“THERE’S NO BUDGET, BUT…”

“There’s no budget, but there could be scope for bigger things…” has long been drip-feeding into my Gmail account as some half-arsed incentive to do anything. Fortunately, I have a day job and any written work on the side is little more than hobbyist nonsense — I think I crave corporate relationships to fill a gap somewhere in my psyche with written word promiscuity. I care about getting the job done yet I have little to no interest in being a writer and I have even less inclination to enter the world of journalism. Journalism used to have a function — not to enlighten, expose injustice or change the world, but to get free CDs and records. Then everyone stopped caring about vinyl and you could download the content of a CD. With that, any journalistic impulses in me eroded and I swiftly sold my soul. I was a crap music journalist too — I used the word “sonics” too much and would bestow full marks so liberally that it made ‘The Source’ at its absolute 5-Mics-for-Lil’ Kim nadir read like Tom Paulin in full misery mode. I have no plans to return to that realm and I’m unsure as to whether music journalism has benefited from being ridded of freeloaders like me or simply been populated by dickriders who don’t want to lose their press trip privileges or be spotted by label PRs during their regular trawls of Google Blogearch and Twitter. I try to keep out of it.

Yet I still feel a certain kinship with the ripped-off writers of this world. Everybody gets shafted at corporate and indie level when they’re trying to get a name for themselves, but words don’t seem to be valued as much as images (and I have the greatest respect for photography — especially when everybody thinks they can do it and can’t) or even styling — which in the hands of Petri or Foxton is an art, but in the hands of many is just editing an existing edit and assembling them in an unexceptional manner. Nobody gives you a bunch of those word fridge magnets and says, “Assemble me some paragraphs!” Maybe it’s because copy-paste culture means nobody needs to edit the crap copy a PR company blasts out there. I’ve long found that there’s scope for bigger things, but it’s important to stick up for yourself by reminding those who’ve conveniently forgotten that their job is — like mine and many out there who take things far too seriously — utterly irrelevant beyond a square mile or so and a handful of outlying towns and villages where people might pick up a style magazine, imagining some magical realm and visit London to get ripped off too. It’s all bullshit.

I write for fun and when I see somebody exploiting that, it leaches the joy from banging out freeform paragraphs laden with run-on sentences. I hate the culture of aggregation too — mostly third-hand smoke and mechanically reconstituted information under the guise of content creation. If you can’t write, create, photograph, design, edit, raise funds or inspire, why are you getting involved in a creative industry? I respect the crew culture of strength in numbers, but why advertise for blog contributions? Build it and they’ll come, unless you’re just another clone of an existing site operating to get a free t-shirt from a rookie PR. I feel bad declining blog contributions elsewhere, but one joy of digital democracy is that I can up something wildly self-indulgent, unedited, unstructured and unproofed up here right now without a deadline, an editor or any external force hampering it. Why do I need to write for you?

Some would argue that democracy is what’s wrong with the internet, but it isn’t — where once, fanzines required workplace misuse, spent printer cartridges and photocopy costs, the internet lets that spirit roam free. It’s not as tangible, but it there has to be some compromise. I’m extremely happy that my friends at Hypebeast (some have assumed I’m anti Hypebeast, but that’s a fallacy — I’m still losing sleep over the Yeezy 2 drop) occasionally syndicate copy from here onto their vastly more successful site. If you have a blog….sorry, “online magazine” why can’t you dip into design, create your own shots and do all your own writing? Why do you need to start recruiting from day one? Did you learn nothing from Boo.com? If you’re into something enough, you can broadcast it and from there, the world is yours. Don’t let the leeches steal your shine. The internet is full of po-faced conversations with anybody who’ll constitute “content” and short video documentaries about pretty much anyone. It’s just one big crowd smelling their own farts and claiming they’re iconic. The time is right to just do your own thing. If you’re going to work for free, just do it for yourself.

Just to contradict my pro-digital ramblings above I’m a little more drawn back to writing for print at the moment, just because it’s the only way I can convince my mum that I have a job and because just as your moment of glory goes live online, too often, it’s swiftly washed away by wave after wave of the same old information. Click throughs are far uglier than physical pages too. One key element is seeing the snub of no Twitter, Pinterest or Facebook shares. With a piece in print, ignorance is bliss, but online, elements of your failure to engage an audience are there for all to see.

Where did that rant come from? I needed to write something for this blog, my inbox just pissed me off with budget-free promises of a media takeover and the teasers for this documentary – ‘Salad Days: the Washington D.C. Punk Revolution’, reminded me that once upon a time, “There’s no budget but…” used to be an asset and a harbinger of impending creativity. Between this and the ‘Bad Brains: A Band in D.C.’ (with an appearance from the late Adam Yauch) film that recently got a poster, indicating that screenings beyond SXSW are imminent. It’s all about D.I.Y — forget the begging letters.

For my fellow John Carpenter fans, AintItCoolTV just upped this video of the ‘They Live’ panel from Texas Frightmare with Roddy Piper, Keith David (in skintight neon mode) and Meg Foster. Plenty of trivia in just over 15 minutes.

COPY

Anyone else out there in a job that they find tough to describe to elderly relatives, old school friends at reunions and taxi drivers? I sometimes lie and say I work in accounts, hoping that the interrogator doesn’t start asking me about software, modes of analysis, VAT loopholes or — in a worst case scenario — to help them with their tax return. It’s because I find most people to be nodding dullards at gatherings and I can’t be bothered to talk about trainers. I don’t care what they do and I know that they’re only asking about my occupation because we’re conversationally handicapped by the fact neither of us wants to be in the other’s company.

Occasionally I write some copy for brands. Sometimes they’re brands that even that person might know rather than some friend’s project which I would never bother even broach in awkward conversation. Those projects validate my existence to some degree and allow me to tell the truth at social events that aren’t some godawful product launch that’s full of boring “tastemakers” taking pictures of carefully lit displays and pulling those strange momentary vinegar faces behind their 5Ds as they prepare to make Tumblr history with their documented awesomeness.

It must be nice to be able to describe your occupation in at least four words without having to make some lame mumbled excuse for your existence.

Though I can remember back to being able to say that I worked in accounts or I worked in a warehouse back in the day, yearning to be doing something really wanky. I watched a documentary after leaving higher education that fired my imagination — it featured a bunch of people in an office in some up-and-coming “hub” area of London working as “creatives” for some creative agency that’s either long dead or a multiple Campaign award winner by now.

There was no set start or finish time (I was in a job where cigarette times were pretty much run to a stopwatch at this point) people brought in dogs and whizzed around on little metal scooters. They didn’t actually appear to do anything, and I fancied spending the rest of my life in a role like that. But my bland covering letters and C.V. that lied and said I swam and played guitar in my free time (my dad suggested that was better than “Watching weird films and hoarding sportswear”) didn’t even get me rejection letters. So I ended in various accounts roles, including one role that involved brokering prices for corpse cleanup, all requiring numbers rather than the written word and rendering me mediocre, with little chance of promotion.

I looked up to Soho’s Unorthodox Styles because they did cool shit with brands and obsessed about tropical fish, Supreme and Nikes. They even had a webcam in the office and used a mysterious thing called Blogger to keep people updated on their exploits. They appeared to be the opposite of the yellow tinted sunglass wearing, Star Wars t-shirt sporting buffoons whose jobs I coveted a couple of years previously — they actually appeared to work daft hours. Yet it looked to be worthwhile. And through gloriously convoluted circumstances, I ended up at Unorthodox Styles, and on arrival Mr. Russell Williamson told me that I was a copywriter, despite having no actual copywriting experience. Russell is awesome like that.

So when I’m asked how I got into this nonsense, all I can proffer is, “dumb luck”. Because I can’t be one of those people who acts like they’re reinventing the wheel with anything I assist with (writing, SMUs and all that works with it doesn’t feel like real work, so I can’t take it seriously), I don’t think I’m a very good copywriter at all, so I’m always looking for some education.

For years, I’d been ordered to invest in ‘The Copy Book’ but the madcap Amazon Marketplace prices put me off. I’d attempted to heist a copy but failed and got confused by the differences between the 1995 original and a paperback edition circa 2000 called ‘The Copywriter’s Bible’. But now those concerns are an irrelevance and if you were stockpiling a copy and watching those prices rise, your speculation failed, because TASCHEN’s vast reprint and redux with D&AD ups the original 32 participants to 48 and runs the gamut from long-form, text-heavy advertising masterpieces to memorable triple word campaigns.

The stylish cover’s transparent overlay depicts eye tracking data, reiterating that good copy is indeed a science. Some commentary and advice from some personal heroes like Dan Wieden, Dave Trott, Nigel Roberts (“Words are great. People still read. But they only read what they want to.”), Tony Barry and Marty Cooke is occasionally contradictory but always absorbing. The crisply reproduced ads that accompany each spotlighted author’s writing could prove beneficial for anyone looking to maintain brevity, attention and stay on message without resorting to repetition (or lazy alliteration like that).

With those excruciating paragraphs before I even mentioned the book title, I’m already ignoring the lessons within ‘The Copy Book’ but I recommend picking it up as a celebration of marketing’s true masterpieces. If advertising is ever whittled down entirely to 140 hyperbolic characters for tracked Retweets or a clickable YouTube video that purports to have been banned for “viral” purposes, at least there’s this document of a time when notepads, napkins, empty envelopes and leaflets unlucky enough to be in the line of fire were annihilated in the quest to perfect the message.

On that occasionally out-of-print subject, shouts to Jeff Staple on Twitter for reminding me of the existence of FontBook for iPad on Apple’s App store. £3.99 beats £285.29 on Amazon Marketplace. The compare function is invaluable.

I like ‘Men’s File’ magazine. It always feels like the team behind it like going out and doing stuff rather than thinking of ways to create photoshoots in parks or gawping at each other’s sockless McNairy-clad feet. I respect the fact that this publication has the RRL hookup, and has done for a little while now. Any rag can get a co-sign from whatever brand we’re jocking at the moment, but the RRL co-sign is strong. The team got the invite to visit the Double RL ranch and took military historian Simon Delaney with them as models. That’s deep. Unless you’re Oprah, those tepees are usually out-of-bounds.

After the Nike campus and archive, this was always my second dream field trip. Having visited the former, I fear the ranch is a little less feasible. Of course, it’s all cowboy dress up nonsense, but at the core of it, that’s Ralph’s hobby and as photoshoot locations go, it’s a tough one to beat. You can buy as much second hand Polo on eBay as you like, but riding an RL branded (not in the red-hot sense) horse trumps everything. Issue #5 also talks a little about Paris’s Apache gangs, which influenced the latest Mister Freedom collection. Apaches are a very interesting phenomenon — I hope Mister Freedom reproduces one of their amazing late 1800s knife/knuckleduster/gun hybrids too…

Speaking of Polo, shouts to Piff Gang for channeling the power of underrated Dipset spinoffs plus Currensy and Creative Control with a UK slant. My favourite UK rap is generally based on goonery. Piff Gang don’t trade in mindless goonery but they do smoke a lot, can flow and crucially, they don’t dress like they’re homeless — the downfall of many a UK MC who forgets the need for clean living in difficult circumstances. Phaze One is a solid MC and the rest of the crew bring it too. Bring on the mixtapes while the sun’s still making appearances over here…