#061: Always Meant For This Time
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 freelance hip-hop writer Andre Gee, Wendy Carlos biographer Amanda Sewell, photographer and podcaster Georgina Cook, and political music scholar Billy Coleman. Plus: Reading recommendations, podcast recommendations, and much more! But first…
Can Confirm
Reading List
Marissa R. Moss explores the existential threat facing independent venues
VICE runs down the 50 greatest (?) landfill indie songs of all time
Harmony Holiday’s The Black Catatonic Scream is a fascinating digital project combining prose, poetry, GIFs, and more
Zachary Lipez on Batman, friends burning one another with lit cigarettes, and more
Inna Lazareva on the complicated history and lives of musicians from the private orchestra of Jean Bédel Bokassa
Alphonse Pierre’s consistently excellent weekly rap round-up column
Lia Pikus on how a collective of Black musicians is exposing racism in classical music
Suzy Exposito on how Latin music needs a Black Lives Matter movement
Retro read: Mykel Board on the zine wars of the late ‘80s [h/t Turntable Report]
Q&A: Andre Gee
Andre Gee is one of my favorite writers of the moment, crafting vital dispatches for his #morefire newsletter and various publications. After reading his “ALL Rap Music Is Political” piece in early July, I got in touch to see if he’d be interested in doing an interview. In this excerpt from our interview, Andre describes what’s changed in the past few years about his approach to writing.
I feel like in many ways I’m not just writing for the newshole, I’m writing for people to read down the line. So that’s why my pieces tend to be so long, thorough, and well-researched. I want someone to come away from my work feeling like they learned a lot, rather than just reading a piece of ephemera.
Another thing that I’ve learned personally that’s reflected in my writing is nuance. I used to be heavy on binaries and reductive reasoning, but the more you read and live, the more you understand that everything that happens derives from a confluence of social factors. I make it my intent to explore them all.
Lastly, another thing that’s changed is my distaste for social constructs, and my desire for people to really rethink the way they engage with music and other media. When I first started writing I would express myself from the perspective of the average music consumer—then I started rethinking consumerism. I’m really focused on conveying that the root causes of so many societal ills come from people with nefarious motivations. So if the source of our culture is rotten, we should reexamine cultural norms.
Read the full interview with Andre here.
Writers And Editors On Their Work
Rolling Stone’s Brittany Spanos talks with Brady Gerber
Jenzia Burgos chats about the Black Music History Library
Will Robin discusses the final stages of work for his upcoming book
Emma Warren has a new pamphlet out soon on how to document your culture
Rachel Charlene Lewis on how she takes breaks during the day
Emily Lordi, Regina Bradley, and Hanif Abdurraqib in conversation about Emily’s new book The Meaning of Soul
Stars — They're Just Like Us!
Q&A: Amanda Sewell
Amanda Sewell is the author of the first biography of pioneering American composer Wendy Carlos. Carlos, for those unaware, was the artist behind the 1968 album Switched-On Bach, which introduced millions of people to the sound of analog synthesis for the first time. (You can also hear Carlos’ work throughout the soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange.) But Carlos’s story doesn’t stop there. In this excerpt from our interview, Amanda explains.
Carlos has been at the cutting edge of electronic music innovations for her entire career. She was one of the first musicians to use digital synthesis (such as the TRON soundtrack in 1982), and she was also an early adopter of MIDI. Electronic musicians revere Carlos for her accomplishments with both digital and analog synthesis. For example, in the 1986 album Beauty in the Beast, she used digital synthesis to create new instrumental sounds and also to render a variety of tuning systems.
Finally, Wendy Carlos was one of the first people in the United States to disclose her gender transition publicly. SOB and her other albums in the 1970s were all released under her male birth name, but she had transitioned to female by the time SOB was topping the charts. This means that she couldn’t give interviews as herself about her music at the time because it would require having to disclose her gender transition. She didn’t feel safe doing that until the late 1970s. In a 1979 interview, she disclosed her transition and was finally able to release music under her own name. Although people had likely heard of transgender individuals such as Christine Jorgensen and Renee Richards, for many, Carlos was one of the first public figures whom they had already known (or thought they had known) as one gender but who had transitioned to another gender. Jorgensen and Richards only became famous after their transitions.
Unfortunately, Carlos’s gender identity has tended to dominate what many journalists and scholars have written about her. Her groundbreaking work as a musician is often drowned out by those who focus excessively on her gender. In my work, it wasn’t uncommon for me to find reviews in which the journalist spent more than 2/3 of their words on her gender.
Read the full interview with Amanda 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.
Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly-Glenn Copeland Story follows a transgender elder emerging from obscurity to receive the adulation he has long deserved. Guided by Copeland’s gentle storytelling, director Posy Dixon leads viewers through his supportive musical upbringing with classically educated pianist parents. Sadly, those parents were too conservative to fully accept their child early on. Copeland’s gorgeous jazz-folk albums, meanwhile, failed to catch on commercially, so he turned to computers for the 1986 electronic new age cassette Keyboard Fantasies, from which the title of the film derives.
Now, thankfully, Copeland’s music has been rediscovered, and the film’s third act follows him and his band of young musicians, Indigo Rising, on a recent tour of Europe. The film also includes a brief passage on the final years Copeland spent with his mother, when they finally learned to understand each other. At age 74, Copeland has come to the realization that his songs were always meant for this time, when listeners of all ages can be deeply moved and his messages no longer feel like a fantasy.
Q&A: Georgina Cook
Georgina Cook is a photographer perhaps best known in the music world for Drumz of the South, a photo series documenting South London. Just recently, Georgina started a podcast called Vision of Sound, which she simply calls “a celebration of creative people making work about or inspired by music.” (If you’re looking for a place to start, I’d highly recommend the recent episode with Emma Warren.) In this excerpt from our interview, Georgina talks about the early days of Drumz of the South.
I started it as a newsletter, and I remember distributing it around Croydon while wearing massive wooden heels and flared jeans cos I was obsessed with Lauryn Hill’s ‘70s style that she had going on. Except obviously I wasn’t Lauryn Hill, but a young woman from South Norwood and navigating the cobblestones of Croydon’s Surrey Street market in massive heels to get to Big Apple Records was completely ridiculous.
Blogging became a thing right after I started the newsletter, so I moved Drumz of the South to Blogspot which entirely cut out the need for shoes in order to distribute it. One of the highlights so far was creating an installation from my images and 2004-05 recordings from FWD>> for Stance Podcast x Tate Modern called “Who Wants A Rewind?”
Read the full interview with Georgina here.
Podcasts!
Joe Budden has announced that his podcast will no longer be exclusive to Spotify (listen from 64:00 - 178:00) [h/t Cherie Hu, who has the highlights in this thread]
Micah Peters and Justin Charity have a fascinating discussion about Tory Lanez, Megan Thee Stallion, and fandom on Sound Only
Country Queer has launched a podcast
Among other delights, Pitchfork reviews editor Jeremy D. Larson plays a recording of himself singing Coldplay’s “The Scientist” on this week’s episode of The Pitchfork Review
Emilie Friedlander and Joy Crane discuss their article “Inside the Social Media Cult that Convinces Young People to Give Up Everything” on the latest edition of The Culture Journalist
Ann Powers is the latest guest on Everything Is Fine [h/t Jessica Hopper]
Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast has finished its season devoted to Workingman’s Dead
Ten Bandcamp Guides
Modern Bulgarian music by Ashley Bardhan
Madlib’s Medicine Show series by Marcus J. Moore
Psychedelic Jewish folk by Josh Fleet
Experimental music inspired by Japanese classical by Shannon Nico Shreibak
Music for plants by Casey Jarman
African country music by Jesse Jarnow
Mathcore by Michael Luis
Modern Greek music by Megan Iacobini de Fazio
Punk klezmer by Tzvi Gluckin
Kompakt’s Total series by Michaelangelo Matos (disclosure: this piece quotes from an oral history of Kompakt I compiled for Resident Advisor in 2013)
🤯🤯🤯
Q&A: Billy Coleman
Billy Coleman is a postdoctoral fellow in early American history with the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri and the author of a new book entitled Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788–1865. I was intrigued by the subtitle of his book, eager to know exactly what it meant, so I got in touch with him to find out more. In this excerpt from our interview, he explains the general outline of the book.
Harnessing Harmony is about how early Americans discovered the political power of music. It reveals especially how conservative elites—from the beginning of the republic through to the Civil War—learnt to leverage links between mass and popular culture to shape the nation and preserve their privilege. And it argues that approaching the history of music in the United States from this perspective can help us better understand the connections between elite power and popular politics. The book asks what motivated the composition of popular patriotic anthems like “The Star-Spangled Banner,” considers the politics behind the goals of early American musical organizations, reinterprets the point of presidential campaign songs before the Civil War, and shows how music and politics fit into the lives of some fascinating but not always well-known individuals.
Read the full interview with Billy here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
This week’s cause worth supporting comes from Billy Coleman.
Aboriginal Legal Service NSW is an Aboriginal community-controlled organization that has been doing vital work for the past 50 years. They were the first free legal service in Australia, and they continue to provide culturally safe legal representation and advocacy for Aboriginal persons throughout the Australian state of New South Wales today.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by the folks I’ve interviewed here.
Academic Stuff
Project Spectrum has published an open letter to the Society for Ethnomusicology
Popular Music History has a new issue devoted to Pop Memorabilia
The World Music Textbook is seeking contributions
Music, Sound, and the Moving Image’s latest edition has been published, including articles on Eisenstein and library music
Call for Papers: CITIES, Communities and Territories is looking for submissions for a special issue entitled “People Have the Power”: Songs of Resistance in Late Modernity
Call for Papers: Popular Music is publishing a special issue about Popular Music and Populism
Call for Papers: Riffs is publishing a special issue that “will bring together work that uses fiction to critically explore issues within popular music”
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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…