#078: The Web Of Resonances
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 Dolly Parton expert Lydia R. Hamessley; Ian Wheeler, the co-founder of Talkhouse; and Dr. Amanda Harris, the author of Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970. Plus: Documentaries about Halifax! Reading recommendations! And not a single Bernie meme! (Not that there’s anything wrong with them.) But first…
7.2 On The Embarrassment Scale
Reading List
Maureen Mahon writes that the voices of Black women were essential to Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound
Tim Fletcher tells the story of a tiny Bangladeshi record shop and its impact on the country's metal scene
Nate Chinen looks back on an incredibly tough year in jazz
Loren DiBlasi wonders why nu-metal is the new soundtrack for figure skating
Sam Backer explains the effects of the Music Modernization Act
Geoffrey Himes introduces the 21st Annual Country Music Critics’ Poll
Mosi Reeves on how fans identifying samples can put artists and record labels at risk
Suzy Exposito writes about growing up goth in Miami
Paolo Uggetti explains why NBA team DJs are essential workers this season
Resident Advisor has published a list celebrating 120 Black acts in electronic music
Q&A: Lydia R. Hamessley
Lydia R. Hamessley is Professor of Music at Hamilton College. She writes on old-time and bluegrass music, with an emphasis on women and Southern Appalachia. Her latest book is Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton. She has also written about the banjo in nineteenth-century America; Appalachian murder ballads; and Peggy Seeger. In this excerpt from our interview, Lydia explains what her makes her Dolly Parton book a bit different than a typical biography.
Unlikely Angel is a book about Dolly’s music, not her biography. There are several biographies out there about Dolly, but they do not really discuss her music, even though Dolly consistently says she wants to be known as a songwriter first, and that writing songs is central to her identity and sense of well being. So Dolly’s songs are the focus of my book.
I believe Dolly has a core set of values that guides her life and informs her songwriting. I start with the premise that Dolly’s songs are the primary way she expresses her core beliefs, and my analyses reveal the web of resonances between Dolly’s songs and her ideas. Her songs illuminate what she is most moved by. They reveal what she values in relationships, what she thinks about situations and systems of injustice, and the nature of her spiritual life as expressed in both sacred and secular realms.
Read the full interview with Lydia.
Causes Worth Supporting
From Lydia R. Hamessley:
During this pandemic, hundreds of thousands of people in the music industry have been affected. Gigging musicians especially have lost their livelihood, and they often don’t have any safety net to fall back on. So I would recommend that people donate to Musicares or to the IBMA Trust Fund/Covid-19 Relief. Or folks could seek out their local musicians and music venues and support them with donations, attending and tipping at virtual concerts, and buying their music. Purchasing physical CDs directly from the musicians returns the most money back to the artists. They receive very little when you buy or listen to songs through streaming services.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Almost Had Me This Time
Podcasts!
Sasha Frere-Jones gets personal on a recent How Long Gone
Rivals’ next episode will be its last (for now)
Katie Chow joins It Rocks Or It Sucks to talk Vampire Weekend
New podcasts: Maggie Serota and Mike Guggino have launched Three Things with Maggie & Mike; Sophie K, Alyx Holcombe, and Yasmine Summan have teamed up for On Wednesdays We Wear Black
Sasha Geffen and Harmony Holiday join Hanif Abdurraqib on Object of Sound to talk about masks
The latest Fluxpod features an interview with Adult Swim's Jason DeMarco
Q&A: Ian Wheeler
Ian Wheeler is the co-founder of Talkhouse and Partisan Records. Among many other projects you can read about in the interview, Talkhouse has had—for many years now—a flagship podcast that pairs up artists, musicians, filmmakers, comedians, and actors for conversations about their work for many years. So I was particularly interested to hear what Ian had to say about the future of music podcasts.
I'm kind of torn on an answer at the moment. Recently, Spotify announced that podcasters who use the Spotify-owned Anchor.fm platform can put any song on Spotify into their podcast free of licensing fees. Artists will be paid a regular Spotify royalty rate. I think it's a really terrible deal for artists, labels and publishers—but especially artists.
For one—Spotify's royalty rate is notoriously bad, but it also creates a situation where podcasters don't need "approval" over usage, so you could have a situation where a renowned conspiracy theorist uses a song in his podcast and the songwriter has absolutely no recourse to have it removed (at least none that Spotify has mentioned thus far). It will also mean that Spotify's music podcast offerings will boom while Apple Podcasts and the other services won't be able to publish these podcasts. So it's a land grab that ends up being pretty unfair to artists and labels.
A number of other music podcasters and I have been hoping that there could eventually be some legal clarification around Fair Use for music in podcasts, and also that some kind of standard license fee and terms that would be fair to both artists and podcasters could be agreed-upon between podcast publishers, labels and music publishers. But I'm not sure where things will head now with this latest Spotify development. I think there is so much great storytelling potential in music podcasts (shoutout to Hrishikesh Hirway for paving the way with Song Exploder) and I hope we can maintain a "clean" ecosystem that incentivizes that great storytelling.
Read the full interview with Ian.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Ian Wheeler:
My go-to is Waterkeeper Alliance. They've got local chapters around the world and keep our waterways drinkable, fishable and swimmable.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Stuff You Gotta Watch
Stuff You Gotta Watch celebrates music journalism in video form. This week’s column is by freelance writer Jesse Locke.
In the early 1990s, the Halifax music scene inspired an unlikely feeding frenzy for labels in search of heirs to the grunge throne. The Next Seattle looks back at the era when shoegazing power-pop quartet Sloan became the first East Coast Canadian group to earn an international deal, followed by signings for Jale, Thrush Hermit, Eric’s Trip, and the Hardship Post. None of them became the next Nirvana, but it’s fun to revisit these bands’ moments in the sun.
As filmmaker Rob Lepper explains on his blog, The Next Seattle had been in the making for two decades before he finally released it last May. Though it’s only 30 minutes long, the short doc boasts an impressive selection of vintage live footage, show posters, and stories from people who were there for this brief burst of excitement—people like MuchMusic host Mike Campbell, who shares the surreal experience of being asked by a Levi’s executive visiting Halifax to go “where the kids hang out.”
Of course, a music scene receiving the attention of record labels doesn’t guarantee instant success for everyone. Super Friendz bassist Charles Austin laughs at his memories of playing empty shows on American tours while they remained local heroes back home. The industry buzz inevitably faded, but No Records’ Waye Mason sums up the moment well. Outside of Olympia or Athens, he argues, there weren’t many cities of 300,000 people boasting as many excellent bands as Halifax.
YouTubin’
The New York Times breaks down how Prince wrote “Sign o’ the Times”
Ann Powers interviews Robert Gordon, author of It Came From Memphis
12tone on the four chords that seem to appear everywhere in pop music
DJ Pierre has narrated a short history of the smiley face [h/t Mixmag]
$$$
Former Rolling Stone folks are talking about the company’s wages
Rolling Stone is having thought leaders pay them to write for the magazine
The New Yorker Union underwent a 24-hour work stoppage this week in protest of management’s wage proposal
Reina Sultan asks eight freelancers to reveal the economics of their lives right now
Get You a Man Who Can Do Both
Bits, Bobs
Repeater Books has a new radio station
Can you guess what year these music magazine covers are from? [h/t Popbitch]
Ann Powers is taking leave from NPR Music to work on book projects
Randall Roberts is collecting old hi-fi ads
James Baldwin’s record collection is a Spotify playlist
Scott Lapatine has a story about the bathroom at Billboard’s offices
Q&A: Dr. Amanda Harris
Dr. Amanda Harris is a Senior Research Fellow at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (University of Sydney) and Director of the Sydney unit of PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures). Amanda has a new book, Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970, which features contributions from Aboriginal scholars Shannon Foster, Tiriki Onus, and Nardi Simpson. In this excerpt from the interview, Amanda explains why she was inspired to write the book.
For as long as I’ve been part of the Australian music community, discussions about appropriation in Australian music have been circulating. Some of the most widely recognised Australian art music composers built their reputations on the claim to be expressing a distinctively Australian musical voice, and this distinctiveness was often built on representing Aboriginal presence in some way—either by evoking the vaguely familiar sounds of drones (mimicking didjeridu) or by directly quoting melodies from Aboriginal songs. But these debates about appropriation were very circular and often got stuck in discussions about copyright and permissions.
But it is clear that there is much more at stake than just copyright. As I quote in the book, Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes that Indigenous peoples have long been appalled by the way “the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.”
Read the full interview with Amanda.
Academic Stuff
Switched On Pop and To Live and Defy in LA were nominated for PROSE Awards
Elliot H. Powell has an excellent Timbaland and sampling syllabus
New journal issues: The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Ethnomusicology Forum, Music Research Annual, and Journal of Music, Technology and Education
Call for Proposals: Jazz Perspectives is looking for submissions
The Journal of Popular Music Studies is looking for a new web editor
The International Council for Traditional Music is hosting a year-long series of discussions on Decolonising Music
An online symposium on music biopics, Pop Rock Music and 2000s Cinema, begins this Friday
Call for Contributions: We Are Europe is looking for ideas and pitches around The Future(s) of Festival(s)
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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…