#186: Just For Myself
Just For Myself
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 music journalist Michael Azerrad, Australian hip-hop expert Dianne Rodger, and freelance writers T.M. Brown and Eli Schoop. Plus! Jann Wenner takes, a call for new Stuff You Gotta Watch contributors, and much more! But first…
Been Here More Times Than I’d Care To Admit
Source
Reading List
- Fidel Martinez says Jann Wenner’s fall from grace doesn’t absolve music journalism
- Leila Wills thinks it’s time for hip-hop to talk about Afrika Bambaataa
- Chal Ravens looks at the future of sampling in electronic music
- Hannah Edgar and Jeffrey Arlo Brown uncover a crisis at the Cleveland Institute of Music
- Tamar Herman wonders what in the world is happening with the k-pop concert market in the US
- Stephen Thompson celebrates NPR Music colleague Bob Boilen
- Michael Gonzales reflects on his years writing for The Source
- Craig Seymour goes deep on remixes
- Brett Callwood profiles Sarah Avrin of Charm School PR
- Joe Hagan writes about his history with Jann Wenner
Lede Of The Week
It’s been six years since I published Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine. Though I spent four years researching and writing it, Jann Wenner, whose idea it was to make the book, rejected it as “flawed and tawdry.” After I mailed him a published copy, he canceled our scheduled public appearances, including one at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which he cofounded. It’s been six years since he and I last spoke. - Joe Hagan
Q&A: Michael Azerrad
Michael Azerrad is a longtime music journalist and the author of The Amplified Come as You Are. It’s a “30th-anniversary deluxe edition of the iconic bestselling biography of Nirvana, updated with exclusive new content exploring the personal and cultural forces that inspired the music.” (Full disclosure: Michael is my old boss at eMusic and Nirvana is a band that I work with at my day job at Universal Music.) In this excerpt from our interview, Michael described how he came to the book.
When the world came to a skidding stop in March 2020, I started thinking about things I'd always wanted to do but had never gotten around to. Some people decided to perfect their sourdough recipe or learn Italian; I decided to revisit some aspects of Come as You Are, particularly some things I got wrong and why. I'd gained some inspiration to do that from the great Robert Greenfield's Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye: The Rolling Stones on the Road to Exile (Da Capo Press, 2014), where he provides some commentary on his coverage of a 1971 Rolling Stones tour. He calls it "a continuing conversation between the wide-eyed twenty-five-year-old true believer in rock 'n' roll I was back then and the somewhat cranky senior citizen I now somehow seem to have become." The Amplified Come as You Are takes a similar tack: it's a dialogue between my naive 30-year-old self and my now sixtysomething self, older and hopefully at least slightly wiser.
So I wrote a few scattered things, no outlet lined up, just for myself. It felt good. Then I wondered if there was anything more to say, so I went to the first page of the book—and wow, I had a lot to say about that page. And the page after that too. And I just kept going—a couple of years later I'd annotated the entire book. To my utter amazement, my literary agent thought I could publish it and, to my even deeper amazement, that turned out to be correct: The Amplified Come as You Are will be published by HarperOne Books on October 24th.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Michael Azerrad:
I'll stump for Earthjustice. Their motto is "Because the Earth needs a good lawyer," which means they fight in the courts for environmental justice, they do it for free, and they're very effective. Earthjustice protects ecosystems and wildlife, protects people from pollution and toxic chemicals, and champions renewable energy sources. Earthjustice is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, they have a 96% rating from Charity Navigator and all donations are tax-deductible.
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.
Often viewed as an early example of the Black Power movement, The Cry of Jazz connects jazz to African-American history through performance clips (which include the likes of Sun Ra and John Gilmore), dramatic sequences, and narrated footage of Chicago's Black neighborhoods in the 1950s.
The documentary is revolutionary for its depiction of Black and white people discussing jazz and politics together—suggesting an integration that was far from the norm in late '50s America—but also for including clear statements denouncing how much of Western popular music is an appropriation of black genres: "Rock'n'roll is merely an offspring of rhythm & blues," George Waller's Alex tells a white couple.
The Cry of Jazz is a valuable document of an era and a lifestyle, with its juxtaposition of sociopolitical contextualization and musical sequences proving to be both educational and entertaining. It also traces a parallel between jazz and Black life: Both are defined as a mix of "freedom and restraint." Initially released in 1959 to mixed reviews and accusations of "black racism," it has since been selected for preservation by the Library of Congress due to its cultural significance.
Would You Like To Contribute To Stuff You Gotta Watch?
I’m looking for some more folks to help out with Stuff You Gotta Watch section of Music Journalism Insider. I pay $50 per column, and am looking for someone who is ready to celebrate music-related films of all sorts. (Feature film docs, web series, old segments from defunct TV shows, etc.) I’m also open to shaking up the format if you have a great idea for how to do so. Interested? Respond to this email with your three favorite music documentaries (and why), two things you’d like to feature that haven’t been mentioned in the newsletter previously (and why), and any other info you think I should know.
Podcasts!
- Deep Dive looks at an enormous scandal in Japanese music
- Bandsplain does a 1989 music draft
- David Remnick chats about his new book on Word in Your Ear
- Albert Glinsky joins Money 4 Nothing to talk about Moog and synthesizers
- Twenty Thousand Hertz goes deep on subtitles
Yup!
Source
Q&A: Dianne Rodger
Dr. Dianne Rodger is a senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide. She has a new 33 1/3 book on Hilltop Hoods' The Calling, which is "a major event on the timeline of hip-hop in Australia." In this excerpt from our interview, Dianne explains what her research process looked like.
Very early on in the process (before I submitted the book proposal) I tried to contact the Hoods management team to see if they would be interviewed for the project or involved in any other way. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear that they would not be involved until after my book proposal had been accepted. This changed some of my research plans because I had to use media sources to try and include their perspectives.
This media / archival research was the first thing that I did. I went through all the primary materials that I had collected during my PhD (street press, fliers, hip-hop magazines, documentaries) and wrote notes / collected key quotes. I also used newspaper databases and internet searches to try and locate any interviews that the group had conducted or stories that featured them from across their careers. I then submitted an ethics application to my University for the primary research component. Once that was approved, I began contacting hip-hop artists and other relevant people from the era to see if they would be interviewed for the book. I was able to conduct 15 interviews that varied in length and format depending on people’s availability. Because of constraints around ethics, I was only able to contact people who had a public email address or social media account which did impact the number of interview participants. I was conducting interviews throughout the writing process. I also listened to the album a lot!
Real Scenes
- Andy Beta on Tropicália
- Bora on k-pop and hip-hop
- John Chiaverina on music at the chain restaurant Chili's
- Kat Bein on Burning Man
- Chris Richards on emo
How Do You Do, Fellow TikTokers?
- @nelsongeorge315 discusses the Jann Wenner controversy
- @gee_derrick wonders if stereo sound is dead
- @sonnybabie explores the connection between narcocorridos and criminals
- @abigyesandasmallno explains the (currently ongoing) longest concert ever
- @cdallarivamusic breaks down which bands have the most unique live sets
Dodged This Bullet… For Now
Source
Q&A: T.M. Brown
T.M. Brown is a freelancer with bylines in the New Yorker, New York Times, and much more. His day job is VP of Creative at Codeword, a communications and marketing agency. In this excerpt from our interview, T.M. explains where he sees music journalism headed.
Someone needs to start a worker-owned music outlet a la Defector. I will gladly put in startup capital and handle the publisher side of things. But someone needs to do it. Defector showed everyone what a group of writers with an earned audience can do, and that needs to be the model going forward. I’m someone who has a basically negligible social media following, but there are music writers out there with huge audiences they’ve developed over the years and there’s a massive opportunity out there to make the future of music journalism happen instead of watching it dwindle to nothing.
The best music writing is increasingly happening outside of the usual music journalism ecosystem. Billboard and Rolling Stone aren’t giving someone like Emily Nussbaum 10,000 words to write about the tensions in Nashville’s country music scene or Naomi Fry 2,000 words to talk about 100 gecs. That even happens in more genre-focused outlets: Mixmag or DJ Mag weren’t going to give me 5,000 words to talk about the conflict between two techno museums. Hell, Pioneer Works gave Mike Sheffield 3,000 words to talk about the intersection of music archives and social media!
It’s frustrating, sure, but I also get it. Legacy media doesn’t have to operate on the same razor thin margins most other places do, which means that taking big swings doesn’t make a lot of business sense. And since artists can speak directly to their fans, journalists have almost no leverage. It is a very risk averse environment right now for understandable reasons.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From T.M. Brown:
God’s Love We Deliver has been doing incredible work since 1985, helping serve people suffering from serious illnesses great meals at home. It’s a wonderful org and a very important one to me personally.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Pivoting To Video
- Grady Smith thinks this might be country music’s Nirvana moment
- Black Music Archive explains the power of hand clapping in Black churches
- Rudi Zygadlo profiles Rick Beato
- Noisey celebrates the man who made the acid smiley famous
- Polyphonic explores the first electric guitar solos
Trivia Time
Who was the youngest ever editor of Smash Hits, covering the breakup of Take That for her first issue in 1996?
Bits, Bobs
- Consequence celebrated its 16th birthday
- Patrick Lyons has launched a newsletter
- Penske Media is undergoing an office expansion in Los Angeles
- Justin Davidson visits the Louis Armstrong Center
- Michael Shapiro quizzes writers about their philosophies around daily word counts
I Am The Venn Diagram For This Joke
Source
Q&A: Eli Schoop
Eli Schoop is a freelance writer from Cleveland, newly based in Brooklyn. Eli has bylines in Tiny Mix Tapes, Bandcamp Daily, and Tone Glow. In this excerpt from our interview, Eli explains how his approach to his work has changed over the past few years.
I graduated college in 2018 and tried really hard to get a media job, not aware the party was over within that kind of sphere. The closest I ever got was getting to the news peg interview section with Resident Advisor. So I decided to do shit for myself. Not that getting paid isn’t lit but in the long run it’s more feasible to work full-time at Target or Urban Outfitters than actively trying to be a full-time music writer and when so much work is centered around corny zeitgeist pitch calls I’d rather not. However shitty Substack can be, it’s been sick to see the re-emergence of blogging and writing for niche audiences—after TMT died, all the various micro-scenes and their ilk scattered in various places—so writing what you want and accruing a following and community along the way is the wave.
Where do you see music journalism headed?
Essentially a continuation of my last answer, i.e. more and more regionality and specificity becoming the norm. Doing pieces that chronicle how artists are ascending into fame feels bleak, you’re basically cataloging their path toward being exploited by the wider industry. No Bells is clearly at the vanguard of the game atm, going to Milwaukee to film Ayolii playing a backyard show is just so goddamn raw and really shows their love of music, in stark contrast to the sterilized nature of a lot of music journalism. Also could see younger YouTubers start doing wild shit to inform the masses on cool music, TikTok can be very goofy but a positive side effect is that the canon of weird stuff they consume is far wider than what I ever would’ve seen at the same age consuming /mu/ essential charts.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Eli Schoop:
Cleveland Art Workers is a group that makes sure performers in Cleveland get paid equitably, in a scene that exploits their artists and musicians too easily. “100% of your donations go to paying the art workers— the performers, the sound engineers, the photographers, and so forth.”
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Academic Stuff
- New issues: Nineteenth-Century Music Review Music and Letters, IASPM Journal, Music & Politics, Journal of Mathematics and Music, Sound Studies, Voice and Speech Review, Rock Music Studies, and Popular Music and Society
- Call for Articles: Music, Domesticity, and British Identity [Deadline October 20]
- Call for Proposals: North American Conference on Video Game Music [Proposals due November 30]
- Videos from the Popular Song in Europe in the 1920s conference are now online
- Call for proposals: Music for falling asleep, music during sleep, music about sleep [Deadline November 30]
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
Kate Thornton (later the first host of The X Factor) was the youngest editor of Smash Hits, overseeing her first issue at 23.
Some Final Notes
Thanks for reading! And thanks to James Lamont for their Trivia Time question. 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...