In the USA, turning 21 is considered a big deal. Such a big deal, in fact that Taylor Swift – whose feet are currently bothering the Buzzfeed office – once wrote a song about it. And why is it a big deal? Mostly because you can now legally get drunk.
Go figure. And as of next month, Resident Advisor will be able to get intoxicated in America too. To celebrate what they obviously consider quite an important event, they’re running some articles about it, including this one called “21 Years of Capturing the Dance Floor: A Retrospective on RA’s Influential Journalism”.
Their definition of “influential journalism” must be somewhat different to ours, but each to their own. In it, they go through their own archive to find their best moments – so it’s unlikely to have taken them too long. They also manage to insult Seth Troxler by suggesting he was “at the height of his fame” in 2012 and include no less than two articles about sexuality.
But there is something even more telling in their own article. If you look closely, you’ll notice the most recent feature from their own site which they recommend was from 2019. Nothing from 2020 onwards makes the list – and Ears To The House is more than happy to explain why this might be.
The pandemic hit in the spring of 2020. As a company selling tickets to events, this devastated Resident Advisor – no events taking place will do that, after all. Their own application to government quango Arts Council England for a bailout by British taxpayers cited a 95% loss of revenue almost overnight when this happened.
The company had to dismiss large swathes of its writers at this time. After their bailout application was granted, they hired a new editor-in-chief in the form of Whitney Wei. She was hired to change the site’s direction and to “raise the calibre of music journalism” – but none of the articles published during her stewardship of the site appear in this list. Isn’t that just a little strange?
Unless, of course, they’re talking about the old Resident Advisor. The old site was craven and weak but at least had a number of decent writers and journalists working on it. The new one manages to be craven and weak with a team who, judging by some of the “news” being published on the site, leave a lot to be desired.
