How CokeMachineGlow.com Defined a Decade of Music Writing

This month, a book compiling writing from the website Cokemachineglow.com comes out. I edited it, the culmination of about 7 years of effort and almost two decades of involvement with the site—more than half my lived experience, I’m realizing now, staring in the mirror in the dead of night. I first heard about the site when my friend Eric went to college and told me he had this friend who wrote for a music website. I was agog, speechless. It was 2003. I later met this friend: Betz, a towering figure who would helm the AUX cord at parties and play all the most uptempo tracks off Anticon records. I loved him immediately.

When I started writing for the site in 2005, it was already a bustling ecosystem: there was a layer of associate editors in place (including Betz), a lively messageboard, a fairly involved application process involving not one but two reviews written on spec and pro bono. Everything for CMG, it’s worth clarifying, was pro bono, up to and including the print reader.

Scott Reid, the site’s founder and editor in chief, placed some banner ads on the site, all of which accrued approximately fuck-all, and didn’t even come close to recouping the expenses of running a site, manually laying out each homepage (we didn’t have a CMS until we built one, in 2008), sequencing and mixing monthly playlists, sourcing writers, managing personality clashes, editing and promoting somewhere between 4 and 12 record reviews every week, not to mention track reviews, blog posts, sprawling concert reviews and features and a handful of recurring columns—all in all, something like 5,732 pieces of content, including lists.

We all wrote for free, too, which is something increasingly and justifiably frowned upon in the modern media ecosystem but which is, in hindsight, sort of inextricable from the Cokemachineglow experience. We wrote for free because we had to write, and, while every now and then we mounted an effort to sell out, to turn all our effort into part-time compensation, or at least like “weed money,” it’s also obvious that this was a site that was not going to be tamed, which is to say become profitable: that writerly indulgence and a frankly pretty emo sense of self-flagellation was absolutely inextricable from the site’s appeal, from what bound us to its mission and to each other in the first place.

Our sentences were all too long, too. Cokemachineglow’s house style was “too much.” When it worked, it worked: free-form creative nonfiction spurred from an aesthetic reaction to the music we loved but situated deeply in the experience of being young, afloat on student loans, and probably drunk. When CMG’s writing didn’t work, well, it didn’t, and the writer knew it. One thread on the forum titled Staff On Staff (“not as hot it sounds,” read Scott’s description) served as a forum for feedback, and said feedback was really the only compensation any of us needed or wanted for our labor. There was nothing worse than going all-in on some massive, diaristic concert review and seeing that thread remain dormant afterward.

I don’t want to belabor the point, but belaboring the point is sort of the point. Cokemachineglow’s staff—dozens of writers, in its full timeline, but composed generally of a handful of heavy contributors fading in and out of the hivemind—wrote primarily for each other, with readers amassing in the wake. We arrived as wildly ambitious writers and left as slightly better ones, indulgences either tamed and better wrenched into the copy or enflamed and doomed forever to burst unbidden from every overstuffed sentence we create. Either way: better. Our traffic figures were Monopoly money compared to what would even seem quantifiable today, but mainstream publications noticed: We got shouted out in Spin, Entertainment Weekly, and Newsweek; Robert Christgau got mad at us for an Eminem review; we were a music writer’s music website, passed along like a secret.

Some writers went on to better things: Lindsay Zoladz was the first to decamp to Pitchfork, then to New York and the New York Times; Calum Marsh found his way to the New Yorker and the Guardian; Colin McGowan is that rarest of things, a professional basketball blogger; Andre Perry published an NPR-acclaimed collection of essays; Dom Sinacola worked at Paste for a long tenure, the aforementioned Eric at Buzzfeed and Wired, Molnar at the publishing house that’s publishing the long-gestating Reader, and so on. Turns out the CMG “process”—a bunch of writers, writing their asses off, attracting more writers to fill the spots left by writers who burned out or moved onto bigger things—got results. It just didn’t make money.

I originally attempted to compile the collection in 2015, around the time of the site’s shuttering, under the title “The Old, Weird Internet Is Dead.” This felt extremely relevant at the time, when Wondering Sound, The Dissolve, and Grantland had all recently also shuttered, while Pitchfork had been recently acquired by Conde Nast, truly a case of “the pigs walking like humans,” if you want to see it that way. But I don’t, really.

Pitchfork has aged nicely, in its glossy era, and, for all the heated rhetoric of the early 2000s Blog Wars, it was always a good site. It was first, for sure, inspiring a raft of likeminded webzines full of young writers delirious on the possibilities of the internet as a means to bypass the gatekeepers of print journalism. Money was beside the point for a generation who thought “a byline” was a sacred gift and now realized that, nope, bylines were free! baby and you could spend the first 250 words of your Bravery write-up bitching about hipsters.

CMG, before it developed a reputation as either “the writerly music website (in a good way)” or “the writerly music website (in a bad way),” had a reputation as the Canadian one, thanks to the fact that a number of early editors were based out of the country, and because “Canadian indie rock” was a then-congealing principle (think: Arcade Fire, Feist, Wolf Parade), and because the site’s name was lifted from a book of poetry by the lead singer of the beloved Canadian outfit the Tragically Hip. Anyway, we were soon stretched out in Ohio, Chicago, L.A., Iowa, Portland, London, and so on—not Canadian in any sense except the way everyone freaked out about every new Frog Eyes record.

My original attempt at a compilation dissolved when my rough draft equaled several hundred thousand words. Attempting to tell the story of a website comprehensively or even representatively (in terms of staff effort) is impossible, and anyway, we wrote a fucking lot, as is evident with each of these sentences (sorry). Molnar reached out to me in late 2020—truly a golden age for random-ass emails about long-dormant projects—to revive the project in the form barreling through the mail to independent booksellers and air-conditioned Amazon warehouses everywhere, and that very tactility forced me to go narrow. I whittled down a massive list of nominees, realizing the story to tell is of the site itself: a chronological history of its editorial voice.

Here, at last, was a narrative arc. The early era is full of life: wily stuff, frequently written in the recurring form of a stage-play or Socratic dialogue, full of in-jokes and almost pubescent angst at the state of music criticism. Around the turn of the decade, the presence of a few new voices helped the site coalesce into what I think of as its most regal era, where the “personal angle” wasn’t relegated to the intro but instead suffused into the fabric of the piece. And in the last few years, you see the strain it took to maintain this: writers flaming out and quitting the site mid-article, the encroachment of age and irrelevance, an awareness of the site’s homogeneity and permanent-underdog status and the increasingly overheated temperature of online discourse as the oblivion of 2015 approached. You can read the story of the old, weird internet in these pages.

But I got the title wrong, on that first draft: It isn’t dead. When Molnar approached me to revive this project, he said he still wondered, flatly put, What did it all mean? What did all that effort amount to? You can map the editorial voice of the site evolving alongside Twitter, and its corresponding feel of permanently self-immolating critical groupthink. CMG raged against this, and the CMG Twitter account, which is still running, still occasionally issues trollish jabs at the machine. But CMG’s glory days were not about its puckish contrarianism. It was about the life of its writers and the interplay between them.

Two of our most long-standing editorial formats were the Counterpoint—in which a writer respectfully but fully disagreed with the scored review of another writer—and the Collaboration—in which multiple writers wrote over and around and between each other to more fully express a shared experience of a piece of music. There is a reason why, again and again, we returned to reviews in the form of written dialogues. We were finding our voices in the context of each other. What attracted readers to Cokemachineglow was the sense of community that radiated off of the work, the way Nool and Betz and Boogz were recurring characters within the pieces, how you saw writers strive mightily, hit a dry spell, taper off, and then emerge to knock one out of the park.

CMG didn’t die because the internet no longer had a place for it; it died because we aged out of doing this shit for free. But the spirit of the old, weird internet lives on: it exists in the curated communities under Substack posts, in Letterboxd and Goodreads, on private Discords; it exists on TikTok and Twitch and whatever else I’m probably too old to know about, wherever people with a surplus of free time and creativity are goading each other to delirious new heights; it exists in longform YouTube exegeses and strikingly sincere “reacts” videos.

Of course, these are all corporate platforms, designed around such social interactions, and monetized to profit off of free labor. But maybe it’s helpful to think of Cokemachineglow as a platform, a Web 2.0 Blogspot-era product with the germs of the full social era laying dormant inside. The internet was always going to become the thing it has become. The writing contained within the collection shows one way in which that used to be expressed: longform music criticism, written not as some professional endeavor but because it had to be written, because it was the expression of a community full of people—and this is worth being clear about—that just really, really liked music.

If there is something that working on this collection made me miss, it’s that: the thrill of poring over new music and diving so deeply into it that you emerge like a crazed acolyte, charting its metaphors on a pinboard and weaving its waveforms into your daily life, seeing art not as a two-dimensional or even score-able thing but an ongoing and enduring part of the way that we do the things that we do. This relationship has grown more rare, in the years since CMG’s inception and even its demise: the platforms, again, have had their say, and music is constant, “free,” etc.—almost a source of passive identification rather than a direct one. In that sense alone, the book has served as a reminder for me. The writing glows, still, with the joy of discovery.

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Excerpted from Cokemachineglow: Writing Around Music 2005-2015, edited by Clayton Purdom. Copyright © 2022. Available from Archway Editions.