really my stories to tell. I treat them with care because they are being willingly put on loan, for the benefit of our collective understanding and growth.
II.
It would be easy to blame it on our persistent need for online clicks, impressions, and likes, but the reality is that there have been instances of interview malpractice in every medium and throughout every era. In an outtake from my recent conversation with Touché Amoré’s Jeremy Bolm, for example, we talked about one interview he did that morphed into something else entirely. At the tail end of a conversation with OC Weekly in 2013, Jeremy was asked something about the band possibly playing Warped Tour in the future. It was a throwaway question, he figured, so Jeremy gave what he thought was a throwaway answer: “No way, not at all,” he said. Jeremy then praised his friends’ bands on Warped, bands like Title Fight or Defeater, who were doing something positive by exposing kids to this community, as opposed to “a world with misogyny and ignorance and nothing to offer anybody, which is 95 percent of what Warped Tour is”—and with that the interview came to a close. Much to his surprise (and dismay), when the piece came out, that final quip became the centerpiece of the entire story. OC Weekly led with “Touché Amoré Tell Us Why They’ll Never Play Warped Tour,” while dozens of online sites followed suit, rehashing different versions of the same headline for clicks.
Later, when I asked Jeremy if he felt like an oversharer, he said, “I don’t think I would have gone into as much detail as I just did if I was not talking to you.”
Again, it’s about trust.
In another example, of course, there is the famous pre-internet story that Inside Out and Rage Against the Machine singer Zack de la Rocha told me in 1993, about the time a journalist from Melody Maker asked him to speak about his father, Beto de la Rocha of the Chicano art collective Los Four, specifically off the record.
“I told him that as long as he didn’t print anything I fucking said about my father that I’d talk to him about it,” Zack recalled. “So he swore to me that he wouldn’t, and then asked what my dad was doing now. My dad had a nervous breakdown in 1983 and has been mentally ill since then… He was someone I had looked up to tremendously and still do… So anyway, [the writer] was bugged. He had a wire, and he printed everything I said. Everything… He printed all this stuff I would’ve never told anyone. I don’t mind talking to you. I’ve known you for a while, and we’ve experienced a lot of the same things. But this was Melody Maker. And I read it in an airport on the way home. I cried uncontrollably for at least a couple of days. If I see him now, he’s dead.”
Again, trust.
To be perfectly honest, there are things I could have done here in the last eighteen months that would have probably garnered more clicks, seduced more eyeballs, maybe even compelled more subscribers. I could have chosen to leave in certain potentially “juicy” things in interviews that I instead chose to take out because they felt misleading or ill-phrased to me. I could have tried to draw disproportionate attention to a few casual but provocative excerpts that I did leave in the interviews—much like the OC Weekly did—as a way to inspire cheap discourse. Maybe my failure to do so is “bad business.” But when we talk about ethics in hardcore, as we so often do, have we ever truly mapped out the ethics of how we share our stories or even who we share them with?
III.
“In my time of doing interviews, I think I’ve gotten better at learning how to navigate these conversations and how to share without oversharing. But there are still things in my life that I want to be private, you know what I mean?”
This is Bryan Garris, singer for the wildly popular Knocked Loose, speaking a couple of weeks ago about the lines that we draw on both sides of the interview table. Bryan, for his part, has given this a lot of thought. But what really captures my imagination is the way he puts himself ethically on the hook. For Bryan, there is a moral obligation to give interviews in a way that also does no harm.
“When we were on Warped Tour, I did press every day. It was like my job. I would go to the office and be like, ‘What do I have today?’ And they’d tell me where to go,” he explains, in a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “So I went and I sat down with these two guys, and they were like, ‘Do you know what we do?’ I didn’t. They said, ‘We let artists talk about their depression and their anxiety so that people who listen to it can relate.’ And I said, ‘Oh, no, I’m not doing that.’ They were very shocked. But I was like, ‘Look, I think what you guys are doing is really great, and I think there’s definitely a place for that to exist, and I’m sure a lot of people really value this thing that you’re doing, but I am not the one to do that. I don’t feel comfortable sitting here and talking about how sad I am. That’s not going to be what I’m known for.’ They were pretty bummed, and they tried to reason with me, but I said, ‘I appreciate the offer, but no, I’m going to pass.’
“I struggled a lot with that,” he says, looking back in retrospect. “Because it’s tricky to talk about mental health—especially on a stage like Warped Tour, where the crowd is so young, and these kids have a very new outlook on what anxiety is or what depression is. So if you have the platform to speak about those things, you have to be careful. I’ve seen people give speeches on stage about depression where I’m like, ‘What are you talking about? Don’t tell a little kid that they’re going to be fucked forever.’ I didn’t like that, so I strayed away from it, and until now, I’ve been learning how I want to talk about it.”
This is, once again, an issue of trust. But from Bryan’s perspective, it’s also about the trust he wants to honor between his band and the people who love his band. There is a responsibility on his part, he says, to speak in a way that is constructive—not destructive. So when Bryan speaks with me, we are operating with a shared responsibility to tell his story with a level of care and intent. Without knowing it, he added a necessary dimension to my own understanding of ethical interviewing.
IV.
If I could go back and do over one interview completely, it would be the one I did with Mark Holcomb from Undertow in the summer of 1994. I had been working on Issue 5 of Anti-Matter, and frankly, the praise I had been receiving for the previous two issues was going to my head. I was starting to believe, unreasonably so, that every interview could—and should—reach the same level of emotional resonance or social relevance, but I was also still only 20 years old and I hadn’t quite figured out how to connect with a diverse collection of voices and personalities yet. So when Mark and I began our conversation and it felt somewhat “basic,” I panicked.
I stopped the interview and asked if he was feeling self-conscious. He said he was. We decided to keep walking and talking, putting things on pause. And then, without saying anything, I surreptitiously hit record on my tape recorder again.
After fifteen minutes, I admitted to Mark that I had begun recording again. It wasn’t exactly a parallel to Zack’s story—and Mark, in fact, laughed about it, knowing he hadn’t said anything too personal in that window of recording—but almost immediately, I felt horrible about it. I had lost sight of the only condition that matters in an authentic conversation. For the first and only time, I forgot about trust.
Thirty years later, I still beat myself up over it. Because in the end, I didn’t really get what I thought I wanted anyway. The interview was fine, but it lacked the thing I cherish the most from my conversations today: the opportunity to get to know someone in real time and the slow unfolding of trust that allows someone to truly show you who they are. There is no shortcut for this, nor should there ever be. I, too, have had lessons I needed to learn.
Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Bryan Garris of Knocked Loose.
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"Trust", indeed.
You are where you are because the scene values you, your approach and your style. I don't believe it's done for clicks, hoping other readers agree with me.
You seem sincere.
I so look forward to something from your catalog—new or old—in my inbox each week Norm.
On the subject of trust especially in the crossroads of the internet and journalism I was reading an interview with the writer Dan Gardner who is working on a book with jimmy wales the creator of Wikipedia about trust I think the tentative title is called trust. What I like about this substack page is that Norman you are a respected journalist who a lot of people trust. Which is difficult to find someone on the net who is. That is why people respond to you so positively. I don’t know if you are familiar with the origin story of eBay. It originally started off as a site called webauction.com. Which was a complete failure. Then they put in a web designer who said why don’t you have a feedback forum so buyers know what sellers to trust based on past exchanges with sellers. The rest is history. Trust and Norman go hand in hand that is why anti-matter substack page is so popular. Keep on doing what you are doing.