A photograph taken in 2007 of about two days' worth of received publicity mail.
Without getting too "inside baseball" on it, as they say, allow me to just share a little part of our job with you: Our inboxes here at the Cream/Scene are regularly inundated with just about every sort of entertainment-related email you'd never want to see. Random example from the top of this morning's e-heap? "Extra's First Look [as in the TV show hosted by A.C. Slater]: Simon Cowell's 'Everybody Hurts' Video." Blech. I also received word just last week that Guitar Center has created a battle-of-the-bands style competition (perhaps as a diversion from this), the winner of which gets to record a three-song EP with Mike Clink and Slash. Cutting-edge stuff right there.
But for all the Slash contests and old-man breast fests we catch wind of, there are also plenty of emails about bands we actually care about. Though there are pretty much never bios we want to read, there are albums we want to hear and videos we want to see. The trick is getting folks to send them to us in such a manner that we can a) distinguish them from the shit we don't want and b) actually have copies of an artist's material, not just links to streaming 30-second clips. That's where Chris Weingarten comes in. He's the fire-and-brimstone pastor of music journalism we've blogged about before, and he recently squeezed out a series of tweets about the suckiest parts of publicists' emails. Not to be outdone, Bloodshot Records publicist Marah Eakin responded with a list of how writers can be less sucky as well. Both lists are pretty entertaining, and you can see them after the jizzy.
