#184: My Fuel
My Fuel
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 journalist and essayist Aaron Gilbreath, dance music expert Tami Gadir, Solent University professor Chris Anderton, and the French-focused scholar Aimée Boutin. Plus! Rock She Wrote, reading recommendations, and much more! But first…
Why Else Would You Get Into This?
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Programming Note
I’m taking off next week! See you in September!
Reading List
- Alex Ross pens a requiem for Mostly Mozart
- Marissa R. Moss reflects on listening to music of faith when you don’t have much
- Ashawnta Jackson looks back at the birth of easy listening
- Amanda Henderson says songs are too short
- Jaime Brooks breaks down the manipulation of the music charts
- Michaelangelo Matos reflects on his time freelancing for The New Yorker
- Vivian Medithi says clickbait has conquered rap journalism
- Niko Stratis writes about transphobia in the music industry
- George Varga profiles the team behind Ugly Things
- Daisy Jones describes how the drunk anthem sobered up
Lede Of The Week
“If you’d asked me, as a teenager, what I wanted to be, I would have probably said a 'party girl' and I’d have only been half joking.” - Daisy Jones
Q&A: Aaron Gilbreath
Aaron Gilbreath is a journalist and essayist who has written for Harper’s, The New York Times, and many more outlets. He is the author of This Is: Essays on Jazz and, most recently, The Heart of California: Exploring the San Joaquin Valley. Previously an editor at Longreads, he now runs the Substack music series Alive in the Nineties. In this excerpt from our interview, Aaron explains his current day-to-day.
Back when I was focused on freelance magazine stories, I always worked another job or two, so I’d get up and try to write for whatever amount of time I could—five minutes, 60 minutes—before I went to the tea shop or the university writing center where I worked. My typical day was aimed at getting as much writing time in as possible around my paying work. I always have strong green tea and dark chocolate. That’s my fuel. So I’d hit that hard and write hard... Then after work I’d try to pack in even more writing time. It was hard to get stories done in such small, fractured bits of time. You need to concentrate, so morning and night were best.
My routine now is wake up, make breakfast for my daughter, help get her dressed and pack her lunch for school or camp, then I get right to work at my full-time marketing job, which has nothing to do with music. To write the stuff I love—so about music or environmentalism—I have to do it at night, which means stealing from the small pool of time my wife and I have to spend together, or exercise, or rest my exhausted self. And that burns me out. So I write much more slowly than I used to, because I have less time to do it, but I love writing as much as ever, and I manage to stay productive. And as my daughter grows, more time will return. It’s okay. I’d rather spend time with her anyway. She’s my greatest joy.
Causes Worth Supporting
From Aaron Gilbreath:
The Nature Conservancy. I love them beyond words. They protect the natural world, all over the world, to preserve biodiversity and strengthen our connection with the natural world.
Also, you can contribute to Inside Climate News, which is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, nonprofit news organization that reports on climate change, the clean energy transition, and more. Again, it’s nonprofit, so like all of us journalists, their journalists need support for the important work they do.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
This News Writer Has HAD It!
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Podcasts!
- Transmissions welcomes Guardian editor Laura Snapes
- Not a Diving chats with DJ History’s Bill Brewster
- Alison B. is the latest guest on The Fanzine Podcast
- Twenty Thousand Hertz explores the voice inside our heads
- Lior Phillips joins Sound Opinions to talk about South African music
Q&A: Tami Gadir
Tami Gadir is a lecturer in music industry in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne. Her research “addresses the mechanisms that promote or hinder participation in musical life, on the one hand, and the mechanisms in musical life that promote or hinder political imperatives beyond musical life, on the other.” Her new book is Dance Music: A Feminist Account of an Ordinary Culture. In this excerpt from our interview, Tami describes the book.
The argument is straightforward: global electronic dance music and DJ cultures are part of the wider culture we live in. Even the most alternative/underground scenes do not float above (or below) something called a mainstream of music culture. The book includes an intellectual history of dance music cultures and critically examines how they have been celebrated as emancipatory and radical. It takes all kinds of problems with gender as core examples of where dance music falls short of emancipation, along with other issues such as its in-built neoliberal, entrepreneurial orientations. It is based on years of clubbing, DJing, a little bit of promoting, a lot of observation, and 80 interviews.
It cannot and does not cover every scene, every genre, and every geographical corner. But it is international in its outlook and outreach.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Tami Gadir:
The decision to voluntarily donate money as an individual to a cause or organization is very personal and one I’m not comfortable prescribing for people. Instead, I’d rather suggest that people join their workplace or industry union, or whatever it means in their country or region to organize. It doesn’t matter what the industry is or what the wages are. There are musicians’ unions, for example, just as there are engineering workers’ unions.
In some places, organizing may mean fighting union busting tendencies and repressive laws that make it hard or impossible to take collective action. In other places, organizing may mean gathering regularly with colleagues to start to fight for fairer pay and working conditions. There are many living examples of how to informally or formally organize. The principle applies as much to social justice, ecological crisis, poverty, LGBTQ rights, and anti-racism, as it does to workers’ pay and conditions. The book Workers Can Win: A Guide to Organising At Work by Ian Allinson can be informative as a beginner’s general guide.
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.
Not many labels can pride themselves on starting a cultural revolution. Born out of UK council estates and dancefloors, Trojan Records helped introduce ska, rocksteady, dancehall, and reggae to the world while inspiring a whole new generation of British youth. It's pretty impressive for a label that, up until its liquidation in 1975, operated from a warehouse in northwest London.
The story, however, has its origins "on an island far far away." As the beginning of Rudeboy: The Story of Trojan Records signals: "No Jamaica. No Trojan." Taking inspiration from a land both had once called home, founders Lee Gopthal and Chris Blackwell came together in the late 1960s and immediately started putting out chart hits like Desmond Dekker's "You Can Get It If You Really Want," Jimmy Cliff's "Wonderful World, Beautiful People," and Bob and Marcia's "Young Gifted & Black."
This documentary details Trojan Records' rise and fall—and rise again, with a little help from a 21st-century renewed interest in the label's back catalog—through loads of archival footage and compelling interviews with the likes of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Lloyd Coxsone, Marcia Griffiths, and Dandy Livingstone. But the pièce de résistance really lies in the several dramatization sequences that capture the zeitgeist of the era and tie the entire narrative together.
Trivia Time
Who served as launch editor for pioneering hip-hop magazine Hip-Hop Connection?
Q&A: Chris Anderton
Chris Anderton is an associate professor in cultural economy at Solent University Southampton. His research examines a range of topics including the live music and festival industries, the development and representation of music genres, the management and marketing of popular music, and the intersection of fan practices and intellectual property law. In this excerpt from our interview, Chris explains his career path.
I’d like to say that I planned my academic career, but this is certainly not true. When I left school at 18 the last thing I wanted to do was carry on with education, so I took a job with a bank that over the following years I gradually became ever-more disillusioned with. My girlfriend was at university, so one summer I decided to put in an application to the same university (University of Wales Swansea as it was at the time), got accepted and more or less immediately handed in my notice. After three years studying geography I thought I’d carry on to a master's course so looked around for something that interested me. As a lifelong fan of all kinds of music, but with relatively little talent as a performing musician, I found the MBA in Music Industries at University of Liverpool and thought it looked ideal either as a stepping stone into getting into an industry job or just to find out more about how things work behind the scenes.
Having decided that I liked researching the business more than necessarily working in it, I proposed a PhD project on music festivals back at Swansea University. At the time there was little research into music festivals, yet the sector was growing at a rapid rate and becoming ever more mainstream, professional and commercialised. On completion of my thesis I made a few job applications and took a lecturing role at Solent University. I’ve been there ever since, extending my research interests and successfully supporting students into their steps into the music industries. I’m now an associate professor and associate head working with a great team of research active academics in the music business area, and have had the opportunity to push a variety of research projects and externally focused events (gigs, club nights, outdoor festivals, conferences and so on) with students on the music business and performance courses. I am currently working with local industry stakeholders on how to enhance the music scene in Southampton.
Heroes Get Remembered, Legends Never Die
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Bits, Bobs
- Singapore magazine BigO has closed
- Robert Doerschuk has launched a newsletter
- Jiri Cerny and Andy Golden have passed away [h/t Cary Baker]
Five Things: Rock She Wrote
In 1995, Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers co-edited the hugely important collection of music writing Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap. It pulled together some of the finest writing about music (up to that point) by women, and has served as a touchstone for generations that followed in its wake. Here are five great first lines from pieces collected in the book.
Before picking up a bass I was just another girl with a fantasy. What would it be like to be right under the pinnacle of energy, beneath two guys crossing their guitars, two thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and male bonding? — Kim Gordon, “Boys Are Smelly: Sonic Youth Tour Diary ’87,” 1987
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti has twenty-seven wives, and at least sixteen of them are creating a sensation in the Coliseum in Rome. — Vivien Goldman, “The Rascal Republic Takes On The World,” 1980
The soft, sophisticated sound brought women into reggae’s fold, made close dancing cool again, and did wonders for the sale of gold jewelry to men. — Sheryl Garratt, “Lover’s Rock,” 1985
It’s 5:00 A.M. at the Masonic Temple in Long Beach when at the divine command of the ultra bear, a man leaps into the bass. Sweating and completely naked, he thrusts himself beyond the black fabric of the PA speaker cover and curls up tight inside the huge, resonating cabinet. — Sue Cummings, “Spin Doctors: Jams for a Sleepless Generation,” 1992
Say there, bright eyes: As long as male rock critics are suddenly evaluating Women In Rock onstage, why don’t we also take a few minutes to revaluate Women In Rock offstarge; i.e., the female rock audience, about whom an inordinate amount of drivel has been written. — Lori Twersky, “Devils or Angels? The female teenage audience examined,” 1981
Frighteningly Specific Senior Superlatives
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Q&A: Aimée Boutin
Aimée Boutin is a professor of French at Florida State University. She specializes in 19th-century French poetry, women writers, cultural history, gender studies, art history, soundscapes and the city in literature. Her most recent book is City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris. In this excerpt from our interview, Aimée explains what she’d like to see more of in music scholarship.
More attention to gender and sexuality and women’s writing. I did not address these in City of Noise. The current political situation in Florida has redoubled my commitment to research in these areas.
Academic life can be a rat race. It’s especially challenging to achieve work-life balance. I would like to slow down and have more time for reflection and research. This has been a goal for a few years, but the pandemic really made it clear that this needs to be a priority. The hectic pace of academia isn’t sustainable over an entire career. It’s hard to say no and, of course, I get more requests for committees, collaborations, professional service, peer reviews, and letters of recommendation than I can manage. I am also conscious of the benefits of exercise for good health and mental acuity at middle age and schedule physical activity away from the computer almost every day. Ideas flow so much better after a walk!
Academic Stuff
- New issues: Journal of Popular Music Studies, Organised Sound, Music Analysis, and International Journal of Listening
- Call for Proposals: Music, Sound, and the Moving Image
- Call for Papers: The UoW Annual Black Music Symposium [Abstracts due September 21]
- Registration is now open for the Retrofuturism 2.0 symposium
- Call for Proposals: The 25th World Congress of Philosophy [Submissions due November 10]
- Call for Proposals: Society for Christian Scholarship in Music [Submissions due October 15]
- Call for Expressions of Interest: New Editors for Metal Music Studies
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
Chris Hunt was the launch editor for Hip-Hop Connection in 1988 (and returned several years later as relaunch editor).
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...