The End Of Grantland, 10 Years On

Plus: Thoughts On The Springsteen Biopic and My Favorite Music Of October 2025

Ten years ago, on October 30, 2015, I was on Twitter (as usual, sadly) and seeing people gossip about my impending unemployment. For the first (and, so far, only) time in my life, I knew (vaguely) what it’s like to be a head coach for a high-profile sports franchise or a drummer for the Foo Fighters. That phenomenon of strangers treating the tenuous status of your livelihood as grist for entertaining online conversation.

It’s weird! J don’t recommend it!

The New York Times had just broken the news that Grantland, the sports and culture site where I had been employed since the summer of 2012, was to be shuttered by our parent company, ESPN, effective immediately. The report went live about 10 minutes before an “all hands” conference call I had hoped, implausibly, was not about the very thing the Times just confirmed was, in fact, happening.

“Maybe the Times’ source is wrong,” the hopeful part of my brain offered as the call loomed. The paper of record had, after all, been disastrously inaccurate about WMD in Iraq. Perhaps Judith Miller had been reassigned to the online media beat, without resolving her shoddy journalism practices?

Alas, if I was being honest myself, I knew this resolution had seemed inevitable for months, ever since Bill Simmons was essentially fired that May. ESPN letting our leader and founder go was sort of like firing Chris Martin from Coldplay — even though our staff was loaded (overstuffed, really) with talent, we all amounted to “the three other guys” at Grantland. Then, in early October, the bulk of our remaining editorial leadership suddenly departed, with the majority joining Simmons in the venture that eventually became The Ringer. When I heard the news I was in (of all places) Manhattan, where I was profiling (of all people) Bruce Campbell of Evil Dead fame. I just had drinks with the great Wesley Morris, multiple Pulitzer winner, who relayed the information as we rode together in the back of a cab. (I remember thinking at the time, “This is probably my last time having drinks with Wesley Morris.”)

I look back at my Grantland days fondly and with a lot of gratitude. It’s like being in a great band that broke up after only a few albums, before they had a chance to start sucking. The Big Star of 2010s era internet journalism. In the end, we lasted the exact right amount of time. I’m convinced that even if Simmons hadn’t fallen out with The Worldwide Leader, and we continued as is beyond 2015, Grantland probably still would have collapsed anyway. I hate to refer to any period of time I’ve lived through as a “golden age,” but a site like Grantland could only exist in a relatively robust media environment, when the cable bundle made a behemoth like ESPN flush with disposable cash from more than 100 million subscribers, many of whom had no interest in watching college football or Around The Horn but had to pay up regardless. That’s how you can afford a website that has little to do with your core mission. A decade later, the Grantland money has either disappeared or been repurposed for Pat McAfee’s tank top budget. (To quote noted media sage James Hetfield: It’s sad but true.)

That circa 2015 media world was far more fragile than anyone expected, and it fell apart far quicker than we could have guessed. I cut the cord myself a few months before I lost my job. That’s what they call karma.

People still bring up columns to me that I wrote for Grantland, which makes me happy. And then there are the columns that nobody remembers, which sometimes makes me even happier. I want to talk about one from the latter group. It’s the last thing I ever wrote for the site. It was published on October 29, just under the wire. It was about a band called Beach Slang.

Do you remember Beach Slang? They were a poppy punk band — without being pop-punk, exactly — that was heavily indebted to The Replacements. And when I say “heavily indebted,” I’m talking “Bruno Mars with the MGM Grand, allegedly”-levels of arrears. Though it would be more accurate to say that they were influenced by the idea of The Replacements. Not so much their songs but a half-remembered memory of four Midwestern dirtbags drunkenly making life-affirming noise. As a songwriter, Paul Westerberg was often cynical and sarcastic, which obscured the careful craftsmanship of his words and melodies. Beach Slang’s songwriter James Alex, meanwhile, bombastically worked slightly different variations of the same theme, which was basically “I will die a romantic death in defense of every rock-song cliché known to man.”

If you were paying attention to this kind of music between the years 2014 and 2016 — let’s call it “Japandroids-adjacent rock” — Beach Slang was kind of a big deal. Though if you started caring about this micro-genre in, like, 2019, you might have already found them cringy or even old hat. That’s how small their window of relevance was. Which isn’t a knock, really. Most bands have no window at all.

When I wrote my Grantland column, I was in full-on Beach Slang fan mode, as you can tell from this excerpt about their just-released full-length debut album:

The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us abounds with potential pitfalls, moments when the spell could be broken by a lyric or musical flourish that’s merely corny rather than transcendently corny. I suppose Beach Slang will elicit groans from those who aren’t on the band’s wavelength no matter what. But for me, as the record progressed on my first listen, the sense of exhilaration grew, from the sweetly sighing backing vocals of “Bad Art & Weirdo Ideas” to the intensely rasping chorus of “Ride the Wild Haze” to the articulate feedback of “Dirty Lights.” When I heard Alex sing, “If rock and roll is dangerous, how come I feel so safe in it?” in “I Break Guitars,” I felt a lump in my throat. My god, I thought. He’s actually pulling this off.

Talking to Alex prompted a sense of relief, because I feared that perhaps this was all a put-on. His album had become a safe space for me to profess all of the beliefs that I had stuffed down into the nether regions of my heart. Beach Slang embodies nearly every single one of these cherished ideals: Earnestness is good. Bombast is good. Rock and roll is the best. Getting drunk can be a noble act. Embarrassing yourself publicly is righteous so long as you’re passionate. You truly can be born to run, so long as you don’t stop believin’ in Siamese dreams. The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us validates all of this hokum in 30-minute intervals.

Loving Beach Slang feels like going out on a limb, so it was nice to discover that Alex deserves that trust. In real life as on record, Alex talks like Paul Stanley introducing “Strutter” to a stadium packed with 40,000 wannabe dreamers. Listening to him feels like flying so long as you don’t look down.

Now, before I say anything else about this passage, let me tell a quick story: Many years ago I mentored a college student who was flirting with becoming a music critic. Only she had a hang up about “being right.” She would always ask, “Do you ever worry about writing the wrong thing?” And it occurred to me that no, never in my life, had I even considered worrying about it. Which, when I thought about it from her perspective, actually seemed pretty strange. I don’t worry at all about writing something that might seem stupid — even to me! — at some point in the future? Set aside the whole “you can’t be ‘wrong’ about your own opinion” thing. It’s definitely an occupational hazard for a person like myself to get eternally locked into a position that you eventually no longer feel like defending. And it’s normal, I think, to dread that sort of outcome. But I honestly have never been bothered by the possibility, which I guess means I picked the right job (or that I’m a sociopath).

It’s my firm belief that any writer worth their salt is fearless in that way. For a critic, that can mean hating something millions of people love. But it also can mean loving something that other people might make fun of. “Embarrassing yourself publicly is righteous” is a statement I support for rock bands and rock critics. I really believe that a critic should be willing to humiliate him or herself in the service of passionate praise at least once per year. Loving without shame (or restraint) is part of being human, and a fan, and if you don’t have the potential for that kind of intense adoration in your guts you’re missing an essential ingredient for good writing (not to mention good living).

It’s also human to later regret said passionate praise, or at least feel the urge to tone it down a little when you reflect back on it. In the case of Beach Slang (whose story did not end happily): While I didn’t have an official year-end list in 2015 (because I had no platform to publish it on), I did share an unofficial tally that put The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us at the very top. Which is something I would not do today! I still have affection for that album but … this is 2015! The year of I Love You, Honeybear and Divers and Currents and Poison Season and Something More Than Free a lot of other records I like way more. Listening to Beach Slang now is like recounting that amazing conversation you had at the bar the previous night when you’re no longer six or seven PBRs deep. You don’t discount the fun you had, but you also can’t ignore how irrationally giddy you were in that state.

If I’m ever interrogated by The New Yorker about my career …

No matter what, however, I will always appreciate how much I used to love Beach Slang. 2015 me really had a moment with that band. I was really flying, man. For a while, it was nice to not look down.

FURTHER LISTENING

Over on Never Ending Stories, I reviewed the recent Springsteen biopic, Deliver Me From Nowhere. I would advise listening to the episode if you care about my complete feelings on this subject (as well as the choice observations made by my co-hosts Ian and Evan). But my core complaint about this competently made but minor film stem from the book I wrote on the subject, which grounds Nebraska in the story of Born In The U.S.A. and Bruce’s eventual decision to embrace “larger than life” rock stardom and all the glory and pitfalls that entailed. That journey to me is really dramatic and interesting, though the filmmakers of Deliver Me From Nowhere apparently disagree. Which would be fine if they had, say, given Steven Van Zandt even a single line of dialogue rather than devote a sizable amount of screen time to a short-term girlfriend who doesn’t actually exist. (SVZ was Bruce’s real love interest in this period!)

FURTHER READING

At Uproxx I did my round up of favorite music from October 2025. Regular readers of this newsletter will recognize most of the names, though there is one album I have not talked about here, Hannah Frances’ really good LP Nested In Tangles:

This beguiling singer-songwriter welcomes Joni Mitchell comparisons due to her use of alternate tunings as well as the Hejira vibes that permeate albums like 2024’s Keeper Of The Shepherd and her strong new LP. But fans of aughts-era freak folk will also find much to love here, as Frances specializes in melodic and transportive musical eccentricity. There’s also a “time out of mind” quality that evokes the the chilly beauty of ’60s British folk. (I actually thought she was British the first time I heard Keeper Of The Shepherd, but she’s actually from Chicago, which makes her about as English as Mike Ditka.)

Grab her album here.