Did you think Paper Thin Walls was a piece of instal­la­tion art too? What else could a new music start-up with no rev­enue stream be? Appar­ent­ly it was­n’t. I knew it was too good to be true. It paid! Now it’s gone.

I was there in the begin­ning. I don’t remem­ber exact­ly how I got involved. I may have worn edi­tor Christo­pher Wein­garten down or he may have asked me to help him out of a hole while edit­ing the first Hol­i­day Mix­tape. It was a bap­tism by fire, all done for free, or out of some vague belief that I might actu­al­ly get paid for all the non­sense I was doing back then. It did­n’t, but I vol­un­teered for more as my unem­ploy­ment wound down.

In the end, it was all worth it. Work­ing with Chris Wein­garten (and Bran­don and Tom) was an oppor­tu­ni­ty not to be missed for a cou­ple of rea­sons. First, it was refresh­ing to find some­one so ded­i­cat­ed to music writ­ing, in and of itself. I felt that he was real­ly try­ing to recre­ate Chuck Eddy’s ver­sion of the Voice’s music sec­tion. It remind­ed me why I liked music writ­ing in the first place. He was curat­ing the sort of site I want­ed to read all the time.

Sec­ond­ly, and this is real­ly a corol­lary of the first point, Whiney’s just a great edi­tor. When I’d sign on in the morn­ing, I’d check Pitch­fork and find umpteen typo­graph­i­cal errors in the lead review or fea­ture, things that could’ve been fixed with just a lit­tle proof­read­ing. I’d joke with Chris about them, say­ing, “So many edi­tors, so lit­tle edit­ing.” Per­haps it was because of this that Chris held him­self to a high­er standard.

It’s more than a lit­tle sad to see a site like Paper Thin Walls go. It was one of the last bas­tions of music crit­i­cism that did­n’t frus­trate me. The reviews were short and to the point, which helped keep the writ­ing live­ly. When I worked on Bull­horn updates for the news feed, I felt like I had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to lay waste to the pub­lic­i­ty cycle in 10 words or less. It was the sort of out­let that struck a crit­i­cal bal­ance between gonzo antics and for­mal­ism and kept music crit as it should be first and fore­most: fun!

Last, but cer­tain­ly not least, Paper Thin Walls helped me get my cur­rent job! I cel­e­brate that fact every oth­er Fri­day morn­ing at mid­night. Thanks for every­thing, Whiney. Your hard work and patience will not soon be forgotten.