Month: May 2020

Music Journalism Insider Interview With Jason Tate

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Jason Tate

There’s an interview with me in the latest issue of the Music Journalism Insider newsletter. You can read the full thing here. There’s a lot of talk about the early days of AbsolutePunk.net, what the website has transitioned into, and some of my thoughts on music journalism in general:

At the time, I was starting to think that it didn’t make sense for there to be like 3000 individual band pages and fan pages. There would be a New Found Glory fanpage and an MXPX fanpage and a Blink-182 fanpage. I wanted to write about all of those bands, but I didn’t want to make individual sites for every single of them. So there was a little bit of backlash from people who just wanted to see Blink-182 wallpapers or whatever. But it was the early 2000s, so it didn’t really matter that much to me—I was 18 and I was just goofing around online in my dorm room. I didn’t know that it was ever going to be an actual job.

Phoebe Bridgers Profiled in The New Yorker

Phoebe Bridgers
Jason Tate

Amanda Petrusich profiled Phoebe Bridgers for a new New Yorker piece:

But the commercials bought her enough time to write and record “Stranger in the Alps.” “I would have had to work at Starbucks full time to make the record that I made, and then I wouldn’t have had time to make it,” she said. “The fact that I was able to work five days in one year and basically gave myself my own trust fund—my rent was paid, and I could go to the studio like it was my job—gave me the freedom to explore. Which makes me think a lot of dark shit about privilege.”