A Call for Culture Submissions
Dear Readers, As we’ve run into a bit of a summer lull in content for our culture section, I thought I’d take this opportunity to put out a call for content. We’ll still be taking pitches and submissions as usual for the culture section, but there are also a couple of specific things I want to bring to your attention.
1. I’d love to see some more pitches for Collaborative Reviews. We published a bunch of these through the winter and spring, and would love to see more. So, what’s a collaborative review? Well, we like it when a couple of writers get together and hash out their thoughts about an album they want to talk about. So far, all of our collaborative reviews have been of recent albums, but I’d like to open up that up to allow pitches for collaborative reviews of any album, ever, as long as we haven’t already covered it. As for the writing, we’re open to a wide range of styles and approaches, here, so take a look in the Culture Section archive to see what we’ve done in the past, and hit us up through submittable with your pitch.
2. I’m hoping to start a series of essays (think 600 – 2,000 words, but flexible), in which writers explore, write about, meditate on “forgotten” albums from the 90’s. I’m not going to split hairs about what constitutes a “forgotten” album, so if you can make a case for it being forgotten, it’ll be fair game. (Let’s be reasonable, though, if you just want to write about Nevermind or In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, I’ll probably turn you down—what’s left to say about either?) Just to give you an idea, we’ve got one piece in the hopper about Choir’s Free Flying Soul, and I’m currently kicking around some ideas for something on either Love Spit Love’s first LP, or Elvis Costello’s All this Useless Beauty, both of which have kind of been forgotten in different ways. Think about albums that folks don’t spend a whole lot of time writing about already, albums that don’t land on popular publications’ 100 Best Albums of the 90’s list—that kind of thing.
3. Finally, at the end of the year, we’ll be running a big “best albums of the year list.” We’ve still got a few months, but at some point in late November we’ll put out a call for you to send us lists of your favorite albums of the year, and we’ll use those to build our own. We’ll also be asking for folks to send us 50-150 word blurbs for many of the albums. We’ll end up writing whatever blurbs we don’t get from outside participants, but we’d love to have you along for the ride. I know we’ve got plenty of time, but thought I’d put it out there now so you can start planning your lists and thinking about blurbs.
Like I said, we’ll still be looking for the usual material as well, but I’d love to see more collaborative reviews, and get the 90’s essay series up and running. I can’t wait to see what you send us.
-James Culture Section Editor
