S L U S H C I T Y

I am a freelance copy editor. Sometimes I work at home, sometimes I work in the library, but sometimes I do magazine jobs in big office buildings where there are piles of free stuff: CDs, books, T-shirts, bottles of bug spray, and Sonic Boom alarm clocks that vibrate the bed and strobe the lamp on your nightstand because a regular alarm simply won’t cut it.

It is items from this pile (especially music) that Slush City primarily concerns itself with. The things that were sent to magazines—some by bright-eyed young artists, some by jaded old publicists—that, for whatever reason, were jettisoned as freebies for the always-hungry-for-schwag staffers. Things that were overlooked, sometimes criminally and sometimes deservedly.

Bands, writers, alarm-clock developers: Resist feeling bad that you were in the Slush. You are Slush, but I am too. And while sometimes I may be harsh, I assuage my conscience by writing occasional pieces about how idiotic reviewers usually are in the first place.

Note that I am often operating without any background information. A CD-R that might look like a crappy demo may well be a gajillion-dollar major-label project. My hope is that this keeps me a little more objective. Also, not everything here is going to be new: Sometimes it takes months, even years, for items to find their way to the Slush. And once they’re there, there’s no telling how long it’ll take to dig themselves out.