Advice for the New Observer Music Editor

2. Think about the week you decided to write all the reasons why you don't much care for a certain local band. Now, consider the great little local band you didn't write about that gets to struggle another week to find a bigger audience.

4. Drive to Denton occasionally and don't bitch and bitch and bitch about it in print, you sack.

5. Have some taste.

6. No one gives a shit about what you mix with your Red Bull or the brand of cigarettes you smoke. Take a shot at writing about local music.

7. Shine on a band until their asses glow—the half-cooked band you heard on the cassette you got from your Sunday regular friend-with-benefits who has good ideas about music and humping. You will change the lives of these folks. Once hobbyists, they will now take it all too seriously and give themselves to a label and a national audience, get critically lauded, never make money and get sick of writing short little poems with music. At least one of the dudes will wish they'd never stopped making films. And all this will happen before they've gotten their second album released, which'll take a while between the cycling depressions and trying not to rush "genius" or the exposition of a fraud perpetrated on everyone. All because some local music writer loved a cassette that you whore. Anyway, best wishes and good luck to you.—Chris Flemmons, The Baptist Generals

Don't suck.—Robert Wilonsky