#073: Mentasmic Abandon
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 Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua; Michaelangelo Matos, author of Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year; freelance writer Marcus K. Dowling; and Pitchfork Staff Writer Noah Yoo. Plus! A review of a great electronic music documentary, some year-end list stuff, and much more! But first…
Hate To Be A Reply Guy, But It’s Actually Iaoioeaeaeioeaiooie
Džuboks? Džuboks!
As you may remember from earlier this year, I’ve commissioned a number of features on music magazines of yesteryear. (You can read the one about El Expreso Imaginario here.)
Right now, Olivia Giovetti is working on a piece about the vintage Yugoslav rock magazine Džuboks, and she’s looking for some help. We’d like to include the perspectives of women or nonbinary musicians or music writers with a connection to the magazine. Did reading Džuboks in the 80s shape your own career in music? Did you work with an editor like Petar Janjatović long after the magazine folded? (Did you write for Džuboks?!) If so, just hit reply on this email and I’ll get you in touch with Olivia.
Reading List
Liz Pelly on Spotify Wrapped
Reed Jackson unravels the truth behind the leak of the Jay Electronica album
Miranda Reinert on Spotify playlists and discovery
Jak Hutchcraft tracks down folks who placed personal ads in music magazines decades ago to find out what happened
Chanté Joseph listens to the stories of women who danced their way through the Lovers Rock era
Julia Toppin and Joe Muggs chat about the issues raised by traditional rave and electronic music narratives
Eleanor Halls on what’s stopping more women from writing about music
Bethonie Butler on the racial reckoning in reggaeton
Andrew Mellor on a cultural appropriation controversy in contemporary classical music [h/t Steve Smith]
Jonathan Griffin on John Cage’s mushroom obsession [full disclosure: my wife edited this piece]
Q&A: Matthew Perpetua
Matthew Perpetua is the owner and proprietor of Fluxblog, a long-running mp3 blog. Matthew started the site in 2002, and continues its formula of one post and one song to this day. More recently, however, Matthew has branched out: He’s put together a lot of excellent genre/era playlists, which—to my mind—is also a form of music journalism. He’s also just launched Fluxpod, a podcast version of the blog, which features Matthew in conversation with various folks about music. In this excerpt from our interview, Matthew discusses the podcast and its aims.
Fluxpod is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time as a lifelong radio fan and a fairly heavy podcast listener in the time when I don’t listen to music. The show will basically be me talking to a guest about music in some way—sometimes it’ll be music writers, sometimes musicians, sometimes music industry people, sometimes just interesting people from other fields who are also quite into music. The long term goal is to have it all add up to cover a very wide range of experiences with music, and to offer a sort of extemporaneous music criticism or music journalism. I also just want it to be entertaining, and to be something that can introduce people to songs and ideas.
I’m producing two episodes per week—one free, the other paywalled for Patreon subscribers. This is basically the same model as a lot of the left wing podcasts I follow, like Champagne Sharks and Chapo Trap House. I’m pretty serious about doing this, and as you can tell, I’m willing to keep doing a thing over and over and over for a long time. My hope is that enough people subscribe that I can phase out a lot of other work and just make this my primary living. This is basically the first time in nearly 19 years I’ve actually tried to make Fluxblog my actual job as opposed to something that I treat like a part time job. Maybe if Patreon had existed in the 2000s things would have been much different for me, but alas.
Read the full interview with Matthew.
Lists! Lists! Lists!
Love or hate them, people click on them. Here are a few year-end list-related things that I found interesting or useful so far.
MusicREDEF has links to tons of lists
Rob Mitchum is collating a lot of best-of lists from around the world in a single spreadsheet
Complex UK has a list of the best music writing of the year
Joshua Copperman has a list of what your favorite 2020 album says about you
Stereogum ranks 2020’s Quarantine Radiohead covers
Iconic, Haunting Tweet
Q&A: Michaelangelo Matos
Michaelangelo Matos is the author of Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year. Michaelangelo has written about music for decades, and has previously published two books (one on Prince’s Sign O’ The Times, the other on dance music in America). Michaelangelo’s meticulous research and in-depth analysis makes Can’t Slow Down the definitive account of this era of pop music. In this excerpt from our interview, Michaelangelo describes the book and why he decided to write it.
Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year is my attempt at an aerial overview of that year in music, though its timeline begins with the record business’s near-collapse in 1979 and ends with Live Aid in July of 1985. It covers a lot—the big stars, the burgeoning undergrounds, changes in the music business from changing tech to changing formats to the rise of the reissue business—in what I hope is entertaining fashion.
How did you come to this subject for a book? What made the topic so interesting to you?
Nineteen eighty-four was always my favorite pop year, for sentimental reasons of course—but the music holds up, and in fact helped shape my taste in obvious ways. And I realized that, much like the U.S. rave scene, there wasn’t really a narrative history of this era—a time when pop was exploding in all sorts of ways. Lots of books about this period in hip-hop, punk and indie, all sorts of subcultures—but not the mainstream, in a period when the mainstream was really vibrant, at least in America. So I wanted to rectify that.
Read the full interview with Michaelangelo.
Podcasts!
The latest episode of Highway Hi-Fi is all about puppet / ventriloquist records
Dallas rap historian Taylor Crumpton was the latest guest on Sum’n to Say
Kyle Barnett discussed his book Record Cultures: the Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry on Money 4 Nothing
Speed of Sound’s Steve Greenberg discusses his podcast’s production workflow
LEVEL Magazine editor-in-chief Jermaine Hall appeared on In Search of Sauce
Vivian Host has a new podcast called Rave to the Grave
GRM Daily founder Posty talked about the platform on Straight Up
New York Times reporter Reggie Ugwu was a recent guest on Longform Podcast
Ian Cohen, David Anthony, and Eric Grubbs toasted three years of The E Word
Stuff You Gotta Watch
Stuff You Gotta Watch celebrates music journalism in video form. This week’s column is by freelance writer Chal Ravens.
Hands-down one of the best electronic music documentaries ever made, The Sound of Belgium takes the long view on a tiny European country with an outsized influence on electronic music. With all the momentum of a tightly curated DJ set, the doc takes us from the pipe organs and beer kegs of Belgium’s bucolic past right up to the ‘90s police raids that brought the hardcore rave scene crashing down.
With an unbeatable soundtrack (and dead-clever editing), director Jozef Devillé shows how a dedicated clique of ‘70s diggers laid the groundwork for New Beat, a scene whose fans demanded the hardest, darkest, and most avant-garde electronic material available.
When that sound imploded, it made way for the mentasmic abandon of Belgian techno and records like T99’s ‘Anasthasia’—and the effect on nightclubs is massive, as seen in spectacular archive footage from legendary spots like Bocaccio. At this point in lockdown, it’s almost hard to watch.
YouTubin’
Rob Scallion visits the Musical Instrument Museum
Electronic Beats tests various DJs on their 90s US house knowledge
Grady Smith on how TikTok is changing country music
HipHopMadness explains how lyrical hip-hop has lost its cool
Q&A: Marcus K. Dowling
Marcus K. Dowling is a freelance journalist and cultural creative. In the music sphere, he’s written for Vice, Complex, The FADER, Bandcamp, and Mixmag among many others. His biography, however, goes far beyond music: “I have done everything in life, from work for the International City-County Management Association to work in the independent professional wrestling ranks," he says in our interview. In this excerpt from our interview, Marcus explains what he’d like to see less of in music journalism.
I’d like to see less fear in so many realms. Fear is a motivator that has debilitating consequences. Namely, fear of the future, fear of having a well-constructed yet critical opinion, and fear of not succeeding are most problematic. Overall, there’s so much fear in music journalism right now. Of course, this is entirely understandable.
But, the potential for eradicating fear is best found in embracing hope. I think that music journalists aggressively embracing the search for hope needs to occur more often. Seeing more writers doing hard journalism around creating sustainable solutions for surviving COVID for musicians, fans, and the industry alike or highlighting music that celebrates the art of the process or the profound potential of how sound impacts emotion, works, for starters. Eventually, seeing a more significant number of well-authored investigative pieces that create paths to establishing social codes that emphasize honesty, accountability, and equity as the cornerstones of music’s future would be lovely.
Read the full interview with Marcus.
Bits, Bobs
33 1/3 has announced its upcoming books
St. Louis classical music critic Sarah Bryan Miller has passed away
Music Business Worldwide will no longer publish weekly
Dan Charnas has a Twitter thread of words music writers should avoid
New newsletters: Hunter Harris, Meaghan Garvey, and Justin Joffe
Karl Fowlkes has created a music business exam
Received an email you didn’t like? Send it to a literal dumpster fire [h/t The Land of Random]
Yet Another Reason To End Blind Auditions
Q&A: Noah Yoo
Noah Yoo is Staff Writer at Pitchfork, a job that entails juggling various responsibilities across the site. “The one constant is that I am probably in front of my computer, staring into a screen, waiting for something good to happen. If I’m on the news desk, ‘something good’ might be an interesting album teaser. If I’m writing something longer for the site, ‘something good’ might just be a new synonym for ‘angular’ or whatever.” In this excerpt from our interview, Noah offers a tip for music journalists and an artist that he’s been listening to lately.
Listen to as much stuff as you can. Even if you have areas or genres of expertise as a music fan, don’t pursue stuff just because it’s relevant, or write styles off for being esoteric. Find other people whose tastes you trust, keep tabs on what they’re talking about, even if it’s not “your thing.” You and your writing will be better off for it!
What artist or trend are you most interested in right now?
I’ve been really taken with Omega Sapien, who’s part of the alternative Korean music collective Balming Tiger and recently put out his debut solo album Garlic. Obviously people know (and love…) the big K-pop names like BTS, but Omega Sapien and other Balming Tiger members such as Jay Park signee sogumm are putting out some really inventive stuff.
Read the full interview with Noah.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Noah Yoo:
The Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC) is an NYC-based social services nonprofit that’s focused on the empowerment of immigrant and low-income families through childcare services, senior centers, in-home care, and more. If you’re able, please donate to their COVID-19 relief fund.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by the folks I’ve interviewed.
Academic Stuff
The 2020 Kwabena Nketia Book Prize has been awarded to Damascus Kafumbe for his book Tuning the Kingdom: Kawuugulu Musical Performance, Politics, and Storytelling in Buganda
FOCUS On Sound, an anthology of scholarly articles and artist responses to the subject of sound, is out now
Call for Presentations: Ludo2021 Conference on Video Game Music and Sound and the ongoing Popular Music Books in Process series
The University of North Texas has issued a report on the controversial issue of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies
IASPM is starting a new monthly Online Research Seminar Series in December; the first guest is Matt Brennan
The Association for Recorded Sound Collections is accepting applications for grants
Free online conferences next week: Sound Instruments and Sonic Cultures and Sounds of the Pandemic
Adam Harper will give a talk about “lo-fi” on Wednesday
Enjoyed this article about Henry Rollins on screen [h/t Dan Papps]
Latin American Music Review, Organised Sound, American Music, The Soundtrack, and Contemporary Music Review have published new issues
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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…