Reznet

Quiet in Person, Wild in Print

By Andi Murphy

SIOUX FALLS, S.D.--Robert Morast’s desk in the Argus Leader newsroom is cluttered with stacks of CDs and music magazines. Posters of Nirvana, Turbonegro, AFI, Star Wars, the Simpsons and Alkaline Trio hang on the cubicle wall. Plastic snake toys peek from behind his computer and his iPod lies lifeless.

He wears a dark blue shirt that accents his brown hair and makes his eyes seem an icy blue.

Morast comes off as a shy person. He has a consistent, quiet voice.

His voice in the Argus Leader, however, assumes a different tone as he writes about pop culture in South Dakota: comic books, video games, films and, his specialty, music.

His background and childhood could explain his demeanor. Morast grew up in Halliday, N.D., population 250. He lived on a ranch and attended the 42-student Halliday High School. He occupied his time with comic books (“Spiderman,” “Silver Surfer” and “Y: The Last Man”) and movies. He became a “Star Wars” fanatic.

Morast doesn’t have a great picture of himself and is critical of everything he does, said co-worker Eric Hahn, an Argus Leader copy editor. Morast’s upbringing on a ranch made him the person he is, Hahn said.

“Doing an honest, straight job of everything--I think that kind of defines him,” Hahn said.

News assistant Judy Lampert lowers her voice to say Morast is quiet, “not a real noisy person at all.”

“I think he’s kind of a sweet guy, I don’t know, he comes off differently in his writing,” Lampert said, as if revealing a secret.

At Bismarck (N.D.) State College, Morast wanted to major in biology but soon found out it was not his forte. Neither was advanced math.

“I got bad at it,” he said with a polite smile.

Morast noticed that the Mystician, the college paper, only had reviews about country music and artists. But he wanted to read about rock music, so the paper asked him to write a review. He did, and he’s been doing it ever since.

His excitement over his first publication was short-lived. He didn’t think the article was good, but he admired the headline.

“I don’t like to dwell in the moment,” he said. “I just move on.”
Morast earned an associate of arts degree at Bismarck State and a bachelor’s at Minnesota State University in Moorhead, double-majoring in English and mass communications. He said that double majoring seems like a big thing, but it really isn’t.

He laughed, “I’m probably full of [it], huh?”

Guitar World, a rock magazine from New York, accepted Morast as an intern and made him do “grunt work” like deliveries and errands, he said. But he had the chance to watch the editor and see how things worked. He didn’t get paid and he borrowed money from his father. He said indignantly that he had to work for the rest of the summer to pay his dad back.

Morast had a second internship at The Forum in Fargo, N.D. He wrote mainly entertainment reviews.

“This kind of made me realize that I wanted to be a journalist,” he said.

Motivation for Morast has been the thrash metal/punk band, godheadSilo from North Dakota. He explained that the band members came from a small town in North Dakota like he did. Their “short noisy songs,” he said were “so damn loud” and reminded him that he could do great things, even if he did come from a small town.

Morast started working for the Argus Leader in 2000 as entertainment editor. He gets to interview and meet music artists. He says meeting the artists is not all that great, despite what most people think.

“They say the same,” he said about the not-so-pleasant interviews and that he likes to listen to the music, instead. He visited lead vocalist Sully Erna of Godsmack and said that he “seemed so cocksure.” Morast said he was not impressed.

That attitude is expressed in his writing, and some readers don’t like it.

“When you criticize music they kind of take it personally,” he said.

Some of the comments he receives are offensive, even explicit. But he said he likes all the comments and hate mail.

“You gotta tell the truth and not care what people have to say,” he said. The hate mail is “kind of the nature of the job.”

He smiles and shrugs his shoulders.

Andi Murphy, Navajo, is a student at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. A graduate of the Freedom Forum's 2007 American Indian Journalism Institute, Murphy interned as a reporter at The Daily Times in Farmington, N.M., and, last summer, at the Great Falls Tribune in Montana.