By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
Page McConnell, keyboardist with the band Phish, probably explained the difference between a solo and a jam better than anyone I’ve ever heard try. Without getting too into the weeds, he boiled it down to listening. Solos are about being heard. Jams are about listening.
When I heard that bit between songs on the radio, it really struck me.
I’d never thought about the parallels between my career and my musical tastes before, but now it seemed obvious. Good journalism is about listening too.
You have to have your own voice; just like a musician has to know how to play their instrument well. But journalism isn’t about telling your story. It’s about working with another person to tell their story.
Fairness often demands that you also talk to someone on the other side of an issue, or with an opposing point of view, as well. But even then, you aren’t interjecting your thoughts and ideas. You aren’t highlighting your opinions. You are sharing the thoughts of others and trying to come to some objective truth – if there is an objective truth to be shared.
Sometimes, though, it’s really just about another’s ideas, and making sure you understand them clearly enough to communicate them to the world at large.
Communicating another’s ideas clearly doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with them or support them, however. It doesn’t mean you expect all your readers to agree with and support those ideas either.
Usually, readers understand this. Sometimes, though, they do not.
They conflate the message with the messenger – and if that messenger carries a message they don’t support or agree with, woe unto that bearer of bad news.
It was something that I put a lot more thought and worry into when I was a young writer. I’d vacillate between feeling like I failed to explain something clearly enough and – especially when I’d receive hateful mail from the right calling me a Godless Commie, and from the left calling me a Fascist Stooge, for the same article – like I must be doing something correctly if I was angering folks on both ends of the political spectrum.
Sometimes I felt like it was a reading comprehension problem, and I don’t think I was too far off on that. After more than two decades of writing I’ve come to understand that some folks have selective comprehension. They comprehend the things that reinforce their biases, and they fail (or stubbornly refuse) to comprehend things that clash with that preexisting world view – as if understanding another is somehow betraying their own ideas and ideals.
But McConnell’s words helped me articulate something about this job that I’ve already understood for a while; some folks just don’t want to listen.
They want to be heard.
They don’t want to jam. They want to solo.
Sometimes that’s fine. If you’ve got other folks who are listening to you, sometimes it’s okay to take a lead, play a little solo, and purge whatever it is you need to get out of your system.
It’s healthy and cathartic.
But even soloists need to know when it’s time to back off and share the stage. Because the sound of 100 folks listening to one another, working together, and building something together – that’s a jam. It’s got a groove you can fall into.
But the sound of 100 soloists, all going off at the same time? That’s just cacophony.
And my ears don’t have time for that noise.
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com
