#070: Something Really Ancient
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 the authors of two new 33 1/3 books, Zach Schonfeld and Ayanna Dozier; an audio producer, Allyson McCabe; and Laurent Fintoni, the writer behind the new book Bedroom Beats & B-sides. Reading recommendations, a bunch of Time Magazine covers, and more! But first…
Exciting Night / Week / Couple Months Coming Up!
Reading List
Matthew Ball on the opportunity of audio (and who will capture it)
Arionne Nettles discusses how her grandparents helped shape the Chicago blues industry
Marissa R. Moss and Natalie Weiner have launched a country music newsletter
Justin McCurry writes about the Japanese musicians trying to save shamisen music
Tana Yonas on the mythical synths of Cape Verde
Richard Akingbehin remembers Dubstep Forum
An interview with Meaghan Garvey
Chris White on why it’s important to use Beethoven’s first name
Beatriz Miranda writes about the struggles of indigenous Brazilian musicians
Ted Gioia on New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett
Q&A: Zach Schonfeld
Zach Schonfeld is a freelance writer and critic whose first book, on the album 24-Carat Black's Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth, is one of the new entries in the 33 1/3 series. Zach was on staff for many years at Newsweek before going freelance full-time. Nowadays, he writes for Vulture, MEL Magazine, The Ringer, and Pitchfork. The latter site published the piece that became the inspiration for his new book; in this excerpt from our interview, Zach outlines how he wrote the book.
Truthfully, I wrote much of the first draft in a panicked frenzy during the three months leading up to my book deadline. You know when you’re reporting a long piece, and one line of interviews leads to another line of interviews, and then you tumble down a rabbit hole of even more sources, and then you realize that if you don’t force yourself to stop reporting and write the damn thing, it will never get done? It was like that…
Still, throughout the research process I had the book extensively mapped out in my head, both because 33 1/3 requires you to create a chapter outline as part of the proposal process, and because the structure of my book somewhat mirrored the structure of my preexisting Pitchfork piece…. I generally find it useful to write features out of order, following no explicable logic other than inspiration, and that was true with this book. I wrote the third chapter first, because it seemed like a key and exciting linchpin of the whole story, and I wrote the introduction last. I bounced around constantly. I am not sure if this is a freakishly chaotic approach to writing that will be mocked on some viral Twitter “workflow alignment chart,” or if it’s just how everyone writes nonfiction books.
Read the full interview with Zach.
Podcasts!
This American Life details what it’s like to play in the pit orchestra for Phantom of the Opera
Gary Suarez has launched a podcast
The latest guest on Rock’s Backpages is Loraine Alterman, who talks about her career trajectory—from Detroit Free Press reporter to co-producer of a Broadway show about The Temptations
Resident Advisor’s Exchange has a panel discussion on rethinking music journalism
Rolling Stone is producing a new podcast to accompany their recent 500 Greatest Albums list
Q&A: Allyson McCabe
Allyson McCabe is an independent journalist and audio producer whose work often appears on NPR's national news shows (Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and All Things Considered) and on podcasts such as KCRW's Lost Notes and the BBC's Short Cuts. She’s also written about music for WIRED, The New York Times, The Rumpus, and more. I first heard her work in the excellent Billy Tipton episode of Lost Notes from last year. In this excerpt from our interview, Allyson describes what she sees happening today in the podcasting world.
I’m worried that content decisions are too often driven by what sells rather than what’s valuable. I’m concerned about increasing consolidation in the industry. If you look at podcast ratings charts, you’ll see they’re dominated by big budget shows with aggressive marketing campaigns. But there is a lot of other content out there, which is less commercially driven, and really deserves to be discoverable. In the UK, you have great shows such as “Have You Heard George’s Podcast?” and “Short Cuts.” In Canada, I’m a big fan of “Love Me.” I’d like to see more of that kind of thing being produced in the U.S. with assistance for distribution and promotion coming from public radio and non-comm stations. For me, a dream job would be to run A&R: finding talent/content and matching it with the right resources/partnerships to help it grow and succeed.
Read the full interview with Allyson.
Bits, Bobs Pt. 1
City Pages has shut down
Pitchfork Union has secured an agreement for Just Cause
Rollie Pemberton, Kathy Iandoli, KC Orcutt, and Matthew Kent have launched newsletters
Creative agency Varyer has launched a web magazine
Noz has left Substack
Metal magazine A Fistful of Metal has launched its first issue
Stuff You Gotta Watch
Stuff You Gotta Watch celebrates music journalism in video form. This week’s column is by freelance writer Jesse Locke.
Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World is a long overdue rewrite of the musical history books, celebrating the stories of Native Americans’ revolutionary contributions to popular culture. Catherine Bainbridge’s 2017 film digs deeper than the usual rock doc with a vast array of voices and enough archival images to fill a museum.
The film begins (naturally) with Link Wray’s “Rumble”, which became the first instrumental to be banned from radio airplay. (Authorities thought it would incite delinquency.) He wasn’t the only Indigenous artist facing blacklisting: Buffy Sainte-Marie’s music was pulled from US stations, and even Johnny Cash’s album Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indians encountered resistance.
Some of the film’s most heartbreaking stories focus on the musicians who died at a young age, such as powerhouse drummer Randy Castillo and guitar hero Jesse Ed Davis. (The latter laid down the immortal solo on Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes.”) Thankfully, there are some stars who are still with us, like Redbone’s Pat Vegas, whose signature hit “Come And Get Your Love” reached a new generation with its appearance on the soundtrack for Guardians of the Galaxy. To hear the songs and stories that have been suppressed for too long, join in the Rumble.
Q&A: Laurent Fintoni
Laurent Fintoni is the author of the book Bedroom Beats & B-sides, which tells the story of the instrumental hip-hop and electronic music scene that has grown into an integral part of the music world over the past 30 years. Laurent conducted more than 100 interviews for the book, so I can think of few people better to tell this story. In addition to the book, Laurent is a freelance writer and has helped with odds and ends behind the scenes of this newsletter over the past year. (Thanks, Laurent!) In this excerpt from the interview, Laurent explains how he came to the idea for the book.
The book deals with music that has meant a lot to me since I was a teenager and it’s really helped me figure out why I cared about it too. I started with this idea of linking the beat scene and boom bap, but the more time I spent working on it, the more I expanded from this initial thought and realized that I was dealing with something much bigger, which I refer to as beat culture in the book.
It’s a term that a few people mentioned in our conversations, but it was during a chat with Georgia Anne Muldrow last year that it kinda fully took hold. The way she used beat culture and how she talked about it was the missing piece that I’d been looking for. Beat culture really encompasses much more than just the beats that I discuss in the book. We’re basically talking about something really ancient, really primal. But the idea of a modern beat culture proved a perfect vehicle for telling the story and it also allowed me to tie in other ideas I’d been playing with, which included things like the evolution of the producer as artist and the evolution of beat making and performance.
Read the full interview with Laurent.
Evergreen
Bits, Bobs Pt. 2
Yanny or Laurel, Ludacris edition
A celebration of the late 80s / early 90s Chicago LGBTQ publication Thing [h/t Craig Seymour]
This parody of music explainer TikTok is spot-on
Q&A: Ayanna Dozier
Ayanna Dozier is a scholar, filmmaker, and performance artist, as well as the author of a new book in the 33 1/3 series on Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope. Her experimental short film, Softer (2020), will premiere as part of the official selection showcase in several fall film festivals. She is also currently a lecturer at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Fordham University. In this excerpt from our interview, Ayanna talks about what writing this book meant to her.
The Velvet Rope is a book that has transformed my existence. I think after I entered grad school, I realized that I finally had a vocabulary to help me translate its impact not just within my life but to others. What I mean by this is that the album troubles a lot of intersections of identity formation, abuse, depression, sexuality, body issues, and the like and having a clear language and research of those issues is useful to walking others through the album’s thematics and its impact on me and others.
There is a trend in contemporary popular culture writing to filter media solely through the writer’s experience—lending toward a more personal narrative style. And while I appreciate that style, it can also present a series of missed opportunities for engaging with a topic’s broader appeal and research history. In addition, it can lead the author in trouble when they try to take experiences and histories that are not theirs and make them their own through personal narrative. Not everyone’s experience is going to be relatable and I am acutely aware of this. So while I, for years, tirelessly explained to my friends and co-workers the importance of this album on my life, I realized that I needed a language and a research practice that would give me the tools to walk people through a media object’s impact and context and I learned those tools via my academic experience.
Read the full interview with Ayanna.
Academic Stuff
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is producing a special issue dedicated to music and sound; for more info email rtmckenna@nd.edu
Registration is open for the conference Radio and the Sound of Modernism
A new publication, Discussing Bach, has launched
Call for Proposals: The conference Between Centres and Peripheries: Music in Europe from the French Revolution until WWI (1789-1914) is accepting submissions
Flip It and Reverse It: Hip-Hop Worldwide is looking for contributions
Call for Proposals: The University of Connecticut is organizing a virtual conference next year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Joni Mitchell’s Blue; email joniblueconference@gmail.com for more info
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The Closing Credits
Thanks for reading! Full disclosure: My 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…