KTSW Spotlight: Shallow Rewards

By Ché Salgado
Music Journalist

Here are KTSW, we consider our job to basically be turning you, the audience, on to new music. This is all well and good, but the fun is the process of discovering and coming to love new albums, bands, genres and movements isn’t solely based on listening alone. It couldn’t be, when you absolutely love what you’re hearing you can’t help but need more to soak up. That’s where the KTSW content spotlight comes in, periodically, we’d like to provide you with the very best of long-form music journalism in the form of vlogs, blogs, columns, movies, documentaries, books and whatever else we find that we think qualifies. To kick off the inaugural edition, we have something that’s been integral to my music knowledge and development of my own personal music philosophy (don’t laugh, you have one too, you just don’t know it).

Shallow Rewards, the online alias of former Pitchfork writer, Chris Ott isn’t so much a series of videos as it is an online realm which at its height consisted of an often at-war Twitter account, a Medium profile, a website, an Ask.fm page and these 29 or so videos. Half of these have since been deleted with only reuploads and cataloging done by other internet users being all that’s left of a once prolific, informative and inflammatory web presence. The videos cover a wide range of topics from shoegaze to “selling out”, from Kurt Cobain to the links between Evie Sands and Spiritualized. Each one is an absolute gem but some certainly shine more than others, we’ve provided those standouts below as well as a fully compiled list of all the videos right here.

Video 18: The Real McCoy

Video 23: Your Mother Should Know

Video 24: Shoegaze I

Video 28: Psalm 285

Video 29: The Exploding Boy

For more Shallow Rewards content, the Medium profile is still up as well as a website which contains many of these videos in audio form as well as audio only “episodes”. These audio clips can also be found on iTunes and Apple Music. On Spotify, extensive playlists made by Ott and others can be found, each one is an examination over some facet of pop music. Oh, and his review for the reissue of Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted is great.