#062: A DIY NASA
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 writer Stephanie Phillips; catalog music expert Michael Duquette; “annoying music” scholar Felipe Trotta; and Joe Banks, author of the new book Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age Of Paranoia. Plus: A documentary about a guy who spent decades broadcasting music to aliens, reading recommendations, and more! But first…
Dark Disco Comments, Pt. 1
Some Personal News
I feel very lucky to say that I recently got a full-time job. It’s at Universal Music in the catalog marketing department as part of their branded online magazine uDiscover Music. The magazine, at its core, aims to shine a light on releases from various Universal Music labels that are five years or older. It falls in line with a lot of what I was previously doing at Red Bull Music Academy: seeking out and diving into untold stories, bringing to music layers of context that may have been forgotten, or not acknowledged to begin with.
Today, we're launching the first big editorial project that I’ve worked on so far. Called Black Music Reframed, the project has been edited by Naima Cochrane and William Ketchum III, and its purpose is to have some great Black writers celebrate great Black music.
What does my role mean for the newsletter? I don’t expect much to change with regard to what I feature and how I write about it, but I will be including disclosures when I link to anything that I’ve worked on directly (or if someone has written something great that happens to be about a Universal catalog release). There will also be a disclosure note at the bottom of every newsletter.
Reading List
Beatriz Miranda tells the story of a Black bossa nova pioneer who has never gotten his due
The first line of Jes Skolnik’s latest newsletter is a gut punch, and it only gets more powerful from there
Luke Winkie collects the most humiliating notes writers have ever received from their editors; the last one is pretty funny
Hannah Giorgis on what incarcerated rappers can teach America
Michelle Lhooq has been traveling the country covering the protests all summer; her latest dispatch is from Washington D.C.
NPR Music has produced a timeline of its coverage of protest music in 2020
Tom Breihan writes about the Ghostbusters theme
David Patrick Stearns on America’s lost generation of Black conductors
The Guardian’s iconic festival sets series has just wrapped up; I’d start with Jennifer Lucy Allan on Spinn and Rashad in Europe and Jumi Akinfenwa on Missy Elliott at Lillith Fair
Ian Penman doesn’t love Kraftwerk as much as most, but he has a lot of interesting things to say about them
Rob Young is sharing stories about the writing of his book Electric Eden, ten years after its publication
Q&A: Stephanie Phillips
Stephanie Phillips is a London-based, arts & culture journalist and freelance copywriter. She’s currently working on a book on Solange for the University of Texas’s Music Matters series, recently helped organize an event called Decolonise Fest, and leads Big Joanie, a group that just put out a single on Third Man. I’m honestly not sure how she manages it all. In this excerpt from our interview, she talks about what she’d like to see more of in music journalism.
More people of colour in general. In the UK the journalism industry is 94% white and that is reflected in the way stories are told, who is considered to be an artist of the moment, and who is considered an authority. The UK feels way behind the times, as diversity in the industry is rarely mentioned and, if it is brought up, no one wants to do anything about it. It's hard to encourage more young women of colour to become journalists where their voices are needed, as I also know they'll likely be spoken over and have their work and talent disregarded.
What's one tip that you'd give a music journalist starting out right now?
Trust that your voice and your point of view is what needs to be heard right now. I spent so long waiting for someone to tell me when I was ready. I didn't realise I could just pitch someone straight out of university and start then.
Read the full interview with Stephanie here.
Podcasts!
George E. Lewis was the latest guest on Sound Expertise
Katy Henriksen has launched the podcast Sound Off, which features “in-depth conversations about music that challenges the status quo”
The latest episode of Popcast focused on the life and legacy of Power Trip’s Riley Gale
Saxon Baird and Sam Backer’s Money 4 Nothing is all about music and capitalism; I found the episode on The Federal Music Project with Professor Kenneth Bindas pretty fascinating
Song Exploder may take episodes offline due to licensing issues
Michael Hinds and Jonathan Silverman discuss their book Johnny Cash International: How and Why Fans Love the Man in Black on New Books in Popular Culture
Stuff You Gotta Watch
Stuff You Gotta Watch celebrates music journalism in video form. This week’s column is by freelance writer Jesse Locke.
John Was Trying To Contact Aliens tells the story of Michigan’s John Shepherd, who devoted nearly 30 years of his life to beaming records into space. The 16-minute short, now available on Netflix, is packed with so many astonishingly nerdy musical details that it feels like an episode of Documentary Now! without jokes.
Cramming his grandparents’ home with enough electronic equipment to transform it into a DIY NASA, Shepherd’s pirate DJ sets were broadcast to a prospective audience of extraterrestrials. The records he transmitted from a collection of 4,000 LPs will tell you everything you need to know about his heady taste: Can, Harmonia, Fela Kuti, Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett, and K. Leimer, just to scratch the surface.
As the film reveals more personal details about Shepherd’s feelings of isolation as a gay man, the romantic connection that provides its storybook ending will make anyone beam. Only one complaint can be made here: This fascinating documentary deserved to be far longer.
Bits, Bobs, Pt. 1
Mark “Frosty” McNeil has put together a website devoted to Alice Coltrane
Rainbow Rodeo, a print publication dedicated to queer country music, has launched a Kickstarter
A roundtable discussion featuring classical music critics will take place on September 15
Wax Poetics is relaunching
The 33 1/3 series has published new books on Janet Jackson, Suicide, and I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen
Q&A: Mike Duquette
Mike Duquette is the founder of The Second Disc, a website devoted to all things music reissues, box sets, and compilations. As someone who is also interested in history, canon building, and storytelling, I was excited to learn more about his story. Mike recently had his position at a label eliminated, so he’s been picking up freelance work “researching dates, facts, trivia, chart positions, anything that adds color to the re-presentation of an artist’s work for an anniversary campaign or book—putting all of that trivia in proper context.” In this excerpt from our interview, though, he talks about how he got into this world in the first place.
I had always loved catalog music—a natural extension of my three loves of journalism, music, and old things. The idea that people could turn their fandom into putting popular music into a proper context fascinated me… The circumstance of graduating college in the midst of a massive recession (around 2008) meant just sliding into a job wasn’t a possibility. With the acknowledgement of the immense privilege that allowed me to do this—I moved back home, worked all hours in retail and conceived The Second Disc. Beyond, like, Rolling Stone gift guides and the odd feature, you never got a lot of detail in what those sets were like or how they were made. What needs did they fill for a community, what stories did they tell?
At the height of my consulting [with labels], I had the unique opportunity to work multiple sides of the supply chain, stocking CD titles that I helped research or proofread on the shelves at Target. (I am nothing if not well-rounded!) I would be foolish not to mention my partner-in-crime Joe Marchese, who came on as a second writer not long after I started and did a great overhaul of the site after I started working in catalog music full-time. Joe extended TSD’s legacy with an imprint label in conjunction with the indie reissue folks at Real Gone Music, and has produced amazing reissues and compilations by The Supremes, Johnny Mathis, Bobby Darin, Laura Nyro and more.
Read the full interview with Mike here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
This week’s cause worth supporting comes from music journalist Max Mertens and Sarah Mackenzie. Max did a great job of explaining things in an email to me, so I’ve pasted it below.
We’ve put together a charity Bandcamp compilation called EVER NEW featuring brand new music and covers from a who’s who list of Canadian artists, including Owen Pallett, Mac DeMarco, Jennifer Castle, Ryan Hemsworth, Jessy Lanza, Tess Roby, Lydia Ainsworth, and more. 100% of proceeds go to Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ2S charities (Black Health Alliance, Indspire, and The 519). I think there’s something for everybody in there, from moody electro-pop to weird ambient/experimental stuff to fall weather sweater-appropriate indie rock.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by the folks I’ve interviewed here.
Bits, Bobs, Pt. 2
Penn Libraries has digitized the Marian Anderson collection
Brandon Stosuy has a new book out about making time for creativity
Daric Cottingham has a new newsletter for “young adults, pop culture enthusiasts, and those who want to know what’s going to be the next big thing”
Liz Harris has created a zine called PRESENCE
Buffalo State has digitized every issue of Gary Sperrazza’s The Shakin Street Gazette, a zine from the 1970s; highlights include Lester Bangs’ essay “How To Be A Rock Critic”
Dark Disco Comments, Pt. 2
Q&A: Felipe Trotta
Felipe Trotta is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Brazil, and Vice-Coordinator of the Post-Graduate Program in Communication. He is also the author of the new book Annoying Music in Everyday Life. With a title like that, I had to know more. In this excerpt from our interview, he explains the basic outline of the book.
The book is about the music that bothers us. I did about 70 interviews with different people in Brazil and in Scotland (where I got a visiting Scholarship for one year). It deals with how people interact with each other, both in relation to the space where a music sounds and also to the subjective feelings a music (or sound) experience activates in ourselves. The “thesis,” as you say, is that the annoying music is the sound that makes us aware of the presence of the “others.” What we define as annoying music is music that challenges our ideas about life and society, the music that other people like and that puts us distant from them, of their ideas, their lives, their bodies. Annoying music is a way to deal with the unavoidable violence of everyday life in contemporary cities.
Read the full interview with Felipe here.
Academic Stuff
A new issue of American Music devoted to “Platforms, Labor, and Community in Online Listening” has been published
The 2020 Pop Conference kicks off this week
The Journal of Sound and Music in Games has published its first three issues
TEMPO, a journal devoted to international new music, has published its latest issue, and includes one of the last interviews Krzysztof Penderecki ever gave
Dark Disco Comments, Pt. 3
Q&A: Joe Banks
Joe Banks is the author of the new book Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age Of Paranoia. It’s rare that you’ll see a book with two subtitles, but anyone who knows anything about Hawkwind will understand that it’s somehow entirely in line with the group’s ethos. Joe’s book is one of the first that looks deeply at Hawkwind’s cultural impact. In this excerpt from our interview, he discusses how he got into the band.
When I started getting seriously into music as a young teen, one of the first albums I got out of our local record library was Space Ritual, Hawkwind’s legendary live album from 1973, which remains an utterly unique (and extreme) listening experience—it took me a little while to get my head around that, but then I was well and truly hooked, especially when I bought a twofer cassette of Quark, Strangeness and Charm and PXR5, a couple of late ‘70s albums where their status as a science fiction band (as opposed to just a “space rock” band) is really established. On a basic level, the fact that they made this terrific noise while promoting a blackly satirical SF worldview was very appealing. But as the years went by, I realised that Hawkwind connected to the 1970s in all kinds of interesting ways, both musically and culturally.
Read the full interview with Joe 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…