The first thing Chad Radford did when I met him was hand me his business card. I got a handshake, a brief introduction and then it was time to work. Throughout my time interning at Creative Loafing in Atlanta, I’ve discovered Radford is not just the Music Staff Writer for the newsmagazine, but actually is a man that many Atlanta people despise.
As a music writer, Radford interacts with people on an extremely high level. He attends countless concerts, interviews everybody from Kathy Griffin to local bands such as Baby Baby and Black Lips. Music takes up a pretty significant part of CL, so his work is usually one of the most popular parts of the paper. It took me a while to realize just how big of a responsibility that is.
A lot of people hate Radford. They disagree with his opinion. They treat their favorite bands like their favorite baseball team. People invest a lot of their social identity in the music they listen to. If Radford writes a criticizing article on a band’s album or reviews a concert, angry fans constantly bombard him both in-person and over the internet.
“They’re like, ‘this band sucks. That band sucks. This music sucks. Why do you like that? I can’t believe you said that,’” Radford said. “When you’re thrown in that kind of mix, you start second-guessing your own decisions sometimes. You start wondering if you did the wrong thing. But the answer is no.”
With the advantage of age and time in the field, Radford has learned to ignore these haters and allow them to have their opinion without swaying his. He created his own policy where he simply disregards rude responses from the public. He admitted that it took a long time until he could do this. He said it’s a very teenage mode of thinking to believe that somebody is foolish if they don’t like the same music as the next person over.
People get information out of what he writes and when he puts his opinion in a review or on CL’s music blog, Crib Notes, it usually starts a conversation, which is the point of journalism to begin with.
“You have to be able to see through all the noise that’s coming at you and look at everything for whatever nugget of wisdom is hiding in there. I have to be able to separate what I really need to pay attention to and what can I just brush aside,” Radford said. “It’s difficult.”
However, Radford is ranked as the best Atlanta Music Writer, so it’s obvious he has mastered how to write effectively, fairly, but also with a purpose. Having an individual voice in the journalism world, he said, is more important than it has ever been before. Trust your vision, and it will come out true.