Last month, veteran journalist and Internet pioneer Jason Gross (he co-founded the e-zine Perfect Sound Forever in 1993) invited me to contribute to a collection of advice on music writing. The series, “What’s The Write Word?” was published in four weekly installments. My piece was included in the final part posted on June 8.

“What’s the Write Word” included around 100 journalists, critics and editors. I was honored to share space with old friends (Venus magazine founder Amy Schroeder), heroes (Alex Ross, New Yorker columnist and author of the the brilliant The Rest is Noise) and other assorted heavy hitters (Kris Ex!).

My “advice” turned out to be something of a rant. I operate in my own universe, and when I’m confronted by the real world I often turn awkward, not knowing how to say the right thing. Plus, I was in a weird mood on the day I wrote it. I didn’t consciously intend to take shots at Lil Wayne’s No Ceilings CD, which is actually sort of decent, or complain about how sucky being a freelancer can be. But doing what you love for a living can be hard and difficult work, and it’s your ability to embrace the slog that inevitably defines you. As Andre 3000 once said, “Even roses smell like boo-boo.”

One of my friends said he liked it. He felt it was honest.

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Music journalism can be a depressingly familiar cycle. Maybe you get involved because it’s the only position at your local newspaper, or you’re so fanatical about music that you’re willing to spend a few hours on a blog, praising and posting MP3s of your favorite artists. When you get established—snaring a few freelance outlets, and maybe even a regular job—it can appear loaded with perks, from high-profile interviews to lots of swag like free records and T-shirts (though there seems less of that nowadays). But as you get older and establish an adult lifestyle (or, god forbid, get married and have children) that requires a decent wage uninterrupted by layoffs, the whims of a Machiavellian editor, and an ever-changing scene, you’ll probably end up doing something else. Maybe you’ll become a film critic, or a food and wine guru. Or maybe you’ll drift into publicity, advertising, or web design.

I was first drawn to music journalism via the underground rap scene of the late ‘90s. I remember the first time I interviewed Stones Throw owner Peanut Butter Wolf. He drove me to the local Safeway because I forgot to bring batteries for my cassette recorder. Over ten years later, that scene is a shell of its former self. My friends and I used to argue over Company Flow’s Funcrusher Plus; now we hold our nose and download Lil Wayne’s No Ceilings. In fact, most of my contemporaries from those days have moved on to teaching, writing books, and traditional news reporting. As I write this, I’m wondering why I haven’t done the same thing.

Sometimes I feel like I got stuck. I barely make enough freelance money to support myself, and I often have to play “bill collector,” hounding editors for months just to get a measly $100 check. Many of the magazines I once admired have disappeared, from Option and Musician to Raygun and URB (although it barely survives online). And I find little common ground with the rap glossies and their slick, condescending approach to hip-hop culture, or the rap blogs, and their hype-oriented coverage of flavor-of-the-month battle MCs and beat makers.

When I work on an assignment, I often sleep for hours, trying to find the perfect opening graph in my dreams. I can go on like this for days. Then, all of a sudden, I settle on an introduction. It appears like the stem of a string, and I unravel the ball of thread until the story is finished. Sometimes it’s just hack work, an easy way to present the latest star to a publication’s readers. Occasionally, it offers brilliant analysis, deconstructing that star and the cultural trends that buoyed her to fame. When that happens, I feel proud of the work I’ve done.

I live for those moments. It keeps me at my desk sifting through email press releases, doing Google searches, and looking for the next artist that will inspire me to write a new story. I love to write, and the world of music is just a muse for my words. So I guess the only piece of advice I can offer is a question: why do you want to do this?

I find it hard to embrace the new Flying Lotus album, Cosmogramma. It’s not as if it’s a bad album — it’s great, in fact. But the secret is out about FlyLo. He’s not mine anymore.

I wasn’t one of the dudes who trend-spotted his work via early Dublab sessions and late-night Adult Swim broadcasts. When he dropped a remix on Mia Doi Todd’s La Ninja: Amor and Other Dreams of Manzanita, I didn’t even notice, even though I had a copy of the CD. I first discovered him through a Pitchfork.com review of his debut album, 1983. (Yes, I proudly admit that Pitchfork.com can be a great source of information.) The reviewer, Brian Howe, wrote a typically condescending opinion, dismissing it as a “genre exercise“. But the name — Flying Lotus — was so memorable. It stood out to me. So I immediately requested a CD from Plug Research. A week later, I had 1983 on near-constant rotation.

Many wondered if Flying Lotus was just a precocious take on J Dilla and Madlib styles, another member of that weird L.A. beat shit, a netherworld of hip-hop, electronics and California soul. And I admit that I kinda fronted on Flying Lotus in my reviews, too, even though his music had already won my heart. Attention, aspiring music critics: Learn to not only reflect your expert analysis of a genre, but also how a piece moves you. If something truly inspires you, then the heart should always win out, no matter how logy or derivative the recording may sound.

Regardless of what I wrote, I was a super-fan. I told countless friends about him. Any mixtape I made included the requisite FlyLo beat. I ripped his demo tracks off his MySpace page. (Remember when people used to do that?) I even hyped up Samiyam, his beatmaking protege from Detroit, Michigan. And when FlyLo signed to Warp, I was one of the first people on the Internet to announce it. I am proud that I anticipated the Flying Lotus gravy train, and how it would eventually impact the entire Los Angeles beat music scene. I may not have discovered him first, but I embraced him hardest, while others stood on the fence and vacillated over his potential to grow beyond “genre exercises.”

When Los Angeles finally landed in 2008, I was all over that shit. I interviewed him several times, including a lengthy pre-release interview for Plug One. When I spoke with him, the album wasn’t even released yet. FlyLo told me, “fuck a Pitchfork,” as if he cared whether or not the almighty tastemaker liked his album. Of course, he really did care. And when Pitchfork.com awarded him a positive review, XLR8R published a cover story, and The New Yorker delivered a lengthy appraisal, Los Angeles became required study for a nation of indie hipsters.

Two years later, the gravy train has left the station, and I can barely get on it. It took several angry emails to land a small review in Spin magazine, while the big profile was awarded to a New York electronic writer. (Much respect to you, Andy Beta.) More than just sour journo grapes, though, Flying Lotus and the L.A. beat scene is no longer a well-kept secret. It is now a flavor to be tasted by any self-respecting music critic. A horde of followers and bandwagon jumpers try to jack the recipe, and their dilution efforts earn near-daily coverage on dozens of blogs and the L.A. Weekly.

Not coincidentally, Cosmogramma connects with the Sa-Ra cosmic ball. It flits along classic trip-hop (thanks to the Thom Yorke cameo), straight-up 8-bit beats, deep house a la Theo Parrish, and jazz fusion workouts with Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner. It blows past the quirky turntablist in-jokes that endeared me to Los Angeles into future soul sounds that feel elegant and worldly. Most importantly, it’s a party that’s open to everyone. Old diehards like myself stand uncomfortably by the punch bowl while big industry dicks work the room, offer salutary weed blunts and effusively praise this “new” wunderkind.

All that’s left for me are those wonderful hours when I vibed to FlyLo as I drove along the highways, his sounds transporting me somewhere else. Three years ago, Flying Lotus inspired me to become a Stan for him. Though I still love his music, that moment of obsession is gone, disintegrated into the Cosmogramma.

Photo by Timothy Saccenti.

Today, Paper Thin Walls announced that it is shutting down operations on Labor Day. According to head honcho (and former hip-hop guru at CMJ) Christopher Weingarten, the site will stay archived online…for a while.

Paper Thin Walls was a curious beast. It seemed out of place amidst the monomaniacal blogs (a camp to which Plug One sort of belongs), hipster crack indie sites and print magazine outposts that populate the online music landscape. Instead, it hearkened to the Web 1.0 formula of the late 90s. Remember Sonicnet, Platform Networks and 360 Hip-Hop? These sites essentially tried to launch major magazines with insightful, original journalism. They paid writers a decent rate. And they operated ethically, posting audio and visuals after clearing them with record labels.

It’s a wonder PTW lasted for three years with such a widely discredited philosophy guiding it. Today, even the aforementioned print magazine outposts — Rolling Stone’s Rock & Roll Daily, for example — occasionally indulge in a little leaking. Most online ventures without magazine/corporate backing, from Prefix to Pop Matters, force new writers into a long apprenticeship (Hey, at least you get your name on the Web!) before even paying them for their work. Sadly, and despite a deep-pocketed backer in Getty Images, PTW may have sealed its doom by operating honorably in a wild wild Internet where leaking is the law.

I wrote for PTW for several months prior to its demise, and noticed that it shared a sometimes-uncomfortable stylistic affinity with Pitchfork. Much of PTW’s stories and reviews featured the snarky, punchline-driven style that Pitchfork (and, back in the day, Spin and Village Voice) popularized, for better or worse. But Pitchfork was launched in the mid-90s, growing from a fan site by a Chicago record store owner and his friends into the massive influent we all know and love/hate today. PTW certainly couldn’t hope to achieve that same success in far less time and with the money meter running.

Unlike Pitchfork, however, PTW also praised a considerable amount of indie hip-hop, too, from Vast Aire’s unjustly ignored Mighty Joseph project and Kidz in the Hall to Ohmega Watts. Of course, these were mere sideshows to PTW’s parade of known and unknown indie-rock contenders. Rock rules. That’s the world we live in, and there ain’t much we can do about it.

PTW will be archived online for a while, but not forever. In the meantime, relive the “greatest posts” it has assembled.