Been meaning to update the site again, but if you’re prone to long breaks, you want to come back with something good, right? How ‘bout drama? The Internet loves drama.

Yesterday, a piece that I wrote for the Austin edition of the A.V. Club went live, garnering responses ranging from “BS” to “This article is incredibly pedantic, lame, and a huge bummer in general” to “I don’t know what your goal was in writing this piece” to “Go fuck yourself”. This savage attack on the sensibilities of so many people that I wrote was, um, a promotional article for an experimental music festival called the New Media Art and Sound Summit from a local collective I’ve written about a few times in the past, Church of the Friendly Ghost. The article was one in a series called “Faking Your Way” that I came up with back in November of 2008, and which has gone on to become a repeated formula throughout the A.V. Club. I’m pretty proud of it, as I think it’s a funny and fairly unique way to promote events that are otherwise under-the-radar or which seem inaccessible to the sort of people who read sites like the A.V. Club.

The beef that people had with the piece was two-fold: One, a source interviewed for the article insisted that he was “asked to provide ideas and information that would be helpful” and he was offended that it ended up in an article with the tone that mine had. We even had a little bit of back-and-forth bickering in the comments, where I felt the need to quote from the email I sent him before the interview explaining the piece and how his words would be used. To put it plainly, I don’t think he has any reason to feel misled.

The other reason people took umbrage to the article was because they felt “it comes off like you want to make the musicians and the people who watch them look like pretentious tools”. This echoed an email I received from a guy who I’d approached about being a source for the article who declined, saying, “The idea that experimental music is for specialists and those ‘in the know’ is why people are afraid of/turned off by the kind of music that I have devoted my life to making.”

(To be clear, I had no problem with the guy opting not to be interviewed, and I appreciated him giving me his reasons. The “Faking Your Way” series can be pretty snarky sometimes, and I deliberately toned that down in this case after considering his email.)

But here’s what’s weird to me: Audiences already feel like this kind of music is weird and not for them. I didn’t invent the attitude that these guys are describing. I didn’t call anyone a pretentious tool, or make them so defensive that they read that into the article I wrote. If I wrote, “The Church of the Friendly Ghost’s NMASS festival is super accessible and sure to be just what you’re in the mood for, with twenty-minute triangle solos and performance art pieces in five movements for the whole family,” the guys who are pissed at me right now might instead feel validated. Hooray, see, what we do is for everybody! But people who hear that an experimental jazz ensemble is playing as part of a festival aren’t going to take the A.V. Club’s word for it that it’s suddenly right up their alley – they’re just going to ignore the article and go read about that verse Lil Wayne recorded via telephone for the Drake track while locked up in Rikers Island somewhere. Ignoring the fact that people are intimidated by experimental music isn’t the same thing as making them no longer intimidated by it.

The point of “Faking Your Way” is to acknowledge that not everything is for everybody. The series has included articles on subjects like the BCS Championship Game that explained who Colt McCoy was – something that a solid 60% of Austinites could have explained in their sleep. We ran it because we were speaking to the other 40%. These acknowledgments don’t make people who don’t know anything about the subject – be it football, or experimental music, or comic books or theater or art – look at it and say, “Nope, not for me.” If they feel that way after reading it, then they were going to feel that way even if I wrote that the event was awesome awesome awesome and everybody should go. People are fucking smart, especially when you’re trying to sell them something like this.

But what the piece can do is educate people who don’t have any background in a way that acknowledges, “Hey, you know what? Watching a grown-ass man scrape a piece of paper on a drumhead as part of a festival performance is something that may make you feel left out.” And when they’ve been approached like this – on terms that respects where they’re coming from – they can decide if they’re interested in the event or not.

For a reader, the first question isn’t, “Will this festival be something I’ll enjoy?” It’s “Is this article about this festival something I should read?” If it’s framed in a way that respects their position, then they may read it, and then ask the second one. If it’s not, then they won’t even know the festival is happening, and whether they’re likely to hear the sound of a guy doing nothing but playing the triangle and think, “That’s how I feel inside all the time” or not, they won’t feel as though they’ve been invited.