#178: The Prosperous Cyborgs
The Prosperous Cyborgs
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 freelance writer Josh Terry, Medieval Islamicate scholar Lisa Nielson, and Pitchfork Design Director Marina Kozak. Plus! Reading and podcast recommendations! And more! But first…
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Come On Bobby, Let’s Go Party
Source
Reading List
- Brian Josephs outlines the difficulty of preserving hip-hop mixtape websites
- Rob Sheffield asks fans to stop throwing things at concerts
- Finn Cohen asks Kelefa Sanneh what pop music can teach us about each other
- Janell Hobson argues that women are central to the history of hip-hop
- Shawn Reynaldo talks about his reading history
- Jesse Rifkin interviews Greg Tate
- Robert Christgau shares three vintage reviews from Steve Anderson
- Charlie Fracture discusses the pleasure of slow music
- Cameron Carr believes the aughts are becoming an essential inspiration for musicians
- Olivia Giovetti reveals the opera fuck boy matrix
Lede Of The Week
“What, exactly, is a fuckboy? When I asked people on what remains of classical Twitter to tell me about their favorite fuckboys in opera, the responses I received showed that, even after a nearly-decade-old debate around the word’s manifold meanings and usage, we’ve yet to reach a consensus. I’m not here to define the fuckboy. As Potter Stewart famously said, I know it when I see it. And I see it a lot on the opera stage.” - Olivia Giovetti
Q&A: Josh Terry
Josh Terry is a freelance writer. He’s worked for RedEye Chicago, VICE, and Netflix over the years, and freelanced for countless publications. Currently, he runs the excellent newsletter No Expectations. In this excerpt from our interview, Josh offers some pieces of advice for new music writers.
I have three. One, which is obvious to me, is read as much as you possibly can. Read things you like and read things you don’t like. Read the classics and the people doing it now. When you read enough, you start to develop taste and a sense of what works and what doesn’t. What you think you like starting out might end up being totally cringeworthy the more you learn and read.
The second tip is to treat people with kindness, respect, and professionalism. Make your deadlines on time, respond to emails, and don’t be precious about your copy. When things finally started to go well in my career early on and it felt like my hard work was finally paying off, I had to rein it in a little bit. You can overcompensate when you experience praise and get recognition for your work. You should savor your professional victories but never let it make you an asshole.
Most importantly, I’d tell writers starting out right now to expect getting a day job and to not feel like you aren’t making it as a music journalist if you have to get one. When I started out, I didn’t realize that most of my favorite writers had day jobs and were making money writing branded content—or whatever—outside of music journalism. The opportunities that were there when I first decided to try this career are just not available to an aspiring journalist today. This is not a reflection on your talent, work ethic, or taste, it’s just that the industry has dwindled significantly over the past decade.
Read the full interview with Josh here.
Group Chats Are The Best Chats
Source
Podcasts!
- Water & Music founder Cherie Hu talks community on RA Exchange
- The Theory Club welcomes Tayo Omisore to discuss rap canons
- Kerry O'Brien and Will Robin chat about On Minimalism on The Music Book Podcast
- Switched On Pop asks, “What makes a gay anthem?”
- Angie Martinez talks about her career on Questlove Supreme
Q&A: Lisa Nielson
Dr. Lisa Nielson is Associate Director at Cleveland Humanities Collaborative, a Mellon-funded pathway program for community college students interested in pursuing a four-year degree in humanities. She’s also an Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow, and the author of Music and Musicians in the Medieval Islamicate World: A Social History. In this excerpt from our interview, Lisa outlines her current research interests.
Recently, I’ve been working on how race/ethnicity, in addition to sexuality and gender, influenced perceptions of musicians, especially enslaved women musicians, and what impact that had on the overall perception of music in medieval Islamicate culture. There is a need for more work in this area, and I’m lucky to have several brilliant, thoughtful colleagues asking similar questions. I’m also increasingly interested in how eroticism and music were intertwined, and want to go deeper into that question. As I’ve worked on understanding how race and bias functioned in the medieval, I’ve done more reading in natural philosophy and medicine. I have a lot more to learn in these areas, but as I go deeper, I have begun to write and think more about how to decolonize language and develop better, more inclusive music pedagogy.
Why do you find this area of research so interesting?
Who doesn’t want to learn more about sex and music?? But seriously, how we have understood race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other social constructs has been inflected with a Western lens. That’s just one way of looking at these constructions, and by no means universal. I want to gain a better understanding of how medieval people viewed, categorized, and explained human differences, as well as how science, politics, and belief/religion intersected with constructions of humanity. In so doing, I have been challenging my own thinking about how we have studied enslaved musicians, women, and human difference.
Read the full interview with Lisa here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Lisa Nielson:
In Cleveland, we have a number of fantastic artists and activists, and I want to give a huge shout out to Shooting Without Bullets, founded by Amanda D. King. This transformative media and arts program is dedicated to providing community, support, the arts, and education for Black and Brown youth.
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 Ana Leorne.
What do No Doubt, Sublime, and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones have in common? They are all part of third-wave ska, an enthusiastic '90s revival of the genre, combining traditional two-tone and Bay Area punk, that took the US (and eventually the world) by storm. "Enthusiastic" isn't a euphemism—just take a look at the excitement of Reel Big Fish, The Slackers, Save Ferris, The Impossibles, Rx Bandits, The Aquabats, and many others as they reminisce about this golden era in Pick It Up! - Ska in the '90s.
Built around numerous testimonies and loads of archive material, Taylor Morden's documentary manages to channel the insouciance that is central to ska, demonstrating how the DIY nature of the genre was fundamental to its birth and dissemination. The doc also does a terrific job in highlighting the impact ska had on social and political issues, notably those relating to race and gender. Though there's an unavoidable geographical emphasis on the Orange County ska-punk scene, Pick It Up! is comprehensive enough to trace a relatively full portrait of the rise, apex, and eventual fade out of a movement that brought new colors to mainstream pop music.
How Do You Do, Fellow TikTokers?
- @luxxuryxx explains the origin of the Knight Rider theme
- @mathiasmorte goes deep on the history of Yoshi’s voice
- @patrickhicks82 tells the story of a legendary hip-hop DJ
- @milkw33d69 counts down the top 5 pop punk songs from 2003
- @cyberexboyfriend talks band t-shirts
Five Things: Charles Shaar Murray
Charles Shaar Murray was perhaps one of the best-known writers for the NME throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. His collection, Shots From The Hip, is the best introduction to the work that he was doing in the magazine. Here are five great lines from pieces included in the book.
- The trouble is that punk violence—like most rock and roll violence—is more of a metaphor than an actuality, but the violence with which it is being met is all too real. In this respect, punks are far more sinned against than sinning, but try telling that to the Sunday Ghoul. — Punk rock feature, 1977
- The bastards weren’t loud enough! — Black Sabbath live review, 1976
- Christ, somewhere in the Grand Interviewer’s Lexicon (or even in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred) there must be a diplomatic way of saying ‘Your album is so godawful I wouldn’t use it line a budgie cage even if I had a budgie,’ but I couldn’t think of it. — Paul McCartney feature, 1975
- The prosperous cyborgs at the next table in the backroom of this expensive Stockholm eating-place are sloshing down their coffee as fast as they possibly can, with such indecent haste that one plump, middle-aged Swedette disgraces herself in the process. As they vacate the premises, another troupe are ushered in, take a look at the party in the corner and usher themselves out again. — Sex Pistols feature, 1977
- That snoring sound you hear is Elvis Presley recording Elvis Now. — Elvis Presley album review, 1972
Trivia Time
What is the title of Charles Shaar Murray’s first novel?
Bits, Bobs
- NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert was featured on CBS
- Holly Gleason was named LA Press Club’s Entertainment Journalist of the Year
- A museum devoted to salsa is coming to New York
- Robert Sherman has passed away
- Clayton Purdom, Chris Breault, and Pao Yumol have launched a newsletter
Where Do I Sign Up?
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Q&A: Marina Kozak
Marina Kozak is Design Director at Pitchfork. In addition to her work for the brand, she’s currently working on a conversational card game, called “Finestra," meant to catalyze deep conversation through a series of questions. In this excerpt from our interview, Marina explains how her approach to work has changed over the past few years.
Before the pandemic I was an insane type-A perfectionist overthinker, which was both stressful and inefficient. These days I just follow my gut. A lot more doing than thinking. It’s freed up my schedule and allowed me to do personal work for the first time in years. Plus, I think this is some of the best work I’ve done in a long time, despite the lack of perfectionism!
What's one tip that you'd give a designer / creative director starting out right now?
Be curious and take every opportunity that pushes you out of your comfort zone. I would not be where I am today had I not said “yes” to essentially everything that came my way, even when I wasn’t sure if I could do it. The skills I learned by chance ended up being the skills that defined my career.
Read the full interview with Marina here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Marina Kozak:
As a queer writing this during pride month I am going to suggest Lambda Legal, which is a civil rights organization that focuses on LGBTQ+ communities as well as people living with HIV/AIDS through impact litigation, societal education, and public policy work.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Academic Stuff
- New issues: Jazz and Culture, Music Theory Online, Popular Music and Society, Computer Music Journal, Acta Musicologica, and Fontes Artis Musicae
- Call for Submissions: International Journal of Traditional Arts
- Call for Papers: Music, Knowledge, and Global Migration, ca. 1700−1900 [Proposals due October 1]
- Call for Papers: American Music is creating a special issue on the Caribbean [Expressions of interest due July 17]
- Registration is open for DC23, a Dancecult conference
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
Charles Shaar Murray’s first novel is The Hellhound Sample.
A Final Note
Thanks for reading! I make playlists every single week. Check them here! 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...