#057: An Eight Ulcer Man On Four Ulcer Pay
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 Nadine Hubbs & Francesca T. Royster, co-editors of the latest issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies; Rolling Stone news editor Brenna Ehrlich Enos; electronic music journalist Marcus Barnes; and Matthew Ingram, the author of the new book Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness. Plus: Reading recommendations, President Harry S. Truman responds to a music critic, and more! But first…
Yup
Reading List
Briana Younger has launched an ambitious project with NPR called The South Got Something To Say: A Celebration Of Southern Rap; here’s her introduction
Brittany Spanos explores the world of Black pop music stans
Mike Rubin tells the story of Creem Magazine
Andrea Williams asks, “Why haven’t we had a black woman country music star?”
Micco Caporale on a pink construction truck playing a featured role in California protest marches
Christine Hannigan looks at how drummers are dealing with lockdown
Mikeisha Daché Vaughn has a Twitter thread of interviews of Black women by Black women
Ash Lauryn is guest editing Beatportal for the month of August
Manuel Betancourt debunks a decades-old myth about Judy Garland
James Cassar on Creed and Macy Gray (and other things)
Evette Dionne interviews Hannah Ewens about her book Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture
Q&A: Nadine Hubbs and Francesca T. Royster
Nadine Hubbs and Francesca T. Royster are co-editors of the new issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. According to Nadine, “It offers what is, I believe, the largest collection of writers of color in any volume of country music commentary to date. Uncharted Country presents perspectives of critical race and ethnicity; the country music industry; gender and sexuality; class; Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness; global country; mental health; radical activism; and ragtime, Latingrass, Mexilachian, and Blackbrown sounds in relation to country music.” In our interview, they go in-depth about the issue; in this excerpt, they each pinpoint a single article that folks absolutely need to read.
Francesca T. Royster: I would point to Deb Vargas’s essay “Freddy Fender’s Brownblack Country Ecologies” as one that seems especially timely. Vargas writes of how Freddy Fender created his Tex-Mex country sound through his engagements with Chicano musics, together with soul, funk, blues, and rhythm and blues. She complicates a singular narrative of “Brown sound.” Vargas’s essay uses the lens of ecology—the material and psychic sense of place, and space, to think about how music travels and connects populations and histories of struggle, here creating a meeting point between Black and Brown culture in Freddy Fender’s work. She focuses in particular on the experiences of labor, segregation and incarceration shared by Black and Brown folks, and how the music that comes out of this region, including Fender’s, is shaped by those struggles. This essay seems to me to be especially timely right now when the Black Lives Matter movement seeks connections and allies with other freedom struggles in the United States, including the Latinx community, even as these communities have sometimes been in tension with one another. Maybe following Vargas’s lead, Freddy Fender's music could be part of the soundtrack of that movement.
Nadine Hubbs: Wayne Marshall’s “Ragtime Country: Rhythmically Recovering Country’s Black Heritage,” is an innovative and powerful paired-media work—a written historical argument plus a mixtape spanning 120 years of recorded music. The audio piece samples over 170 tracks from 1891 to the present, representing innumerable popular styles, but all sharing in common a particular syncopated rhythm (Marshall names it “American clave”), which zigzags freely across the music-categorical color line. Teamed with his prose piece, Marshall’s megamix deconstructs “Black” and “white” U.S. music marketing categories that have long served sonically to create racial difference and social division, and it gives us audible evidence of a “long history of interracial musical influence and collaboration.”
Read the full interview with Nadine and Francesca here.
Academic Stuff
The debut issue of Global Hip Hop Studies is out now
The latest issue of Music & Politics is devoted to “The Politics of Musical Knowledge in the Soviet Union and Beyond (1930s−1980s)”
Call for Papers: Popular Music is publishing a special issue called “Prosecuting and Policing Rap”
The Engaged Music Theory Working Group has launched a searchable bibliography of work that “directly engages with issues of cultural politics”
Call for Proposals: The online conference “Music, Sound, and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” is accepting submissions until September 1
I Have Experienced True Pain
Q&A: Brenna Ehrlich Enos
Brenna Ehrlich Enos is News Editor at Rolling Stone. Brenna has previously worked at TIDAL, Talkhouse, and MTV News in various capacities. Lately, she’s also started to write young adult fiction. Brenna is one of those rare folks that has worked extensively as both an editor and a writer, so while the below is just an excerpt, I’d definitely encourage you to read the whole thing.
What would you like to see more of in music journalism right now?
I'd love to see more deep-dives into interesting musicians from all levels of fame. More diversity—with coverage and writers. Fewer boring Q&As, more creativity. Also... good ledes. Take the extra ten minutes to craft something stellar. No lede should ever start with a date. Sorry, I just fell asleep.
What would you like to see less of in music journalism right now?
Interviews that don't need to exist. The same people interviewing the same people. Music fiends who can't write waxing poetic about things that happened 75 years ago. Not that we shouldn't do anniversaries, etc. Just have a point, dear God, please.
What's one tip that you'd give a music journalist starting out right now?
Can I give a few? First: Learn to write—and learn to write clean copy. It's not enough that you like music. You have to be able to tell a story. Second: You have to be interested in more than just music. Especially now. Devour arts, culture, history, etc. Be a Swiss Army knife and you'll always be employed.
Read the full interview with Brenna here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
This week’s cause worth supporting comes from Josh Langhoff.
No More Deaths speaks to three of my loves: Jesus, Mexican music, and trolling conservatives. This is the Unitarian Universalist organization that provides aid to migrant people in the Arizona desert and has been prosecuted—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—for things like harboring criminals and abandoning personal property, namely jugs of water, in a wildlife refuge.
Besides the obvious righteousness of their cause, there's a history of excellent norteño musicians entering the U.S. illegally and going on to do great work. The musical duo Los Cuates de Sinaloa crossed into Arizona in the late '90s, lived there homeless for a bit, and now they're established stars with a ton of good music and a corrido in Breaking Bad. You never know what gifts people will bring here.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by the folks I’ve interviewed here.
Stuff You Gotta Watch
Stuff You Gotta Watch celebrates music journalism in video form. This week’s column is by freelance writer Jesse Locke.
Heavenly Pop Hits - The Flying Nun Story is a case study in how to run an independent label with a refreshing lack of manufactured drama. The 2002 TV documentary, available to stream at NZ On Screen, includes moments of tension, regret, and long-running feuds, yet each anecdote is delivered with resigned laughter. Beginning with the label’s origins in the early 1980s, its story is told through archival footage and talking head interviews. Though Flying Nun bands such as The Clean, The Chills, and Headless Chickens would go on to achieve international success (and earn cult status thanks to fans like Stephen Malkmus), the humble spirit of everyone involved remains on display.
Musician/producer Chris Knox stands out immediately with his grinning recollections of the inebriated feedback he would give bands, telling them when they needed to ditch songs or even members. Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd, who comes across as legitimately sheepish, has a friendlier approach to releasing music: “If we liked the band and we liked the people, we just tried to do whatever they wanted to do.” This changed in the 1990s with the founder’s departure and various major label partnerships, alongside the signing of bands like Betchadupa (led by Neil Finn’s son Liam) and their commercial radio friendly alt-rock sound. Thankfully, the years following this documentary have found Shepherd resuming ownership, teaming up with Captured Tracks for a reissue campaign, plus landing new acts such as Aldous Harding and The Courtneys. In the end, label manager Paul McKessar sums up the legacy of Flying Nun best: “Maybe its defining moment is that it’s still here.”
To read an extended version of this review, click here.
Bits, Bobs
Brooklyn Rail music editor George Grella has launched a newsletter
MoPOP is hosting a discussion with Gillian Gaar, Helena Rogers, and Allison Wolfe about the punk scene in the Pacific Northwest tomorrow
The Society of Professional Journalists has a great resource page called The Journalist’s Toolbox
Oral History of American Music has made an enormous collection of interviews with noted American composers, performers and other significant musicians available
magCulture talked with Electronic Sound’s commissioning editor Neil Mason
Brendan Klinkenberg has left Rolling Stone and joined Gimlet
G/O Media laid off numerous video staff last week
Q&A: Marcus Barnes
Marcus Barnes is a freelance music journalist focused on electronic music. He spent a great deal of his formative writing years working for various UK tabloids, but has also spent nearly a decade as the techno editor of Mixmag in addition to writing for other electronic music outlets. But as he puts it in our interview, “I’ve never had any academic journalism training, never taken any courses or read many journalism books. I didn’t spend much time reading other journalist’s work, even when I got into writing about music, and I still can’t name very many music writers… The reason I mention this is because I don’t think it’s always necessary to be embedded in the world of journalism to get somewhere with your writing.” In this excerpt from our interview, Marcus talks about what he likes most about being a music journalist.
Having the opportunity to chat to musicians about their lives. Before I even started out as a journalist way way back when I was a youngster, what always used to go through my mind when I was listening to the music I loved was, “How did they make that tune?!” I’ll never get the answer because it’s bigger than the artist, they’re a mere conduit for creativity, but getting to know their story, where they come from, what they’re about, what got them to where they are… that helps me, and hopefully the reader, to get a little closer to the source. Once I have the interview done, it’s my job to distil their life story into a compelling piece of prose, which is a challenge I relish.
I also love being able to help people, whether that’s writing about lesser-known artists/scenes or giving tips and advice to people. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have had people in influential positions see something in me that I didn’t even see myself, and give me the chance to shine. I will always do the same for other people, when I can find the time.
Read the full interview with Marcus here.
Podcasts!
At the end of the latest episode of Popcast, critics Jon Caramanica and Jillian Mapes talk about what happened after they reviewed Taylor Swift’s Folklore
The first episode of Steve Greenberg’s Speed Of Sound tells the story of how Steve helped make “Who Let The Dogs Out?” a worldwide smash
Hip-hop journalists talking about their craft: Dart Adams on Dad Bod Rap Pod, Yoh Phillips on In Search Of Sauce
The 100th episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz explains how the iconic Netflix “ta-dum” came to be
This audio documentary of Togolese musician Bella Bellow is compelling [h/t Matthew Schnipper]
The Writers’ Co-op is an “audio handbook meant to help you navigate the trickiest bits of running your own freelance writing business”
A Few Weeks Later And I Still Can’t Stop Thinking About This
Q&A: Matthew Ingram
Back when I was getting my footing in music journalism, the blogosphere seemed like the most exciting thing in the world. One of the best blogs of that time period was Matthew Ingram’s Woebot. (Some of the best writing from that blog has been collected here and here.) In a departure from his music writing, Matthew recently published a book titled Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness (US / UK), which, as the book blurb puts it, “connects the dots between the beats, yoga, meditation, psychedelics, psychoanalysis, Eastern philosophy, sex, and veganism.” In this excerpt from our interview, Matthew talks about how he came to the subject for the book.
I came to realise that the nature of what I liked about music was changing. That less and less of what I liked was apparent in contemporary music. Not totally absent but definitely diminishing. I had gradually become more and more interested in the ideas and attitude of the counterculture which I realised lay behind the music I loved. In that research I noticed a number of health methodologies which existed in that era—and that no-one had made an attempt to draw them all together.
What made the topic so interesting to you?
My previous project had been an animation about Vitamin C, so I was already thinking in terms of projects about health. I enjoyed going behind the curtain and discovering all these ideas, mainly from Eastern philosophy that drove the counterculture.
Read the full interview with Matthew here.
Five Salty Responses To Classical Music Critics
Following on from last week’s “Five Salty Descriptions Of Classical Music,” I decided to give some composers (and POTUS) a chance to have their say. Taken from An Encyclopedia of Quotations About Music, here are five quotes I found particularly brutal.
Poor devils! Where do they come from? At what age are they sent to the slaughter house? What is done with their bones? Where do such animals pasture in the daytime? Do they have females, and young? How many of them handled the brush before being reduced to the broom? — Hector Berlioz
I am sitting in the smallest room in the house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me. — Max Reger
I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out a painting by Goya. — Igor Stravinsky
I have read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an “eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay”… Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below. — President Harry S. Truman, in response to a review of a concert by Margaret Truman
I seriously advise all sensitive composers to die at the age of thirty-seven. I know I’ve gone through the first halcyon period, and am just about ripe for my critical damnation. — Sir William Walton
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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…