#049: Nerve-Shredding And Life-Affirming
I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. I highlight some of the best stuff I hear, read, and watch every week; publish news about the industry; and interview writers, scholars, and editors about their work. My goal is to share knowledge, celebrate great work, and expand the idea of what music journalism is—and where it happens. Questions, comments, concerns? You can reach me anytime at music.journalism.insider@gmail.com.
Today in the newsletter: Interviews with multi-hyphenate Eric Weisbard; Judy Garland expert Manuel Betancourt; GRAMMY.com managing editor Rachel Brodsky; and London nightlife scholar Ben Assiter. Plus: Tons of reading recommendations! (It was a great week for music writing.) Chal Ravens on the Fugazi documentary Instrument! And more! But first…
Sage Advice
Reading List, Pt. 1
A powerful essay by Harmony Holiday on the policing of Black music
Matthew Schnipper on why he named his son after Henry Rollins
Alphonse Pierre on J. Cole’s song about Noname; Clarissa Brooks on Noname’s response
Frank Rojas explores the debate in the Latin music community over the use of the term “urbano”
Shamira Ibrahim wrote about the failings of Power 105.1’s The Breakfast Club
Aniefiok Ekpoudom profiles No Signal, the new British radio station making waves during the pandemic
Q&A: Eric Weisbard
Eric Weisbard is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, specializing in music. But readers of this newsletter may know him better as the former record reviews editor at Spin. Or the former music editor of the Village Voice. Or the former guiding force behind the Pop Conference. Or the current co-editor, with Robin James, of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. In short, Eric has devoted his working life to popular music studies, effortlessly bringing together the academic and non-academic into a wonderful community. His work is a definite inspiration to this newsletter. I recommend reading the entire interview, but in this excerpt Eric talks about his mentors and what his current day-to-day looks like.
Did you have any mentors along the way? What did they teach you?
Ann [Powers], my first editor and eternal conversant, has been central to everything I’ve ever written: challenging my preconceptions and knotty prose. Joe Levy and Robert Christgau at the Village Voice offered sentence-by-sentence critiques of my language and claims, a process which could go on for hours. Craig Marks at Spin was a mentor in how to write professionally, package material for a bigger audience, but still keep one’s ideas and ideals in place.
But in a bigger way, I’d see my community of writers over the past, gulp, thirty-plus years, as the real mentoring: the 66 contributors to the Spin Guide and the dozens of others I worked with at the Voice, the 140-180 presenters at a yearly Pop Conference. I’ve always written in a manner that looks to reference other people’s work, past and present, in relationship to my own. Every music writer should have this: some larger conversation they feel part of.
Walk me through a typical day-to-day.
For the past decade, my yearly cycle has included work on a book project or smaller articles, planning and executing classes that take the story of popular music from the 1830s to the present, among other subjects, and then an ongoing editorial role: organizing the conference or editing the journal. It’s a privilege to work on these three levels: personal research, largely self-defined; teaching, where you retell stories to make sense to undergrads; and service to music writing, to facilitate other authors’ work. I’ll be pulled in one of the three directions more at certain times, but always have the others. Hope this continues: we just don’t know whether large public universities like mine will be able to support research faculty in the near-future.
Read the full interview with Eric here.
News Round-Up
Tiffany Wines accused Complex of having a “toxic workplace culture steeped in misogyny, anti-blackness, rape culture and pay inequality”
Pitchfork staff staged a work stoppage in protest of Condé Nast’s “union busting”
Was Beethoven Black? Nope. Here are two great Tweet threads with recs for Black composers to listen to instead, though: #1, #2
Stuff You Gotta Watch
Stuff You Gotta Watch celebrates music journalism in video form. This week’s column is by freelance writer Chal Ravens.
Filmed on grainy stock and pieced together from a decade of footage, Jem Cohen’s portrait of Fugazi is not your typical rock doc. The two-hour trip drifts through the daily life of a band—shows, rehearsals, interviews, trips to the gas station—without imposing a narrative. Instead, Instrument is a reflection of the D.C. punk band’s dissident ethos: raw, unadorned, and improvised.
There’s no idol worship—even the kids in the parking lot are ambivalent about the band they’ve come to see: “What do they mean to me? Oh, they don’t mean anything.” There’s confrontation, too, as frontman Ian MacKaye ejects the most rabid fans (including one “ice cream eating motherfucker“) for spitting and fighting in the front row. And contrary to Fugazi’s po-faced reputation, there’s humour between the cracks—backstage goofs and self-deprecation, as they laugh off a rumour that they all live together in an unheated house, subsisting on bowls of rice.
But the real glory of Instrument is the live performances, captured at frighteningly close range as MacKaye and guitarist Guy Picciotto careen across stage, their ankles turned to jelly and their faces contorted. If you were ever in doubt that Fugazi really, really mean it, just watch Picciotto thread himself through a basketball hoop to finish a song upside-down, swaying dangerously over the drum kit. Nerve-shredding and life-affirming all at once.
Podcasts!
The Classical Music Pod celebrated the work of Black composer Julius Eastman
Higher Learning dissected what happened between Noname and J. Cole
This week’s New Yorker Radio Hour, co-hosted by New Yorker critic Amanda Petrusich, was devoted to music
Call Out Culture went deep on Organized Konfusion’s Stress: The Extinction Agenda
Really enjoyed the most recent episode of The Music History Project, which presented highlights from an interview with Nashville’s first female record producer, Gail Davies
Among Other Things…
Q&A: Manuel Betancourt
Manuel Betancourt is the author of a recent 33 1/3 book on Judy Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall. As with all books in the series, it’s about the album in question, but also something bigger. In this case, it’s about Judy’s relationship with her fans, and it’s an extension of Manuel’s dissertation on queer film fandom. Film is one of Manuel’s biggest passions: He has regular gigs writing about it at Remezcla, Electric Literature, Catapult, and Film Quarterly. In this excerpt from our interview, I spoke with Manuel about the genesis of the book.
The idea for the book is a sort of off-shoot of my dissertation on queer film fandom. I had written a short bit about Judy Garland’s role in Broadway Melody of 1938 for an early chapter of my project. Garland plays Betty, a young girl who sings “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It)” to an autographed picture of Clark Gable — it’s one of the earliest on-screen examples of film fans and served as a kind of capsule of what my project was all about.
When I began thinking about submitting a 33 1/3 book proposal, Judy’s concert album seemed like a good place to further explore the issues about queer fandom I’d sketched out in my dissertation while grounding it in a specific cultural object that has very obvious ties to the LGBTQ community. Namely, I wanted to keep thinking deeply about what it is about divas like Garland that have made them gay icons, and, more to the point, how that discourse in itself has changed: the book ended up becoming a meditation on the pleasures of nostalgia, seeing Judy and her Carnegie Hall concert as always harkening listeners then and now to a quainter time. Like much of my early post-academic work, my proposal was a chance to see how I could pivot my research interests to a broader audience. The 33 1/3 series seemed like a good launching pad, both anchored by an academic press but obviously courting a wider readership.
Read the full interview with Manuel here.
Reading List, Pt. 2
Kim Kelly on queer country
Marcus J. Moore on Black liberation jazz
Crys Matthews on “women’s music”
Eric Stinton on Hawaiian hip-hop
Lists: The Alternative and Stereogum have both published mid-year round-ups
Canon building: Zora Mag has published its list of the 100 most iconic albums by African American women; Alan Licht has published a new entry in his series of minimal music
Another reading list: Ryan Clarke has put together a great list of articles, interviews, and documentaries about techno and its history
Pro Tip: Don’t Follow Your Editor On Twitter
Q&A: Rachel Brodsky
Rachel Brodsky is the Managing Editor of GRAMMY.com. Over the past few months, GRAMMY.com has been one of my favorite reads, taking broad, interesting angles on the very strange and difficult times we’re living through. From articles about orchestras to marching bands to historical deep dives, it’s become a must-read for me. In this excerpt from our interview, Rachel reveals how to pitch GRAMMY.com.
The best way to pitch is to check out what we’re currently doing on the site and aligning your ideas with what you see there.
Then: Send me an email. (Always email. Please don’t slide into my DMs unless it is to ask for my work email.) If we don’t already know each other, introduce yourself and include some links to your previous work, along with what your idea is, why it is timely and why the story deserves to be told right now.
We do a ton of artist interviews and anniversary pieces on GRAMMY.com, but it’s always great to think outside the box. I’m talking industry reports, scene reports, etc. Any ideas that involve original reporting are great. One of my favorite pieces that we ran recently was a feature by Emilee Lindner that looks at how high school marching bands and music teachers are faring in COVID times.
Read the full interview with Rachel here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
This week’s cause worth supporting comes from Rachel Brodsky.
Most of my spare cash these days has been purchasing merch that supports Black Lives Matter (I definitely bought that Black Sabbath tee and one of Andre 3000’s shirts). I also want to plug Black Voters Matter, which helps fund voter registration efforts, staff training, candidate and network development, and other measures needed to increase voter awareness and turnout in communities of color.
👇 Lead Singer of The Verve Pipe 👇
Academic Stuff
The Popular Music Books in Process Series—a collaboration between the Journal of Popular Music Studies, IASPM-US, and the Pop Conference—kicks off tomorrow with a conversation on musical biography
Max Ryynänen, Susanne Ylönen, and Heidi Kosonen are looking for proposals for an edited collection entitled Tracing Disgust: Cultural Approaches to the Visceral
Later today, at 3pm BST, the University of London is hosting a webinar called Orchestrating Isolation: Musical Interventions and Inequality in the COVID-19 Fallout
Veronika Keller, Sabrina Mittermeier, and Maciej Smółka are seeking papers for an edited collection tentatively entitled New York City in Song
This Friday, the Interdisciplinary Forum for Popular Music is putting on a Zoom conference called Africa Synthesized
Megan Kaes Long has offered up a Twitter thread on concrete actions for music theorists to “advance the cause of an anti-racist pedagogy”
Q&A: Ben Assiter
Ben Assiter is a PhD student at Goldsmiths, University of London, exploring “the shifting relationship between electronic dance music culture and London’s urban night time.” Outside of academia, he DJs and produces music as Mr Assister, and performs as a live touring drummer with James Blake. I first got in touch with Ben when I saw he was presenting at the Un/Sounding the Relational City conference earlier this year. In this excerpt from our interview, I asked him to briefly summarize what he had presented.
In my presentation, I discussed audiophile bars as a new kind of musical space for London. More specifically, I focussed on the heavily regenerated area of King’s Cross, exploring what it might mean that a single audiophile bar—Spiritland—stands in place of what was once a buzzing epicentre for club culture. Where most journalistic writing has positioned audiophile bars as a ‘slow listening’ response to the over-saturation of music in contemporary culture, I reflected instead on the rise of audiophile bars during a period which has been a real struggle for many traditional night clubs. Given the ways in which much of club culture is still framed in the limiting terms of anti-social behavior, I considered how a space focussed on static forms of listening rather than dance may fit more comfortably into gentrified visions of urban night time culture.
Read the full interview with Ben here.
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The Closing Credits
Thanks for reading! Feel free to reach out to me via email at music.journalism.insider@gmail.com. On Twitter, it’s @JournalismMusic. Until next time…