#192: Embarrassing But True
Embarrassing But True
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 Atlantic staffer Spencer Kornhaber, cultural anthropologist and folklorist Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth, and metal expert Dayal Patterson. Plus! Reading recommendations, a documentary about New Orleans, and much more! But first…
The Hardest Foreign Language In History
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Reading List
- Michelle Mercer offered a solution to aging away from your favorite bands
- Sean Adams rhapsodized about why he loves music magazines
- Kara explained why k-pop studies is a joke
- Alphonse Pierre worried about rap classics slowly disappearing from the internet
- Niko Stratis explored how tattoos tell stories about the worlds we’ve built
- Brandon Stosuy celebrated crying
- Lior Phillips discussed the history of the mixtape
- H. Drew Blackburn profiled hip-hop journalist and filmmaker Bonsu Thompson
- Parker Molloy quizzed writers on the state of music journalism
- Jon Ross wrote about classical music in the US South
Lede Of The Week
“Fourteen-year-old Joel Thompson settled into his plush red seat in Atlanta’s Symphony Hall, eager for the downbeat of a composer with whom he already felt a kinship.” - Jon Ross
Q&A: Spencer Kornhaber
Spencer Kornhaber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he’s been working since 2011. His new book is On Divas: Persona, Pleasure, Power. In this excerpt from our interview, Spencer describes the book.
I started at The Atlantic on the same day that Lady Gaga’s Born This Way came out, and both developments feel like they’ve had equal weight in my life. Basically, my time in the job has coincided with a personal-and-aesthetic loosening up, during which I’ve evolved from repressed rock guy to… how do I put this… silly gay poptimist. Again and again I’ve found myself writing about singer-troublemakers, most of them women, who are willing to risk cringes on the way to spectacular self-expression.
The book is part of a series collecting The Atlantic’s writers’ favorite pieces along a theme. For me, pulling together various profiles and essays under the title On Divas created some juxtapositional magic. Looking back, I really can see a throughline between my coverage of Britney, Björk, Mariah, and even Jack White, who once had to put out an open letter asserting that he’s not a diva (so diva). I’ve also realized what a hot topic this is. We have so many aspiring pop soloists on the rise—children of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé—who proudly claim the title diva in a way that speaks to all sorts of cultural shifts I hope to keep writing about.
What artist or trend are you most interested in right now?
Embarrassing but true: I still believe in hyperpop! The sound and the genre label have, IMO, been too quickly discounted as alleged Spotify astroturfing campaign and flash-in-the-pan failure to supplant pop itself. But what we’ve been hearing for more than a decade now, from various corners, is authentic: the sound of internet-raised misfits (many queer) using their mass-culture influences for punkish, avant garde, identity-validating purposes. It doesn’t need chart success—but sped-up TikTok songs, rising club BPMs, and the meta, surreal Barbie phenomenon all show hyperpop values moving through the culture.
Also: Spotify’s playlist didn’t invent the word! It’s a useful, self-explanatory term that’s long existed in the wild. For example, when researching Björk, I came across it in a 2002 Society for Ethnomusicology newsletter.
Anyway, the new Hannah Diamond album rules and I can attest there are actual human beings in this world who are listening to it.
OK!
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Podcasts!
- Drowned in Sound welcomed PROG editor Jerry Ewing to talk about his career
- Where It's At: A Short History of Girlbands launched this week
- Bill Milkowski talked jazz journalism, then and now, on The Buzz: The JJA Podcast
- The Love Is the Message crew spoke with Mark Anthony Neal about Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture
- Marc Masters from The Music Book Podcast talked with Will Hermes about his new Lou Reed book
Q&A: Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth
Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth is a visiting assistant professor in comparative studies and an archivist in the Center for Folklore Studies at The Ohio State University. Jasper’s new book is Finding the Singing Spruce: Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia's Mountain Forests. In this excerpt from our interview, Jasper explains why this subject is so fascinating to him.
I have a family history of music and craft that has had an indelible impact. People in my family are makers, constantly busy with their hands and minds. So, I think that approach to craft and building the world you want to see around you has always been with me. However, the craft of musical instruments stuck out to me because of instruments’ lively capability to have life of their own. The sense that a guitar is a heartbeat or a violin is breathing music always overcomes me when I watch musicians perform. Coupling this sonic voice with the idea that trees and forests have a musicality of their own which is then drawn into correspondence with humans through craft, environmental policy, and industry presents the contradiction, nuance, and beauty that is at the heart of creative expression.
How did you go about writing the actual book?
The book is based on my dissertation research, but I spent a lot of time re-writing the text to make it more approachable for a general audience. This involved taking some of the academic conversations to the footnotes, so they wouldn’t interrupt the flow of the prose, restructuring the text, and editing significantly to make the language better capture the sensorial and affective nature of the work.
It’s strange to write a book about a topic that requires such attention to sound, touch, and smell, which are often precluded by the production of a text. When I give talks about this topic, I always bring samples of wood for people to listen to and feel. To do honor to the craft, it was necessary to return to the writing and make it read like the craft unfolds.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth:
The West Virginia Humanities Council Folklife Apprenticeship Program or your state’s version of it. These programs put financial backing straight to folklife practitioners and their students, including a broad variety of traditional musicians. Often these kinds of awards are a mainstay in keeping face to face methods of teaching and transmitting cultural traditions alive!
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 Garth Cartwright.
New Orleans is quite possibly the subject of more music documentaries than any other city in the world. Understandably, the Big Easy’s fame as the birthplace of jazz—alongside nourishing R&B, rock’n’roll, soul, funk, bounce, gangsta rap icons and much more besides—ensures it’s an attractive place for music documentarians. 2016’s The Whole Gritty City is filmed entirely in New Orleans yet doesn’t feature any of the aforementioned genres and there are no cameos from famous names. This is because it focuses on the city’s public school children who are learning instruments to play in three of the city’s marching bands.
The pupils who master their instruments will join bands that accompany parades, football and basketball games, and Mardi Gras celebrations. Learning an instrument is challenging and The Whole Gritty City documents how these kids—often in their early teens—grapple with such. It's not simply learning to play, but the problems life can throw up: dysfunctional families, drugs, gangs, crime, poverty. These kids have no privilege but rarely complain; instead they struggle on, determined to be part of a musical tradition that has long been part of Black New Orleans culture and identity.
Directors Richard Barber and Andre Lambertson do a remarkable job letting the youth (and their teachers) shape the feature. There’s no grandstanding or feel-good ending. That would feel false in a city where too many Black youth die young. Music documentaries rarely focus on non-professionals, and even more rarely on children: The Whole Gritty City reminds us how human making music is, how difficult learning an instrument can be, and why music remains so crucial to communities who often have little else to shield their cultural survival.
Real Scenes
- George Grella on music with alternate tunings
- Philip Sherburne on science and nature recordings
- Stephanie Mendez on East LA punk
- Jon Dale on collective improvisation
- Will Groff on queer country
Academic Calls!
- Music and the Moving Image Conference XX [Abstracts due December 22]
- Analytical Approaches to World Musics [Deadline: December 31]
- The Second Biennial International Conference of Music and the University [Deadline: December 31]
- “Problematic” Punk: NOFX’s Forty Years of Punk Provocations [Proposals due January 1, 2024]
- Innovation in Music 2024 [Abstracts due January 1, 2024]
Trivia Time
What Canadian music magazine was known simply as “!☆@#” for its first year of publication?
Bits, Bobs
- Nick Kelly has passed away
- Chris Willman interviewed Gannett’s new Taylor Swift reporter
- The 2023 CMA Media Achievement Award was given to Marcus K. Dowling
- Bob Stanley received an honorary doctorate from The Open University
- A new award has been created in memory of Scotsman music critic Sue Wilson
- DIY will host a music journalism workshop in Bradford
A Tip For Pitching Stereogum…
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Q&A: Dayal Patterson
Dayal Patterson is the founder of Cult Never Dies and a longtime music journalist. His new project is a massively expanded version of Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult – The Restored, Expanded and Definitive Edition. In this excerpt from our interview, he explains what the new book contains.
[There is] so much new material it can be considered a new title. 140,000 more words (340,000 in total), 23 new chapters, 50 chapters rewritten and updated, 350 more images and some 165 interviews in total. I think it is possibly the biggest metal book ever published in terms of the amount of content.
How did you come to this subject for a book? What made the topic so interesting to you?
The reason for writing the original book was to set the record straight and document the black metal genre properly, because so many people were writing books and articles and making documentaries during the 2000s without any real idea of the history of the genre. Because of that, the history of black metal was being reduced to a story about Norway between 1991 and 1993, whereas my book is essentially from 1980 to the early 2010s and beyond, and covers countries including Norway, Sweden, Finland, the US, the UK, Brazil, Greece, France, Germany, and much more.
The reason for releasing this massively expanded edition is that I was presented with a word count for the original book that meant I had to omit a lot of subjects and bands because of a lack of space. With that in mind, I took out a loan, bought back the rights and then rewrote and redesigned the book, using editors from the black metal scene, and am now rereleasing it on my own publishing house the way it was supposed to be!
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Dayal Patterson:
I think given the vast devastation of the natural world that continues to be seen each year it is worth donating to organisations like the WWF. Given the vast cost of each human life upon the ever-shrinking animal population in terms of pollution, land use, etc., it might be considered a duty of any decent human being to attempt to balance this somewhat.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
More Academic Stuff!
- New issues: Cambridge Opera Journal, Music Therapy Perspectives, and Music & Letters
- Emily Ruth Allen has published “A Review of Podcasting: Time for a Musicology Podcasting Revolution?”
- Call for Presentations: 2024 Pop Conference [Deadline: November 15]
- Call for Proposals: RMA at 150: 60th Annual Conference [Deadline: December 8]
- Call for Proposals: Women in Music: An Interdisciplinary Conference [Proposals due December 15]
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
Exclaim! was originally known as !☆@#.
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...