#187: Part Of The Air We Breathe
Part Of The Air We Breathe
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 SEC fight song expert Carrie Tipton, veteran arts editor Mike Huguenor, and Williams College professor W. Anthony Sheppard. Plus! A call for new Stuff You Gotta Watch contributors, reading recommendations, and much more! But first…
Nevermind Lede Of The Week; This Is...
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Reading List
- Amelia Soth explains that AI music started in the 1600s
- Rachel Cholst breaks down a difficult week in country and Americana music
- Ted Gioia argues that musicians invented stand-up comedy
- Geeta Dayal reviews Marc Masters’ new book on cassettes
- Jude Rogers offers 20 things she’s learned over the years as a journalist
- William E. Ketchum III wonders whether rappers can grow old in peace
- Declan McGlynn looks at the future of the DAW
- Taylor Crumpton explores rap’s relationship with the devil
- Greil Marcus gives his take on the controversial Jann Wenner interview
- Mandy Mussen is not a fan of awkward celebrity interviews
Lede Of The Week
“Over the past few years, a specific sort of interview style has gained traction: one where the interviewer scoffs, stares blankly, aims retorts at their interviewee and exudes a general aura of stand-offishness. Essentially, they do all the things a regular interviewer, who likely fought hard with PRs and agents to secure time with that celebrity, would never dream of doing.” - Mandy Mussen
Q&A: Carrie Tipton
Carrie Tipton is a musicologist. For six seasons, she hosted the book interview podcast Notes on Bach, and her work often touches on “a lot of things inside, outside, and adjacent to academia.” Carrie’s new book is From Dixie to Rocky Top: Music and Meaning in Southeastern Conference Fight Songs. In this excerpt from our interview, Carrie explains what the book is all about.
It’s a cultural history of SEC fight songs from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries that situates them within the broader history of US commercial music and uses them to explore themes of authorship and copyright, the commodification of school spirit, and the construction of race, gender, and regional identity in southern football culture. It’s the first book to focus on college fight songs as an important musical and cultural phenomenon, and it was a lot of fun to research and write. I tried to write it to appeal to regular people (not just academics) interested in sports history and US/southern history and I hope people enjoy reading it half as much as I enjoyed working on it.
Why do you find your book topic so interesting?
At the general level, I think it’s interesting to pay attention to music-making that is in the background of daily life—part of the air that we breathe—and on which we may not consciously focus, but which often bears great affective and social power. Some years after I became a musicologist, I noticed the big disconnect between how important college fight songs are to people (not just in the South) and how little scholars have said about them; they were a kind of background music that nobody had investigated from an academic perspective. I thought it would be interesting to answer the questions of “where do fight songs come from” and “how do they come to mean so much to people” from a regional angle. More narrowly, my interest in the subject had a lot more to do with the history and historiography of the U.S. South than with the intersection of athletics and music, per se.
Causes Worth Supporting
From Carrie Tipton:
Gun-reform groups such as Everytown and Moms Demand Action do a good job of helping local voters try to move the needle on legislative agenda items in their own districts and states. They make it easy for people to educate themselves on upcoming bills and how to contact their reps. We are struggling hard with this in Tennessee, as many states are, and can use all the help these organizations can give us.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Glad I Know What To Call Myself When I’m In The UK Now
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Podcasts!
- Hall Watchers reflects on the Jann Wenner controversy
- Lior Phillips discusses South African music on The Music Book Podcast
- Time's Echo author Jeremy Eichler joins Sticky Notes to chat about mid-20th century composers
- Rave to the Grave welcomes Shawn Reynaldo to talk about the current state of electronic music
- Word in Your Ear celebrates 30 years of MOJO Magazine
Q&A: Mike Huguenor
Mike Huguenor is a musician, writer, and the former arts editor of Metro Silicon Valley. Mike just left his job at Metro and is now working on a biography of Asian Man Records. In this excerpt from our interview, Mike explains what he’d like to see more of in music journalism.
Local coverage. That's really the heart of it. I'd rather read a story about a San Jose band stuck in between waves, playing a basement to three people than a story about any successful pop artist—any day of the week. The latter already has all the coverage it needs, as is evident in its success. The former is something real happening, that will never happen again. That's music.
How do you typically listen to music, both in a professional and personal sense?
Any way I can. At home, I listen to vinyl on my turntable and mp3s on my laptop speakers. We tour often and I listen to what's on in the van and the bands we play with live. Sometimes I listen to mixes of my own music, and then I listen to it on as many different speakers as possible, headphones and earbuds and car speakers and vinyl, checking to make sure all the pieces of sound come through on the various systems.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Mike Huguenor:
The treatment of trans people in America is so unnecessarily cruel. The TGI Justice Project is a group of trans people in and out of incarceration who work together to create a network for their community, a very worthy cause and one that could always benefit from donations.
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.
Released as a companion piece to Matt Trollope's book of the same name, One More: A Definitive History of UK Clubbing is an extensive and immersive journey through a scene that changed British nightlife forever. (The title refers to that final request for the DJ to play "one more" before the inevitable return to reality.)
Brandon Block serves as host of this documentary that traces two decades of UK clubbing, quickly guiding us through legendary venues, superstar DJs, masterful promoters, game-changing publications, and myriad other adjacent elements (i.e. ecstasy) that proved essential to keep the party going for all those years. As we travel from Birmingham to London passing through Nottingham, Brighton, Sheffield, Mansfield, Stoke-On-Trent, Manchester, and Derby, as well as a couple of Welsh and Scottish cities, we get a useful taste of the British club circuit in the '90s and 2000s that doubles as a unique geography lesson.
Sonique, Danny Rampling, John Holland, Fatboy Slim, Jeremy Healy, and many others share their memories of those wild golden days alongside video footage, personal and professional photos, and an impressive collection of posters, tickets, flyers, record sleeves, and other memorabilia.
Would You Like To Contribute To Stuff You Gotta Watch?
I’m looking for writers to contribute to the 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. 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.
Pivoting To Video
- Resident Advisor explores the complex world of digging for records
- Greil Marcus explains why he writes
- The New York Times looks at why rappers have stopped writing
- 12Tone offers a defense of bad lyrics
- The Punk Rock MBA charts the rise, fall, and rise of pop-punk
10. Recording Yourself Snoring
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Real Scenes
- Chuck Eddy on Columbia, Missouri
- Ashawnta Jackson on 1960s Jacksonville
- Lorenzo Simonini on the Yugoslav underground
- Daniel Dylan Wray on Hulme Crescents
- Alex Deller on Brazilian metal
Trivia Time
Who featured on the cover of the final issue of Melody Maker? (Hint: Melody Maker ceased publication in 2000.)
Bits, Bobs
- The newsletter Freelancing With Tim has relaunched
- Norman Brannon looks back at highlights from Anti-Matter on the occasion of its 30th anniversary
- Katherine St. Asaph is the new pop columnist at Stereogum
- Matthew Schnipper has won a music journalism award from Germany’s Reeperbahn Festival
- The Creative Independent turned seven
Yep
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Q&A: W. Anthony Sheppard
W. Anthony Sheppard is the Marylin and Arthur Levitt Professor of Music at Williams College, where he teaches courses in 20th-century music, opera, popular music, and Asian music. In this excerpt from our interview, he explains what he’s working on these days.
I’ve been juggling three projects lately: I am wrapping up work as editor and contributor to a volume entitled Beyond the Bandstand: Paul Whiteman in American Musical Culture. Beyond the Bandstand explores the American band leader Paul Whiteman’s broad impact on popular culture, tracking him in American marketing, animated films, the Black press, Hollywood, the music publication industry, behind the scenes with arrangers, into grand concert halls, across the Atlantic, in the courtroom, and on TV from the 1920s through the 1950s. My own chapter is focused on Whiteman’s work in music television in the 1950s and how his shows reveal a contradictory approach to racial integration and segregation through music.
For the past several years I’ve been working on a book currently titled Opera Since Einstein: Essays in Contemporary Opera. I suppose I’ve actually been working off and on with this project for many years. For example, I’ve delivered lectures on contemporary opera for the Metropolitan Opera Guild—recently defunct, alas—since 2006. This book will focus on central themes that shaped opera over the past fifty years. I’m currently completing the chapter on countertenors in contemporary opera.
Finally, I’ve also been at work on a book currently titled The Performer's Voice: Timbre and Expression in Twentieth-Century Vocal Music. In this book I plan to compare vocalists across the pop/art divide. I published an article in 2021 on Lady Gaga’s range of vocal timbres which gives a taste of the topics to be covered in this book.
Academic Stuff
- New issues: Small Axe and Voice and Speech Review
- Call for Submissions: Theory and Practice
- Call for Papers: American Musical Instrument Society (Deadline November 30)
- Registration is open for Contrafact in the Middle Ages
- Call for Papers: Music, Musicology and Academic Responsibilities in the 21st Century [Deadline December 1]
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
The cover star of Melody Maker’s “Christmas Cracker” swan song was Fred Durst.
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...