#164: My Burning Concern
My Burning Concern
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 podcast host Alana Casanova-Burgess, social media expert Spencer Dukoff, and criminology scholar Lambros Fatsis. Plus! Reading recommendations, a bit of funk, and much more! But first…
Dr. Sean Puff Daddy P. Diddy Diddy Combs, Esq.
Source
Reading List
- Alaina Demopoulos reports on what happens when stan accounts turn on their idols
- Kelly Doherty compiled an AbsolutePunk.net oral history
- Dave “Davey D” Cook explains how hip-hop took over the world
- Matthew Schnipper writes movingly about music and grief
- Felipe Maia untangles the kitty rise of reggaeton in Spain
- Ted Gioia does the math on pop culture stardom
- Jessica Kariisa celebrates King Britt’s Blacktronika educational efforts
- Moya Lothian-McLean says we need to stop pretending London is a 24/7 city
- Ethan Hein asks, “Where do jazz standards come from?”
- Will Pritchard profiles the British Library’s wax cylinder archival project
Lede Of The Week
“Just imagine it’s the most expensive toilet roll in the world.” - Will Pritchard
Q&A: Alana Casanova-Burgess
Alana Casanova-Burgess is the host and co-creator of La Brega, a podcast that “tells stories of an island and a people trying to cope with too many challenges, and who deserve and demand better.” That island, of course, is Puerto Rico. Their second season recently launched, just before I talked with Alana via email. In this excerpt from our interview, Alana talked about the best part of having a podcast.
The energy of the people I work with. There are a lot of different kinds of podcasts, including ones that are just a person and their microphone. But for longform narrative audio, it’s really a team sport. And the vibes on the La Brega team are so good that I’m already worried about how I’ll cope when I don’t get to spend every day with these people. We all care so deeply about the work that we’re doing and every facet of it, from the sound design that makes the piece really sing to even just correcting transcripts so that people can use them as a resource. We have original art and original music, and it’s all very labor-intensive but every single bit of it is worth it. And it feels like we’re collaborating to make something that pushes the medium forward, it’s all very fresh.
Read the full interview with Alana here.
WTF
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Podcasts!
- Amit Gurbaxani and Akhila Shankar have launched the Indian Music Charts Podcast
- La Brega explores merengue
- Her Music Academia chats with Dr. Philip Ewell about the future of music theory
- Paul Gilroy talks about his life in music on Bass Culture Research [h/t Joe Muggs]
- Marc Masters has launched The Music Book Podcast
Q&A: Spencer Dukoff
Spencer Dukoff is the director of audience development at Consequence, where he leads “acquisition and retention efforts across all platforms including social media, SEO, newsletter, video, podcasts, strategic partnerships, and other major content initiatives.” He also writes the music-themed newsletter Late Greats Music Club. In this excerpt from our interview, he describes his current day-to-day.
Every day is different depending on what’s in the works. I’ll usually log on a little before 9 a.m. and I typically start each day by checking in with our social media manager, Cady, and my boss, Alex, to go over priorities for posting that day on our social channels. I also like to get a jump on building that day’s newsletter, scanning Google Trends and SEMRush for any emerging stories we should consider covering, and providing support to editors when it comes to how we can package stories that are about to be published.
I’ll typically save meetings for early afternoons so that people can be more engaged once the morning rush is over. I have various check-ins set up with specific teams at Consequence each week that double as both data recaps (which I’m building and presenting) and brainstorms (which I’m typically moderating and then using the ideas to craft action items for the following week).
Aside from those weekly check-ins, I’ll also participate in higher-level strategy conversations about the direction of the site, doing outreach with artists for our social-first series like Instagram Takeovers and TikTok franchises, and serving as a point of contact for outside vendors of various audience development services and tools. And once all that is done, I sometimes write a little bit for Consequence.
Read the full interview with Spencer here.
Trivia Time
What year did Consequence launch?
Stuff You Gotta Watch
Stuff You Gotta Watch celebrates music journalism in video form. This week’s column is by Ana Leorne.
Though the true magic of funk is better felt than understood, Nelson George’s 2013 documentary Finding The Funk does a remarkable job of tracing the principal roots, influences, and characters that shaped the genre as an indelible force, pushing the limits of pop music and triggering its reinvention.
Questlove serves as the master of ceremonies in this compelling journey through five decades of funk, from its earliest jazz and R&B roots to the impact the genre still exerts today. For nearly an hour and a half, Quest is joined by heavyweights such as Sly Stone, George Clinton, D’Angelo, Maceo Parker, Nile Rodgers, Sheila E., Nona Hendryx, and many others who reflect on the past, present, and future of funk, while we navigate through some of its main incubators, including Dayton, Detroit, and the Bay Area.
Myriad special moments tie the entire narrative together, from D’Angelo discussing how formative Jimi Hendrix’s live album Band of Gypsys was for funk, to Steve Arrington reflecting on Slave’s outrageous album covers, to the James Brown footage posthumously inserted amidst the other interviewees.
Bits, Bobs
- Arielle Lana LeJarde has launched a newsletter
- The latest 33 1/3 books have been announced
- Dan McClosky’s radio interviews are now being uploaded to YouTube [h/t Love Will Save The Day]
- Lazy Headphone is a new Google Alert-esque service for bands
- Consequence Media now owns Modern Drummer
- Juwan Holmes talks to Rolling Stone (among others) about their Twitch strategy
- Dayna McAlpine offers some tips for pitching
- Mitsuo Shindō has passed away
- Hanif Abdurraqib has joined the New Yorker as a contributing writer
How Do You Do, Fellow TikTokers
- @fa2chainz has been celebrating recent Black music history
- @courtneyinsongs explains why Bright Eyes was banned from MTV
- @annabelleklinee reflects on being a woman in music criticism
- @mathiasmorte talks about foley sounds
Hope The Handwriting Has Gotten Better At Least?
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Q&A: Lambros Fatsis
Lambros Fatsis is a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Brighton. His research interests revolve around police racism and the criminalization of Black music (sub)culture(s), fusing cultural criminology with Black radical thought. His writing on the policing of UK drill music won the first-ever Blogger of the Year Award from the British Society of Criminology and an Outstanding Research & Enterprise Impact Award from the University of Brighton. Lambros is also a member of the Prosecuting Rap Expert Network made up of scholars and experts in rap and Black youth culture, who act as defense experts in court cases that involve the use of rap as evidence. In May 2022, he was appointed as a trustee at the Brighton-based youth music charity AudioActive. In this excerpt from our interview, Lambros describes his current research interests.
Much of my current and forthcoming work/publications revolve around the state-sanctioned, racialised criminalisation of Black/Afro-diasporic music(s) from the era of colonial slavery to the present day. My main aim is to show how and why Black music as a form of intellectual production, public expression and creativity—are not only marginalised in the relevant academic literature, but also criminalised by law enforcement. In so doing, I essentially explore how racism as both a world-seeing and world-making ideology of (state) power plays out through the suppression of cultural activities, social space and physical bodies—using the policing of Black music(s) as a mode through which to tell that (hi)story. While most of my published, ongoing and forthcoming research focuses on the policing of contemporary rap subgenres like UK grime and drill music, I also draw comparisons with other Afrodiasporic music genres that have been similarly suppressed since the era of British colonial slavery; from African drum dances to calypso/kaiso and reggae, proving KRS-One right on how the colonial ‘overseer’ of yesteryear becomes the metropolitan ‘officer’ today.
In so doing, my burning concern is to also bring Black music to the forefront as an instrument of scholarship/knowledge and political action that attunes us to the long history of policing against Black music(s), while also stressing how neglected Black/Afrodiasporic music practices are as forms of intellectual, cultural and political life that we ought to re-cognise (literally, rethink) as such!
What I try to show is that the policing against Black music(s), historically, is both justified and carried out through legislation that targets Black music practices as a sign of disorder—in cultural and political terms alike. That which is aesthetically discordant (out of tune) is also culturally dissonant (out of place) and politically disorderly (out of order), making Black music ‘suspect’ as the polar opposite of artistic expression, Western civilisation and socio-political harmony. When Black music is policed, therefore, what is defended is the imposition of a cultural and political order that orders people, their activities and actions by producing laws that legalise violence, repression and coercion as forms of dominance and social control. Simply put, that which is policed as different, alien and inadmissible is that which threatens and endangers the established social order.
Read the full interview with Lambros here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Lambros Fatsis:
I would donate to Sisters Uncut, a UK-based abolitionist-feminist collective that campaigns against domestic, sexual, gendered and state violence—away from calls for more police and prisons.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Academic Stuff
- New issues: Twentieth-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Context, Journal of the Society for American Music, Music Education Research, Journal of Musicology, Journal of Music, Technology & Education, and Music & Politics
- Call for Reviews: Jazz Across Screen Media [Submissions due April 1]
- Call for Papers: IASPM Journal: Contemporary Post-Soviet Popular Music [Abstracts due April 7]
- Call for Papers: Soundscapes of the South [Abstracts due April 10]
- Call for Papers: Rhythm in Music Since 1900 [Submissions due May 1]
- Call for Papers: North American British Music Studies Online Symposium: Music and Ideas of the Popular: Reconsidering British Music and Musical Practices [Submissions due May 1]
- Call for Papers: Reset!
- Call for Papers: Resonance: Queer Politics & Positionalities in Sonic Art
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
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…