#162: Unwavering Conclusions
Unwavering Conclusions
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. And if you’re not already subscribed to the newsletter, you can do so at musicjournalisminsider.com.
Today in the newsletter: Interviews with Dr. Allie Martin, freelance journalist Lily Moayeri, and Canadian music expert Jason Schneider. Plus! Reading recommendations, reggae, and much more! But first…
Hallelujah
Source
Reading List
- Chris Dalla Riva breaks down why modern pop songs have so many credited writers
- Jarrod Richey explores how C.S. Lewis’s words have been applied to music
- Michelle Hromin addresses classical music’s burnout addiction
- Freddie deBoer responds to the recent Pitchfork review of Måneskin
- Lorraine Ye explains how K-pop has embraced and resisted new technologies
- Christopher Petkanas details how Soul is looking to digitize its archives
- Marissa R. Moss says girls just want to be safe and listen to music
- Francesco Fusaro looks at sampling and remixing in classical music
- Elly Fishman profiles the violin doctor
- Annabel Ross wonders why the Grammys get dance music so wrong
Lede Of The Week
“I can’t stop looking at David Guetta’s abs.” - Annabel Ross
Q&A: Dr. Allie Martin
Dr. Allie Martin is Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College. Over the years, her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Society for American Music, and the American Musicological Society. She says some of her favorite work, however, is “teaching, especially hip-hop. Students are so excited and passionate to talk about the music that they’ve grown up with and it makes for a very rich classroom environment.” In this excerpt from our interview, Allie explained her recent research interests.
Currently, I’m thinking a lot about sound and gentrification in Washington, and how Black people have kept themselves well during Covid-19.
Why do you find this area of research so interesting?
Both of these areas of research are close to home. I became interested in gentrification in DC after driving across the city every day as an undergrad student, and Covid has, of course, affected all of us in various ways. I’m interested in what’s beyond the narratives of premature death and comorbidities for Black people, in thinking about mutual aid and community wellness.
How has your approach to your work changed over the past few years, if at all?
Over the years, I have become less interested in drawing specific and unwavering conclusions and more interested in the process of thinking through various subjects and amplifying the work and efforts of people that are making life more livable for Black people.
Read the full interview with Allie here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Allie Martin:
I would suggest donating to and/or supporting Noname Book Club. Noname is a phenomenal rapper from Chicago that started a book club in 2020 that has multiple chapters around the country. In addition to bringing people together to read books, the organization also collects and donates books to incarcerated people.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Mr. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Wild Ride
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Podcasts!
- Yasi Salek chats about the history of Bandsplain on The First Ever Podcast
- The Appetite for Distraction crew hopes for something exciting in Web3
- Steven Hyden talked about Pearl Jam on New Books in Music
- Note Doctors interviewed three first-year music theory professors about their experiences on the job market
- Switched On Pop profiles the L.A. guitar shop that reinvented indie folk
Q&A: Lily Moayeri
Lily Moayeri is a freelance music journalist. She’s had bylines in Variety, Billboard, SPIN, and more, and hosts the independent podcast Pictures of Lily—all on top of her full-time job as a teacher librarian. In this excerpt from our interview, Lily explains her day-to-day.
My husband is also a double-career person and we don’t have any kids. This basically means that we work around the clock, six days a week, by choice. We take Saturdays off to decompress and recharge.
I am at school from 8AM to 4PM every weekday. During those hours, I answer emails, but not much else related to my music journalism life. I do my prepping, transcribing and writing before school, after school and on weekends. I’ve found that if I wake up at 5AM and go straight to school, I can get a lot of my writing done in those early hours before school starts. The custodians have gotten used to seeing me walking on campus in the darkness of dawn. It’s very intense, but I love both my careers and feel genuinely blessed that being in the library and writing about music is what I am doing with my life.
How has your approach to your work changed over the past few years?
The pandemic changed everything. During our remote time, my schedule became a lot more flexible which allowed me to accept a lot more assignments, which led to more and more opportunities. These were not just for writing, but also hosting, moderating, guest appearances and contributing in more ways than were ever possible before. The doors that opened during that time have stayed open, well, I’ve propped them open because even though we’re back in-person, I don’t want to lose any of the ground I gained, hence the round-the-clock life.
Read the full interview with Lily here.
Stuff You Gotta Watch
Stuff You Gotta Watch celebrates music journalism in video form. This week’s column is by Ana Leorne.
After having done some recording in his home country of Jamaica in the 1960s, Lloyd Barnes, AKA Bullwackie, migrated to the Bronx. In 1976, he set up a studio to record both resident and visiting fellow Jamaicans. The result was Wackie’s, a label that quickly built an impressive catalog still much sought-after today. Christopher Coy’s 1981 documentary Bullwackie in New York not only showcases Barnes’ work and dedication, but also provides an invaluable glimpse into the reggae/soundsystem culture of New York—which went otherwise largely undocumented.
Clocking in at about one hour, Bullwackie in New York gathers first-person testimonies from Clive Hunt, Steve Grandison, and Barnes himself to offer a privileged insight into the scene, while also allowing us to take a peek at some studio action. All this is intertwined with stunning live performances from the likes of Ras Clifton, Milton Henry, Inner Harvest, and Itopia, as well as a handful of candid images from everyday life in the late ’70s Bronx, all soundtracked by Wackie’s roster.
Pivoting to Video
- The BBC profiles Dread Broadcasting Corporation
- Rocked explains why gatekeeping hurts heavy music
- The Beat Goes On explores the history of the phone number 876-5309
- Sound Field argues that a certain drum beat forever changed hip-hop
- Mic The Snare highlights one of the greatest Grammy scams ever
Trivia Time
What two artists shared the first cover of Soul in 1966?
Bits, Bobs
- The Wire has debuted a redesign
- Brady Gerber has launched Candyfloss, a public RSS reader for music news and features
- Music journalists Matthew Rye and Joe Edwards have passed away
- Penske Media is now the largest stakeholder in Vox Media
- Love Injection has launched a Kickstarter to publish Paul W. Klipsch’s cult audio newsletters
- Jim Ottewill has started a newsletter
Duo For Pitcher And Batter
Source
Q&A: Jason Schneider
Jason Schneider is a Canadian music historian and former assistant editor at Exclaim. He now runs the music PR company Jason Schneider Media. His latest music journalism project is The Longest Suicide: The Authorized Biography of Art Bergmann. Jason describes Art as “one of the foundational artists of the Vancouver punk scene, who went on to a critically acclaimed solo career in the ‘80s and ‘90s before dropping off the radar for many years due to various personal reasons… People often call him ‘Canada’s Lou Reed,’ although he hates that.” In this excerpt from our interview, Jason explains how he went about writing the book.
My day job now is running my own PR business, so most of my personal writing gets done on weekends. As I mentioned, I had a fairly solid foundation based on the past work I’d done with Art, and I had a structure in place wherein I separated Art’s quotes from the main body text. I did that because I feel Art speaks in a way unlike anyone I’ve ever met, and I wanted his voice to come across on the page in a manner similar to how I heard it. Sometimes people I’d interviewed contradicted his memory, but I think that just made the story more interesting.
So, after I’d finish a chapter I’d send it to Art and he’d send me back notes. He seemed really happy with the chapter about his family, and that got us into a pretty good routine. Some people have questioned whether the book’s title, The Longest Suicide, is in bad taste, but that was Art’s idea. As soon as he suggested it, I wasn’t going to change it. I think it’s an accurate reflection of his dark humour, and the mistaken belief that he’s regularly sabotaged his career on purpose.
What was the hardest thing about the whole project?
In March 2022, Art’s wife Sherri died unexpectedly. She played a huge role in the book, and of course all of us close to Art became immediately concerned with his well being. I’d actually just finished the manuscript, and it had a relatively happy ending. I had to re-write that, obviously, as Art dealt with his grief and I faced a deadline. It was touch and go for a few months, but at one point last summer Art was ready to deal with it, and together we managed to give the book an ending that I feel pays tribute to Sherri, and the 30 years they had together. Even if you don’t know anything about Art’s music, I hope part of the book’s appeal will be their love story.
Read the full interview with Jason here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Jason Schneider:
As was revealed in brutal detail last year, Canada is facing a reckoning over its past and current treatment of Indigenous peoples. It’s a crisis that has deeply affected Art Bergmann, resulting in his recent song, “The Legend of Bobby Bird,” about a young boy who escaped from a Saskatchewan Indian residential school in the late ’60s. His body wasn’t discovered until many years later. The Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie embarked on a similar campaign at the end of his life, helping to create the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund, which aims to build cultural understanding and create a path toward reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Academic Stuff
- New issues: Music and Letters, Latin American Music Review, Music and the Moving Image, Global Hip Hop Studies, Popular Music and Society, Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal, Music & Letters, Eighteenth-Century Music, and Lithuanian Musicology
- Call for Papers: Video Game Music and Sound: Approaches from Latin America [Submissions due February 28]
- Julia Grella O’Connell outlines how she created her college’s first course in Black American music history
- The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress is accepting grant award submissions [Submissions due March 1]
- Registration is open for Music in Global Epidemics
- Call for Papers: You Are Beautiful, No Matter What They Say. Sentimental Ballads in Popular Music [Submissions due February 28]
The Closing Credits
Thanks for reading! In case you’ve missed any special features, I’ve published a number of them in the newsletter, including articles about music journalism history, what music journalism will be like in 2221, and much more. You can check out all of that here.
I also do a recurring column in the newsletter called Notes On Process. The premise is simple: I share a Google Doc with a music journalist where we go into depth on one of their pieces. It hopefully provides an insight into how music writers do their work. You can check out all editions of Notes On Process here.
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Trivia Time Answer
James Brown and Mick Jagger shared the first cover of Soul.
A Final Note
Thanks for reading! I make playlists from time to time. Check them out if you’re interested. And 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…