They got the name from Lester Bangs – or rather from the scene in ‘Almost Famous’ when Bangs/Philip Seymour Hoffman explains to the kid that music critics are ‘Uncool’ – and they want to do it the modern way, the Kickstarter way!
It’s that simple, if Amanda Palmer could finance her album, videos and tour with Kickstarter, why not applying the same idea for a music critic site? Music writers David Greenwald and Daniel Siegal, who worked for Billboard, GQ, the LA Weekly, Rolling Stone’s website and the LA Times, want to create a new site for in-depth music reporting and criticism, totally financed by the money they will raise with their Kickstarter campaign.
By financing I mean that they would pay their writers, if they reach their current goal of $54,000 for a year’s worth of Uncool. The content would be a little different from your average music website, as they don’t want to cover news or what they call ‘bullshit’, or want to have any advertising. Rather, they will only accept long, in-depth articles about music, and we are talking about long personal essays, thoughtful reviews or in-depth profiles of musicians, related to any kind of music. However, they refuse the take the snobbish road, as they would like the site to be a place ‘where someone can write about Taylor Swift one week, and an obscure jazz record from 1955 the next week’….isn’t it what we do?
However, they are going to do it much more exclusive manner, with just 4 pieces a month, one on a weekly basis, with essays of about 1,000 words each and one big leading piece going from 3,000 to 10,000 words, which should net the writer $2,000! So they tend to insinuate they want quality and not quantity, but it depends how you see things, as a long piece is also quantity (of words) and not necessarily quality?
They already have hired their writers, but they promise that more will join the team:
Jeff Weiss (The Passion of the Weiss, Rolling Stone, LA Weekly)
Rachael Maddux (Paste, Pitchfork, The Paris Review)
Amos Barshad (Grantland, New York Magazine)
Simon Vozick-Levinson (Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly)
Scott Tennent (Pretty Goes with Pretty, Spiderland 33 ⅓ book)
Chris Ott (Shallow Rewards, Unknown Pleasures 33 ⅓ book)
Jamieson Cox (Pitchfork, Buzzfeed)
Daniel Kolitz (Prefix, Thought Catalog)
It has been pointed by many that this is not a diverse team there! Come on guys, only one woman? And almost all of them have already written for Rolling Stone or Pitchfork or the equivalent….
When I mentioned Uncool to Iman he said it will not work,… that’s true it is difficult to be optimistic as they only have raised $7,197 out of their $54,000 goal in a month, and have only 28 days to go.