The Next Next Level (AMA TODAY 12 PM PST)

A contemporary story of art, obsession, fame, ambition

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A contemporary story of art, obsession, fame, ambition

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Leon thanks so much for giving up your time today! I wanted to know what was the driving force in your head when you were giving up every hour to write the book? How Did you stay focussed and not get disheartened at missing parts of life due to the dedication to finishing the book? Also along the process did you ever have severe self doubt and how did you get over it?

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11yr ago

The Next Next Level (AMA TODAY 12 PM PST)

Maker

@harrystebbings I can't claim to have given up EVERY hour to write the book -- I actually wrote it while I was working as a reporter at the Ideas section of the Boston Globe. So that meant working on it in the mornings and evenings and on weekends. I should say, though, that I didn't think I was writing a book until Melville House told me they wanted to publish it as one. When I first approached Juiceboxxx about the possibility of interviewing him and writing something about his life/career, I thought it would be a piece of longform journalism or something, maybe a Kindle Single. So I think that helped with some of that self-doubt you bring up! I didn't have nearly as much of it as I might have if I had realized I was writing a book.

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11yr ago

The Next Next Level (AMA TODAY 12 PM PST)

Maker

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11yr ago

Golden Kitty Awards 2016

@leoncrawl so excited to have you here! Appreciate you taking the time - can you tell us what Jukeboxxx has been up to since the book?

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11yr ago

The Next Next Level (AMA TODAY 12 PM PST)

Maker

@corleyh Corley, I gotta start by correcting you on JB's name! It's Juiceboxxx, not Jukeboxxx. However, as he would tell you himself, the name was really kind of random -- he chose it when he was a little kid because he could get get the URL on Angelfire. Ever since though he's been Juiceboxxx, and the name's become really important in connecting all the different phases of his career. To your actual question, though: He put out an incredible new album in June called "Heartland 99," which you should check out on Spotify. It's his best work to date -- a combination of Springsteen-style American pop, Modern Lovers-style proto-punk, and Beastie Boys-style rap, usually all at the same time. Right now he's out on tour in support of the record -- tour dates here: http://juiceboxxx.com/blog/

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11yr ago

Product Hunt

Hi Leon thanks so much for joining us today! I'm curious to know how your wife Alice Gregory of n+1 perceived the book? and Juiceboxxx? Would she be able to get in here to answer? Thanks! 😃

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11yr ago

The Next Next Level (AMA TODAY 12 PM PST)

Maker

@ems_hodge An important question. Alice was kind of confused at first about why I wanted to devote so much time to this project, especially because like most of my friends, she didn't find Juice's music immediately appealing. I tried to get her to watch his videos and listen to his songs but for the most part it just didn't really take, and after a while she was expressing open weariness whenever I brought him up -- which was a lot. During the fall and winter of 2013, when Juice and I did most of our interviews, he was pretty much all I wanted to talk and think about, which required quite a bit of patience on Alice's part. Despite all that she did not put up any kind of argument when I suggested that Juiceboxxx could be the DJ at our wedding, and afterwards she agreed that he'd done a better job than anyone else we could have ever hoped to get for the job.

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11yr ago

hotsingles.nyc

Hi Leon - is there any middle ground? Do you have to choose one or the other (art vs. safe/conventional)?

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11yr ago

The Next Next Level (AMA TODAY 12 PM PST)

Maker

@_helpmeranda There was a good review of the book at The New Republic that quite fairly took me to task for suggesting that an artist's creativity has to come from destitution/suffering. I don't actually think it does, though I do think committing oneself to being an artist is inherently less safe than developing some set of professional skills and taking those to the job market. That's because I think art is kind of magic! And even those among us who are lucky enough to have it in them, like Juiceboxxx does, can lose it at any moment.

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11yr ago

The Next Next Level (AMA TODAY 12 PM PST)

Maker

Hello! I'm excited to do this AMA at 12 PM PST. For now, I thought I would post a few words about some books -- by Ben Lerner, Masha Gessen, Carl Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Sheila Heti, Daniel Kelhmann, and Choire Sicha -- that inspired me and shaped my thinking about "The Next Next Level" as I worked on it. Ben Lerner — “Leaving the Atocha Station” A novel by a young man about being a slightly younger man, “Atocha” athletically puts on display the jerking around of a tense and sometimes dishonest person’s inner life. The book makes me want to live more attentively, write down more of what happens to me, and pay attention to the kinds of small transactions between people that, in my experience at least, tend to be forgotten and left unexamined. Lerner finds storylines in the cracks and grooves of day-to-day human experience, and I’m very jealous of his perceptual gifts. Masha Gessen — “Perfect Vigor” A biography of the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman, an eccentric genius who won the Fields Medal for proving an important theorem that no one had been able to prove for more than a hundred years. “Perfect Vigor” is a work of journalism about someone the author can’t hope to ever truly understand, and not just because he won’t let her interview him but because his mind and his soul are coded in a language she’ll never be able to learn. Gessen writes with a style that is best described as quiet and unobtrusive; you’d be hard pressed to break down her approach to specific moves or tics or flourishes. The book is about values and talent and the choices that make us who we are. But it never brags about its ambition, or betrays any distracting pride in its depth. Carl Wilson — “Let’s Talk About Love” This one expanded my idea of what a book could be. “Let’s Talk About Love” is short, and ostensibly about a Celine Dion album. Unlike most if not all the other books in the 33 1/3 series, it’s not a tribute, or at least it doesn’t start out as one. Rather, Wilson feels an uncomfortable contempt for Celine Dion’s music and the people who love it. But over the course of the book he puts his cultural intuitions under a microscope, and questions the basic connection between identity and taste. I love its unusual shape, and that it looks at the world through a keyhole that no one else has thought to look through. Daniel Kelhmann — “Me and Kaminski” I wrote a draft of an essay about this book when it first came out in English a few years ago. I don’t know how I found my way to it, but I remember feeling sick the whole time I was reading it, and that I couldn’t even bring myself to finish my essay. The story centers around an arts journalist who decides to write a book about a forgotten, reclusive painter in the twilight of his life, cynically thinking that by forging a connection with the painter, he can improve his own reputation. I can’t think of a more unflattering portrayal of my profession: in the universe of this book, cultural journalists are craven, dumb manipulators whose outlook on the world is not only superficial but deeply harmful and maybe even evil. They are incapable of truly loving art, because they can only see its social connotations. Is this an accurate portrayal? I want to say no. Sheila Heti — “How Should a Person Be” Sheila Heti’s “novel from life” is about friendship and getting older — basic aspects of life that will never not be fertile ground for fiction, for the simple reason that everyone cares about them. Reading this book reminded me of watching a movie directed by someone with a fresh and inventive visual vocabulary. The narrative is built out of little shards that have been combined in unfamiliar and pleasingly destabilizing ways. Vladimir Nabokov — “Pale Fire” A literary critic works through a singular obsession with a poet named John Shade. In reading and interpreting the poet’s work, the critic projects his own deranged preoccupations and fantasies onto it, and tries to assert for himself a role in the poet’s life and legacy. I don’t want to say I see myself in this critic, or that my relationship with Juiceboxxx — the rapper at the center of “The Next Next Level” — reminds me of the dynamic between these two characters, but, uh, obviously it does. Choire Sicha — “Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City” This book chronicles the problems and pleasures of a group of friends in 2009. Their enjoyment of each other is described in patient detail, in a voice that is at once journalistic and somehow evocative of fairy tales. The book is non-fiction, and though Sicha very energetically situates the people he wrote about in a larger social context, it’s a testament to something I believe in strongly, which is that it’s possible to make art out of all lives, not just ones that are shaped by patently consequential world-historical forces. The guys in “Very Recent History” are subject to various economic realities that determine the texture of their relationships, their moods, and their ambitions, but it’s Sicha’s affectionate rendering of that texture that makes the book so entertaining and moving.

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11yr ago

The Next Next Level (AMA TODAY 12 PM PST)

Maker

OK, thanks a lot, everyone! Now go buy the book :D http://www.amazon.com/The-Next-L...

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11yr ago

Backchannel

@leoncrawl Thank you Leon for taking the time to do an AMA! As I said everyone, the book is fantastic. Definitely check it out.

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11yr ago

Backchannel

My pleasure to welcome Leon for an AMA today at 12 PM PST....ask q's in advance! :) BIO: Leon Neyfakh used mornings, evenings, and weekends while working as a reporter at the Boston Globe to write "The Next Next Level," a book about creative ambition, failure, and growing up. In the book, Leon uses his complicated friendship with a cult rapper named Juiceboxxx -- whom Leon had been obsessed with since he saw him play live as a teenager in the Midwest -- to explore the difference between people who devote their lives to being artists and people who take a safer, more conventional path. I read this book last weekend and loved it. I had somewhat of a similar obsession with the rapper "Eyedea", but of course I never met Eyedea, so I enjoyed living vicariously through Leon. Would definitely recommend!

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11yr ago

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