#182: Dethroned Gatekeepers
Dethroned Gatekeepers
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 MySpace expert Michael Tedder, podcaster Tim Crisp, King Curtis biographer Timothy Hoover, Johnny Thunders biographer Nina Antonia, and musicologist Jonathan Bellman. Plus! Hip-hop at 50! And much more! But first…
Nothing Beats The Original
Source
Reading List
- Jay Papandreas has thoughts on industry plants
- Janel Martinez profiles former Vibe editor-in-chief Mimi Valdés
- Chuck Eddy wonders whether current pop country is really reactionary
- j. poet chats with Jim Sullivan about the music journalist’s new anthology
- Daniel Dylan Wray says 6 Music is undergoing an identity crisis
- Kiana Fitzgerald discusses her new book, Ode to Hip-Hop
- Marc Masters picks ten of the most memorable Invisible Jukebox interviews from The Wire
- Dash Lewis explores the connection between rap and psych rock
- Molly Mary O'Brien looks at modern music marketing
- Jack Hamilton celebrates a new book by music journalist Dave Marsh
Lede Of The Week
Writing about music is a strange and probably foolish thing to want to do, and attempting it is certainly not an activity that ever crosses most people’s minds. For the wayward souls who do set out to do it, there’s usually a writer or work that we encountered at a formative age and that made us think: Whoa, what if I could grow up to do that? - Jack Hamilton
Q&A: Michael Tedder
Michael Tedder is the author of Top Eight: How MySpace Changed Music. Michael has freelanced for many years for The Ringer, Stereogum, The Daily Beast, and more. This is his first book. In this excerpt from our interview, Michael explains why he chose this subject for the book.
I was inspired to write Top Eight: How MySpace Changed Music because, like many people, I've become frustrated with how commodified and top-down both the internet in general and the music-fan world in particular have become in recent years. I wanted to revisit a time when the internet felt new and full of promise, an era when it seemed like the gatekeepers had been dethroned forever. I also wanted to tell the story of how we lost that innocence, while admitting that even at the time, the MySpace era wasn't that great for everyone, especially young female fans and artists.
Ultimately, MySpace seems both like yesterday, but also far enough in the past that it was worth revisiting, both to preserve the site for the historical record—as the company's new owners have failed to do that—while also hopefully gaining some insight from the time for how we can create a healthier, fairer musical ecosystem going forward.
Read the full interview with Michael here.
Dyson Celebrates Hip-Hop At 50!
Source
Hip-Hop At 50
- Nelson George details the start of hip-hop journalism
- Harry Allen explores the mystery behind hip-hop’s anniversary
- Danyel Smith pays tribute to the rappers we’ve lost
- NPR Music looks at local scenes across the United States
- Suzy Exposito celebrates the role of Latinos in hip-hop
- The Chicago Reader provides a guide to its hip-hop coverage over the years
- Jason Parham meditates on the genre’s never-ending evolutions
- Trapital counts down hip-hop’s top 50 moguls
- Morgan Enos wonders what the next 50 years of hip-hop will look like
Podcasts!
- Switched On Pop looks into the secret world of songwriting camps
- RJ Smith joins Auriculum to talk about his Chuck Berry book
- A new podcast about Sunburned Hand of the Man is launching this week
- Jayson Greene breaks down music’s nostalgia-industrial complex for Today Explained
- Chris Payne talks about his new emo book on Sappenin’
Q&A: Tim Crisp
Tim Crisp is the podcaster behind Better Yet, which features longform conversations with musicians and other creatives. Launched in 2016, Tim has featured Steve Albini, Sadie Dupuis, Tom Scharpling, and many others on the show. In this excerpt from our interview, Tim explains why he started the podcast.
The idea for Better Yet was in my head for a few years after getting into Marc Maron and Colt Cabana's Art of Wrestling Podcast. There were tons of bands in the pop-punk and emo world that were making music that was flying under the radar of the Indie Rock publications at the time. For artists operating on that level, at that time, information was kind of spare and the interviews you could find tended to be kind of boilerplate Q+A's. I wanted to take what Maron and Colt Cabana were doing, having longform conversations about these folks' lives and careers, and bring it to the DIY music community. I posted my first Better Yet interview in May 2016, which led to other podcast endeavors including As You Were: A Podcast About Alkaline Trio with David Anthony where we discussed every Alkaline Trio song and Road to the Skeleton Coast with Brendan Kelly where we went in-depth on every Lawrence Arms, Falcon, Slapstick, and Broadways release.
What's your favorite part of all this?
It's almost always the conversation that comes right after I stop the recording. There's that post-show glow that I get to share with my guest, a feeling like we both did good work and that we made something that will be entertaining to those who care enough to listen. I get a lot of good feedback from the people that I interview, they see that I really do listen to their music and that I care, which is why I started doing the thing in the first place.
Read the full interview with Tim here.
Trivia Time
Who were the founders of Australian rock magazine Roadrunner?
How Do You Do, Fellow TikTokers?
- @gee_derrick wishes there was another way we could consider (and enjoy) posthumous releases
- Emily Swingle talks with Scene Queen
- @abigyesandasmallno explains why we love the major scale
- @patrickhicks82 profiles the “Queen of Copyrights”
- @pablothedon chats about outlaw country
Yup
Source
Q&A: Timothy Hoover
Timothy Hoover is the author of Soul Serenade: King Curtis and His Immortal Saxophone. Tim began research for book in 2001, calling the result a 22-year “odyssey of researching, interviewing, writing and finally getting published.” In this excerpt from our interview, Timothy explains how he got things started with the project.
As this was my first book, I really didn’t know what I was doing, so I just picked up the phone and started calling people (I didn’t know any better). My first interview in 2001 was with the retired VP of Atlantic Records, Jerry Wexler. When other authors hear this, they moan, “You called Jerry Wexler?!!?” Apparently, Jerry could be abrasive to some (at least that’s what I gathered). I had picked Jerry for a first interview as he was incredibly close to Curtis and if he would not talk to me, I probably couldn’t write the book.
I called him and requested an interview, and he responded gruffly, “Call me back in a week.” I called him a week later and he responded, “Call me in an hour.” Not sure where this interview would go, I called him back an hour later and, before I could ask any questions, he said, "So Tim, what have you written?” My heart sank. I was sincere with my answer, “Nothing, Mr. Wexler. But it’s incumbent on me to write Curtis’s story, will you help me?” He responded, “Well, of course, I will,” and gave me a tremendous 45-minute interview and sent personal pictures to be used in the book. He was incredibly supportive.
Read the full interview with Timothy here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Tim Hoover:
I’ve been lucky to have a King Curtis tribute radio show, Soul Serenade, on 90.1 MJWR radio (an internet-based 24-hour jazz station) that is backed by the Memphis Jazz Workshop in Memphis. This is a non-profit charity that is dedicated to restoring the jazz genre in Memphis, teaching high school students jazz. I was at their five-year celebration and blown away by all the young talent that performed that night. A number of these young musicians have received four-year, full-ride music scholarships to universities like the University of California Berkeley and the University of Miami. It’s an amazing operation and I support it whole-heartedly. If anyone is looking for a non-profit charity to support, you won’t be disappointed.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Pivoting To Video
- DW History and Culture explains how Wacken, Germany, became a metal mecca
- The Punk Rock MBA thinks modern music kinda sucks
- Vinyl Rewind debunks some wild 9/11 music predictions
- Metal Injection tracks the evolution of the breakdown
- BET profiles former Source editor-in-chief Kim Osorio
Real Scenes
- Lily Moayeri on The Park Plaza Hotel
- Micco Caporale on the Juggalos
- Daniel Dylan Wray on hip-hop in Leeds
- Richard T. Rodríguez on British pop-punk in U.S. Latinidad
- Stephan Kunze on vaporwave
Groovy!
Source
Q&A: Nina Antonia
Nina Antonia is author of Johnny Thunders: In Cold Blood. The book was first published in 1987, but has been revised and expanded to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his debut album with the New York Dolls. In this excerpt from our interview, Nina explains what made her want to write the book.
Because he represented the spirit of rock n' roll, Johnny was like an electric charge! I'd adored both the Dolls and The Heartbreakers and couldn't understand why no one had written a book about Johnny. Iggy Pop's I Need More had just been published and that was another prompt. In those days, rock books were far fewer, whilst information was less readily available pre the internet.
Since the Dolls, I'd been collecting whatever press there was on the guitarist, which was helpful. Johnny was a man of mystery and, as I was to discover, he was quite a private, shy person. The UK media loved posting teasers as to his whereabouts. At the time I began the project, either the NME or Sounds had announced that he was on the run from the mafia due to his having had an affair with the daughter of a Don. It was utter nonsense of course... or maybe it wasn't! You never could tell with Johnny, he lived a midnight kind of life, which of course made him a fascinating character to write about. He breezed into a room like he was on the set of Mean Streets, which was irresistible from a literary perspective.
Read the full interview with Nina here.
Bits, Bobs
- Scott Schinder will be honored later this month
- T.M. Brown has launched a newsletter
- Billboard has launched Billboard Arabia
- Activision has dropped its lawsuit against Anthony Fantano
- Leo Weekly and Cleveland Scene have new owners [h/t Cary Baker]
Q&A: Jonathan D. Bellman
Professor Jonathan D. Bellman is the area head of academic studies in music at the University of Northern Colorado. He’s a pianist, musicologist, and the author of many books, including Chopin's Polish Ballade: Op. 38 as Narrative of National Martyrdom and The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe. In this excerpt from our interview, Jonathan explains his current research interests.
Most of my work falls into two areas: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical style, with an emphasis on musical exoticism and what it means. So, as an example, I have spent a lot of time studying the music of composers who sought to evoke the performance style of Hungarian Roma (that is to say “Gypsies,” though it’s a problematic term): Schubert, Liszt, and Brahms, for example. I have found that the modern performance style of this repertoire—for example, Schubert’s Divertissement à l’Hongroise, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, and Brahms’s Hungarian Dances—is often straitened and merely accurate… which is like performing merely accurate Gershwin, or another Jazz-influenced composer: disastrous! The style hongrois or “café style,” as it is called, was a popular music, understood to communicate directly with all kinds of listeners and to have a substantial entertainment component: virtuosic solos, hysterical highs, lows lower than any blues, etc. So I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means when a composer puts on another hat, and musically evokes Roma, or fairy-tale Spain, or the far east, or meditative Indian sitar music in 1960s rock, etc.
My other main interest is the music and performance practices of Fryderyk Chopin, which I came to after gradually discovering that the way his music is most often performed today is very, very different from the way he conceived, performed, and taught it. Chopin suffers for the apparent beauty of his music (the music of Gershwin and Dvořák face similar problems); music that is lovely and popular and everyone’s favorite and so on is often taken less seriously than music one has to struggle to appreciate. Because the surface of Chopin’s music is so beautiful, so melodically stunning, and so texturally effective, he’s easy to dismiss; oh, well, everyone loves Chopin. But that means that too often his music doesn’t get a deeper look, or a persuasive analysis.
Read the full interview with Jonathan here.
Causes Worth Supporting
From Jonathan Bellman:
Donate to the music programs in your local institutions: schools, colleges, etc.! The U.S. in particular has a real anti-intellectual, anti-“elitist” streak. “Elitist” usually means someone who had the patience to work hard and develop some skill or knowledge base to a higher standard than your basic standardized test would register. Nothing wrong with this kind of elitism, regardless of how thug-politicians like to talk.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Academic Stuff
- New issues: Asian Music and Music and Letters
- Call for Proposals: International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology [Due September 8]
- The SEM 2023 preliminary program is now online
- Call for Proposals: 9th Conference of the Royal Musical Association Music & Philosophy Study Group [Due October 31]
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
Stuart Coupe and Donald Robertson founded Roadrunner in Adelaide in 1978.
A Final Note
Thanks for reading! Big shout out to James Lamont for their help on the newsletter this week. 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 X, it’s @JournalismMusic. Until next time...