#063: Act Like A Self-Promotional Hussy
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: It’s a big one! Interviews with New Yorker music critic Alex Ross; film and music critic Alfred Soto; freelance writer Tarisai Ngangura; Rolling Stone news writer Claire Shaffer; and Ronen Givony, author of a new book about Pearl Jam. Plus: Polka! Podcasts! Polka podcasts?! If only. (If you have links to polka podcasts, please share.) But first…
Facts
Reading List
Sheldon Pearce writes about the whitewashing of Black music on TikTok
Tone Glow celebrates its favorite non-canonical albums of 2000
Andy Cush explains how music lessons have become a financial (and social) lifeline for many musicians during the pandemic
In LEVEL, four Black women detail what they need from hip-hop in 2020
Former Complex staffer Claire Lobenfeld on culture vulturism
Amber Smith writes about being slut-shamed during a grime clash
Classical musicians discuss how to bring racial equity to auditions in the New York Times
Stereogum's Ryan Leas watches Almost Famous for the first time
Tamara Saade checks in with folks from Lebanon’s club scene after the horrific explosion last month
Natalie Weiner explores the roots of “WAP”
Q&A: Alex Ross
For most folks reading this newsletter, Alex Ross needs no introduction. But for those unfamiliar: he’s been the music critic at the New Yorker since 1996. Mostly focusing on classical music, Alex is equally comfortable writing about trees, Björk, and the politics of the gay community. His new book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, is out this week. It seeks to tell “a cultural history of the modern world that Richard Wagner and his protean art helped mightily to create.” Our interview focuses almost exclusively on the research and writing process of the book, and in this excerpt Alex talks about one of the most interesting things he found along the way.
One moment that was really important to me was my almost accidental discovery of Luranah Aldridge, the daughter of the great African-American actor Ira Aldridge, who became very famous in Europe in the later 19th century. She was an operatic contralto who had some success singing Wagner, and was invited to sing at the Bayreuth Festival in 1896. She didn’t end up singing, because she fell sick, but I was very struck by the fact that Cosima Wagner, the head of the festival, invited a Black artist to perform, notwithstanding the festival’s well-earned reputation for racist ideologies.
At Northwestern University I found a letter from Cosima to Luranah, which no one had seen before. That discovery linked up with my exploration of the work and life of WEB Du Bois, who was an enthusiastic Wagnerite. This surprising strain of “Black Wagnerism” tells us that the phenomenon was more varied and widespread than many people might suspect.
Read the full interview with Alex here.
Podcasts!, Pt. 1
Bandcloud has launched a new podcast called Orange Hexagon Son, focused on music outside the PR system
The BBC has released a new series called Ecstasy: The Battle Of Rave
Amanda Sewell talks about her new book about Wendy Carlos on Stateside
Into the Zone explores the history of boundaries in popular music
Dan Ozzi and David Anthony talk about music journalism on REPLY ALT; Steven Hyden and Ian Cohen do the same on Indiecast
Jeff Weiss talks about local journalism on The Culture Journalist
CedarBough T. Saeji has compiled a list of K-pop podcasts
Q&A: Alfred Soto
Alfred Soto and I started working together in the early aughts, when he began to write for an online magazine I co-founded called Stylus. It quickly became clear that he was far smarter than me, so I made him an editor. Even though we don't talk often, I still regard him as a good friend. And his writing continues to tickle me to no end. So it’s with great pleasure that I’m able to present some more writing from Alfred in this newsletter. In this excerpt from our interview, Alfred offers a few tips for music journalists.
Reading history, literature, poetry, and economics is a pleasure and a necessity; learning how the world works and our relation to it, as banal as it sounds, is an essential component of the writing life.
Act like a self-promotional hussy. Don’t give up on Twitter or Facebook—assisted living facilities for obsolescing journalists, I know, but still an invaluable place to connect with editors. In 2008-2009, I was shameless about promoting [my blog] Humanizing The Vacuum content at a time when writers (still!) remained prissy about it. Editors will notice, identify you.
Specialize in a genre or a mode of thinking. This will inspire editors to say, “Why not ask X to write about Y?”
Believe it or not, blogging in 2020 helps! Whether I post political commentary, film reviews, or another list, Humanizing the Vacuum has proven a necessary laboratory for my published work. I’m proud of the site and think it’s helped create a, lord help me, brand.
Read the full interview with Alfred here.
Bits, Bobs
Scott Lapatine of Stereogum discusses putting together the site’s recent covers compilation
Adam Neely has made a fascinating video showing the connections between music theory and white supremacy
Consequence of Sound’s social person deserves a raise for the arrangement of these photos
Minnesota Public Radio fired Garrett McQueen, their only Black classical host
Emilie Friedlander wondered aloud on Twitter: Could a group of music/culture journalists ever team up to start something like Defector Media?
Brittany Howard will be guest editing the next edition of the Oxford American Music issue
Stuff You Gotta Watch
Stuff You Gotta Watch celebrates music journalism in video form. This week’s selection—efficiently recommended by screenshots alone—is the 2009 documentary The Man Who Would Be Polka King, which tells the story of how singer/entertainer Jan Lewan scammed investors out of millions of dollars.
Q&A: Tarisai Ngangura
Tarisai Ngangura is a freelance writer based in Brazil. Her latest piece is about Margie Hendrix. Ray Charles once said about Hendrix: “Aretha, Gladys, Etta James, these gals are all bad, but on any given night, Margie will scare you to death.” Tarisai writes beautifully about this largely forgotten talent. In this excerpt from our interview, Tarisai offers one tip for fellow music journalists.
The thing is, I’ve never really considered myself a music journalist, more-so someone who writes about all cultural and diasporic facets of Black art. I don’t think, until this point, I realized just how many pieces I’d written where music was at the forefront. I didn’t intentionally set out to do that. It just happened organically as I wrote about Black people and the things we create.
That being said, I think I’d tell a music journalist to write about the things they are passionate about and not what’s currently popular. I think I’d tell a music journalist to write about the things they are passionate about and not what’s currently popular. For me, that meant being in Brazil, looking around me and being so inspired and falling in love with the music I heard. It took a long time for anyone to want to publish anything I pitched because there was such disinterest in music coming from that region of the Americas, and which wasn’t samba and bossa nova-related. But I kept writing and pitching and eventually found publications who were willing and interested. One of the pieces I’m most proud of came out in a small magazine called Gusher which is dedicated to highlighting women writers and artists from the LGBTQIA community. It was a story on the oldest all-women Afro-Brazilian drumming group called Banda Didá. My editors Isabella and Juliette gave me the space to write the kind of piece I had envisioned and I couldn’t have asked for a better team. So write about what moves you and find the spaces that will let you show that, even if it’s your own.
Read the full interview with Tarisai here.
Five Chapter Titles In Andrew Mueller’s “It’s Too Late Now To Die Young”
I recently picked up Andrew Mueller’s It’s Too Late to Die Young Now: Misadventures in Rock And Roll, which details Andrew’s years at Melody Maker in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It’s a great read by a deeply funny writer, but what stood out most were the chapter titles. Here are some gems.
In which the author is kicked in the shin by the drummer from a well-loved British ska band
In which the author goes to a pub to watch a band, still unaware that this could be a job description
In which the author goes to the worst thing ever
In which the author flounders in the gulf between ambition and ability
In which the author does little to improve Melody Maker’s chances of ever interviewing Morrissey ever again
(In retrospect, that last one was probably for the best.)
A Cause Worth Supporting
This week’s cause worth supporting comes from Andrew Mueller.
I know there’s a world of hurt out there, and times are tough for a lot of people, but the disaster in Beirut on August 4th really got to me – it’s one of my favourite places, and the people there deserve way better than being governed by the kind of crooks and bunglers who’d be sufficiently negligent as to leave a 3,000-tonne bomb lying around. The Lebanese Red Cross do great work, and their appeal is here.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by the folks I’ve interviewed here.
Academic Stuff
A new issue of Contemporary Music is out
Call For Proposals: The edited collection Writing HerStories: Women’s Rock Memoirs is accepting submissions
The latest issue of Eighteenth-Century Music is out
Philip Ewell is among the lecturers in the Oxford Seminar in Music Theory & Analysis
Early Halloween Content
Q&A: Claire Shaffer
Claire Shaffer works on the news desk at Rolling Stone, covering just about anything that comes up in the music world at the beginning of the day… and then “news tends to slow down around 1 or 2 pm, during which time I switch to working on long-term projects, like features, reported pieces or podcasts,” Claire writes in her interview. “So that means I spend the afternoon doing phone interviews, researching, meeting with my editors on Zoom, and maaaaybe doing some writing, though usually I don’t have time to do the bulk of the actual writing until the evenings after work.” In this excerpt from our interview, Claire offers a few tips for music journalists starting out right now.
This is a cliché, but write what you want to read. If there’s a section of a draft you’ve written that bores you, or that your eyes instinctively skip over, rework it a bit. Whatever sounds dull to you is certainly going to sound that way to your audience.
Also, please learn your music history, and grow your passions! There are so many online archives for every conceivable band, scene or other bit of music history, and there’s nothing I love more than going down those rabbit holes. Even if you think no one will ever want to read about that mid-80s Slovenia post-punk scene that you’re obsessed with, you never know when that knowledge might be useful one day. And I recommend getting super into a subject or hobby that isn’t music- or journalism-related, too.
Read the full interview with Claire here.
Podcasts!, Pt. 2
Better Yet is back
Phantom Power’s interview with Iranian experimental artist Siavash Amini is super interesting
Switched On Pop is doing a special series on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
Glenda Goodman chats about Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic on New Books in Music
Jenn Pelly goes deep on Enya on The Pitchfork Review
Justin Quirk talks about his book Nothin’ But A Good Time: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Glam Metal on The Word
Hanif Abdurraqib will host the new season of KCRW’s Lost Notes
Q&A: Ronen Givony
Ronen Givony is a key figure in bringing the classical music world closer together with contemporary (electronic/ambient/post-rock) artists through his Wordless Music series. If you simply looked at the subjects of his books, however, you’d never know. He’s written a 33 1/3 on Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy and has a new book about Pearl Jam out imminently. In this excerpt from our interview, he explains how surprisingly difficult it was to secure a book deal about one of the biggest contemporary rock bands in the world.
Quite honestly—given the choice between writing another 100,000 words from scratch, or subjecting myself to the proposal process once more—I would happily choose the former. Suffice it to say that, as I learned, repeatedly, it’s two completely different projects—the proposal, and the book itself—and, in my case, there were literally dozens of rejections before a publisher would take on a book about Pearl Jam, and one that wasn’t an authorized biography.
Part of it, I think, has to do with the subject—a rock band, in the year 2020—and the inherent skepticism people bring to a group like Pearl Jam—i.e., a functioning anachronism—which is something I try to address in the book. Part of it, I’m sure, was simply me being naive about the publishing world.
Going into the process, I thought: surely, it’s one thing to write about a band like Jawbreaker, who never sold more than 40,000 copies of an album, and another to write about Pearl Jam, which could sell out a week at Madison Square Garden in a matter of minutes. As I found out: you would be surprised!
Read the full interview with Ronen here.
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The Closing Credits
Thanks for reading! ICYMI: my new day job is at uDiscover Music, a branded content online magazine owned by Universal Music. This newsletter is not affiliated or sponsored in any way by Universal, and any links that relate to the work of my department will be clearly marked. Feel free to reach out to me via email at music.journalism.insider@gmail.com. On Twitter, it’s @JournalismMusic. Until next time…