How I Became the Honest Broker

Metadata

Author: tedgioia.substack.com
Full Title: How I Became the Honest Broker
Category: #articles
URL: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-broker

Highlights

The Honest Broker now reappeared in my psyche as an inner voice, an avenging angel whispering my ear. Remember me? The Honest Broker puts forthright expression and straight dealing above everything else. The Honest Broker doesn’t look for direct benefit in any endeavor. The Honest Broker is just an intermediary, not a beneficiary. But all that seems foolish—because what do you get out of it?
Even so, I saw my approach to writing change over the next few months. Without even consciously admitting it to myself, I was taking on the persona of the Honest Broker. I began measuring my own methodologies against ideal standards of fairness, and nagging myself when I strayed from them. I started paring away at exaggerations and posturing in my prose, and worked to find other ways of imparting color and vitality to my sentences. Above all, I started worrying about my reader—because, after all, wasn’t the reader the real person I was supposed to serve? Wasn’t the reader the beneficiary of my brokerage services?
Above all, I noticed a whole syndrome that I came to call the Clement Greenberg problem—named after the art critic who achieved enormous success (and very large paydays) by heralding the work of Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists. Greenberg had made it clear that the single most lucrative move for a modern-day critic was to announce the newest new thing, the coming revolution that would sweep everything else aside. And he had proven so influential that, by the time I came of age as a critic, a revolution in music was getting announced every few weeks. I couldn’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about some futuristic, world-beating sound that had altered all the rules—and then a few weeks later it would be forgotten, replaced by something just as ephemeral. The whole thing was a joke to anyone who looked at it from the outside, but within the feverish world of music journalism, no one could figure out any better way to operate.
I knew if I was going to make this work, I had to equip myself better. This would be a long, tough journey. I had to educate myself more deeply, learn as much as I could about music, especially the riches and beauties that others might miss. My new concern with musical pleasure might even turn into an advantage here, opening my ears to sounds the celebrity critics would scorn. I also had to learn how to write better, with more incision and imaginative grasp of the subject at hand. Above all, I had to think about the reader, with far more clarity than I had done before. Perhaps the reader would even think of me some day.