No Expectations 061: Target

Looking back on writing about music for VICE. Plus, an excellent new Wim Wenders film called 'Perfect Days.'

Feb 29, 2024

bokeh photography — Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

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Headline Song: Rui Gabriel, “Target”

Thanks for being here. I had several new paid signups last week, which was so welcome and means the world. Those keep the lights on here and help me devote more time to this newsletter. While it’s still a ways off, each new paid sub puts me on the path to potentially do this full-time. How sick would that be! Appreciate all the support so far.

Pouring One Out For VICE

Last Thursday, I saw a tweet from a VICE staffer stating they received an anonymous tip that the owners of the publication would delete the website. I wrote there for four years—first as a freelancer for Noisey in April 2017 and eventually at VICE as a permalance culture writer from 2019 through 2021. Spooked by that post, I scrambled to make sure I had already saved the highlights from the 400 or so bylines I accrued there. Today, the website is still online and what’s left of the company promises to preserve it. What actually happened is still devastating. That day, VICE Media announced it would cease publishing on VICE.com and lay off hundreds of its 900-person staff. The publication is dead and hundreds of good people are now without jobs.

VICE was the outlet that I wrote for the longest. They were the first publication to reach out after my layoff from RedEye Chicago in 2017 (which, sadly, is another publication that no longer exists). It paid my bills for basically half of a decade. I worked under some fantastic editors like Leslie Horn Peterson, Emilie Friedlander, Colin Joyce, Hilary Pollack, Dan Ozzi, Kyle Kramer, Drew Millard, and many more. I wrote pieces that I still count as the best things I’ve ever done. The big swings I took—even if my take was too spicy and didn’t quite land—don’t make me cringe now as much as I would’ve expected. I loved my coworkers and I learned so much.

It feels bizarre to write about VICE in the past tense. The company was valued at $5.7 billion when I joined as a contributor. Now, the website won’t ever publish new writing again. (Also, lol, I should note that correlation does not equal causation). While I don’t want to speculate too plainly how you can burn through all that money to bankruptcy in six years and effectively lay off your entire editorial staff in 2024. I will say that it’s not the people who are grinding out reported stories, investigations, cultural criticism, artwork, longform and shortform videos, and sharp writing who are at fault. VICE’s demise is not because of the workers. The same top-level incompetence that ripped apart your favorite publication likely did the same here.

That website was such a formative part of my life both as a reader and a writer. It was a financial lifeline in my twenties. My immediate coworkers—Leslie Horn Peterson, Kristin Corry, Ashwin Rodrigues, Drew Schwartz, Colin Joyce, Alex Zaragoza, Bettina Makalintal, Hilary Pollack, Emilie Friedlander, and countless others there—gave me the confidence to keep trying to make a living in journalism. They made my pieces better and kept me sane. Even though that’s all true, I still feel a little self-conscious eulogizing the place. On my team, I was the only person based in Chicago—I visited the VICE offices just one time—and I was mercifully cloistered from a lot of the internal politics and shielded from all-hands meetings. By virtue of physical distance and my freelance contract (they did give me health insurance though—just not paid time off), I didn’t have to deal with a lot of stuff my colleagues had to. I could even make what VICE paid go further living in the midwest over New York City.

I keep thinking how it felt hearing the rumor that VICE’s owners were going to delete the site and that its writers would lose a record of what they did there. Even though it didn’t happen, the prospect of all that hard work, thousands of bylines, and great writing disappearing forever was sickening. (It happened to the folks who worked at the failed news startup The Messenger—this year’s most comically evil shuttering—so forgive me for falling for it). You can write for a company for years that won’t value you, so much so that your work can be permanently deleted in case they totally beef it on the business side. The people who worked for VICE deserve to have their work online and I’m happy it appears to be safe for now.

If you choose to make a living as a writer online, you, through no fault of your own, run the risk of having your work unceremoniously deleted if a publication shutters. While some sites like The Dissolve or Grantland still have their archives preserved, other once-beloved places like Gawker, The Awl, and Wondering Sound do not. It’s sobering to think about how tenuous the online media ecosystem is and how ephemeral this can make great, essential writing. There is so much already lost. While I took time to archive my work over the years, there are still a few dozen pieces that I missed that will never see the light of day thanks to other once-thriving platforms no longer existing. Some were successful interviews with artists I loved and others I’m probably fine with being permanently deleted.

Though I saved my work in 2021 after my VICE layoff, I still spent last Thursday going through my team’s byline pages there. It’s easy to be embarrassed by what you wrote while you were younger but I honestly feel proud looking back on what we were able to accomplish. We got to highlight under-the-radar artists on an international platform, we got to do silly blog posts that were sometimes only funny to us, and we wrote engaging criticism all while dealing with a pandemic and ever-changing pressures and goals from higher-ups that aren’t worth getting into here. While we had to navigate with forces beyond our control, as a team we were encouraged to take risks, champion underdogs, and write well.

Had those pieces been deleted, it would’ve been a shame but it wouldn’t have erased the good work we did then. It wouldn’t have killed the relationships we built as coworkers, the commiserating, the thoughtful edits, the Slack jokes, the sometimes heated yearly AOTY discussions, and the daily check-ins with each other. Media is demoralizing and becoming an increasingly untenable industry. When a publication ends this unceremoniously, it’s understandable to be bitter and outraged. I can’t speak for everyone who worked there and I know it was an awful experience for many. But at the end of the day, I was pretty lucky: I have a few dozen saved PDFs and solid memories of working with people who made each other better. With that, it’s not a total wash.

It’s been pretty numbing to see once-thriving publications shutter and more good people lose jobs. It’s doubly so when it’s an outlet you spent so many years writing for. I want a place that can foster wild ideas, take in young writers, pay them, and highlight interesting artists who aren’t getting coverage elsewhere. For all the bullshit, VICE did that when it could and did it exceedingly well. Now, it’s gone and there are few if any alternatives to take on that mission. I don’t know what can. Something has to.

If you want to read some old VICE highlights:

My interview series where I made artists listen to the most famous album they’ve never heard

The Noisey Next Profile on NNAMDÏ

This Longform Piece From 2017 on Deer Tick

A controversial piece on the Disco Demolition Night

Another Noisey Next on Katy Kirby

A reported piece on how live music can be more accessible

An interview with producer Daniel Nigro

This profile on Chicago’s Deeper

I was a podcast guest on Fortune Kit to talk about The Grateful Dead

Fortune Kit is a great music podcast from Charles Austin, Alex Nichols, and Dan Boeckner—the folks who make the uproarious comedy show Episode 1. Last week, I joined hosts Charles and Alex to try and get them into the Grateful Dead. It was a total blast even if I didn’t quite succeed at turning the duo into hardened Deadheads. Also, if you’re one of the few No Expectations readers who told me to buy a mic for my podcast appearances because “it sounds like shit without a mic,” I have good news: I bought one. It sounds great! Listen here.

What I listened to:

The No Expectations 061 Playlist: Spotify // Apple Music

1. Las Los, “NYC”
2. Lime Garden, “Love Song”
3. Rui Gabriel ft. Kate Teague, “Target”
4. Jane Penny, “Wear You Out”
5. Loving, “Uncanny Valley”
6. Blunt Chunks, “Psyche’s Flight”
7. Another Michael, “Is There a World?”
8. Short Frenzy, “Dirt”
9. lake j, “Often My Mind”
10. Somesurprises, “Be Reasonable”
11. Vampire Weekend, “Capricorn”
12. Tomato Flower, “Harlequin”
13. Hana Vu, “Care”
14. Mo Troper, “The Billy Joel Fan Club”
15. Hour, “Hallmark”

What I watched:

Perfect Days (dir. Wim Wenders, in theaters)

Wim Wenders, the German director responsible for beloved films like Paris, Texas, The American Friend, and Wings of Desire, has a new one out in theaters called Perfect Days. It’s about the quiet, inner-life of a Japanese man Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) who works as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. He’s remarkably disciplined: he wakes up without an alarm, follows a strict routine and treats his job with palpable thought and care. He takes only the simplest pleasure—a well-curated cassette collection of 60s and 70s pop and rock as well as a photography hobby. The film is as minimalist and ascetic as its protagonist: it’s patient, repetitive, and concerned with the smallest moments. I loved it but I think the film’s inherent ambiguity will serve as a Rorschach Test: Is Hirayama’s lifestyle an aspirational model to appreciate life or a coping mechanism to run away from it? Kinda think this one’s a masterpiece. Either way, Hirayama would be the ideal No Expectations subscriber.

What I read:

Software Has Eaten The Media (Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At)

And, most recently, Vice Media announced it would no longer publish written content to any of its flagship publications — including Vice.com, Vice’s regional sites, and its acclaimed tech vertical, Motherboard. An unspecified number — though measured in the “hundreds” — of workers were let go. It was an ignominious end for a publication that started life as an indie punk magazine in Montreal, eventually becoming a globe-spanning publication valued at $7bn.
Vice — although repeatedly lampooned for some of its faux-gonzo writing, which often consisted of privately-educated twenty-somethings waxing lyrical about the virtues of hallucinogenic substances — did a lot of good stuff. Simon Ostrovsky’s coverage of the earliest days of the Russo-Ukraine War, which culminated in him being arrested and held captive by separatists in the Donbass, provided important illumination to a conflict that few understood at the time — or even really cared to understand. This work earned Ostrovsky and Vice two Emmy nominations, plus a couple of Webby awards, and was rightfully seen by many as the Internet finally challenging traditional broadcast media in the conflict and foreign policy reporting spaces, where it previously enjoyed a monopoly.
Vice had an uncanny ability to access some of the world’s most isolated and dangerous places, and come back alive to tell the tale. North Korea. Siberian lumber camps, where an army of North Korean workers toiled in spartan conditions, raising money for their “Dear Leader.” The Syrian city of Raqqa, which, in 2015, was the capital of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate. And unlike many outlets, Vice actually made money — though it never seemed to be able to find consistent profitability.
So what went wrong?