#139: A Midas Vortex
A Midas Vortex
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: Books books books: Interviews with Caryn Rose, Marissa R. Moss, David Cantwell, and Mitchell Cohen. (All of them have new books out.) Plus! Reading recommendations, Laurel Canyon history, and more! But first…
Food For Thought
Source
Reading List
- Ashawnta Jackson on how Black radio changed the dial
- Abe Beame speaks with GQ editor Frazier Tharpe II
- Annabel Ross on toxic male solidarity in the Detroit techno scene
- Gabe Castro-Root profiles a company that makes musician tour buses [h/t Music REDEF]
- Piotr Orlov reviews two recent events in New York City
- Adlan Jackson talks about music criticism with Ben Ratliff and Giovanni Russonello
- Daric L. Cottingham writes movingly about the impact of music on their life
- Robyn Mowatt chats with three hip-hop and urban magazine archivists
- Jayson Greene describes the dissociative sound of music right now
- Amy Missin goes deep on fandom and fangirls
Lede Of The Week
I can still remember the intense pressure I put on the day being just right. - Amy Missin
Q&A: Caryn Rose
Caryn Rose is a music writer, researcher and archivist. She’s written for NPR, Pitchfork, Esquire, and many other publications. Her latest book is Why Patti Smith Matters, out now through University of Texas Press, and she also contributed to the anthologies Women Who Rock and Woman Walk The Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives. These days, she makes her home in Detroit, although she remains a New Yorker in her heart. In this excerpt from our interview, Caryn explains how she went about writing the book.
Since I’ve almost always had a full time job that isn’t writing, I had built a habit of writing one entire weekend day and usually one evening after work as well (or I’d use it for research). No one ever wants to hear this, but so much of successful writing is just showing up consistently and typing words. Even if I thought the words were garbage, I made myself type words anyway because I know I can always edit garbage later, but you can’t edit a blank page. (Editor’s note: the words were not garbage.)
My contract specified I’d deliver the manuscript in 18 months (it was 18 months or 2 years, again, these are supposed to be short books), and I write fast and like a deadline so that was okay with me. But then my father got sick and was in and out of the hospital extensively before he passed away, my cat died, and then I moved from NYC to Detroit, all within the same six months. Plus, my day job was working on software that helped election administrators, a thing that was boring and no one cared about until the 2020 general. Suddenly I was insanely busy on multiple levels.
I pushed the deadline out to the full two years, and then had to do it one more time because of COVID and everything else. I am not the first or the last writer who will need to bump a deadline, but the advice I will give here is that you cannot hide from your editor and it is just better to email or call them and tell them what’s up. The stress of hiding and not wanting to deal with it is a million times worse than just being upfront with them.
Read the full interview with Caryn here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Caryn Rose:
Reproductive rights in this country are under attack and it impacts everyone. Abortion is healthcare. Everyone knows about Planned Parenthood, but I encourage people to donate to their local abortion funds as well. The National Network of Abortion Funds is a great place to send your money.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Me, Every December 25th
Source
Podcasts!
- Bob Lefsetz joined the crew of How Long Gone
- Kira Thurman talked about Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms on New Books in Music
- Velocity Press interviewed electronic music DJ and producer Scuba about his podcast
- The final episode of Reply All features an interview with its music producer, Breakmaster Cylinder
- Grace Elizabeth Hale chats about Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture on Nostalgia Trap [h/t Justin Farrar]
Q&A: Marissa R. Moss
Marissa R. Moss is a freelance journalist based in Nashville. She contributes frequently to Rolling Stone, Billboard, NPR, and many more. Her first book is Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Become the Success Story They Were Never Supposed to Be. As Marissa puts it, the book is “the inside story of the last twenty years of country music through the lens of Maren Morris, Mickey Guyton, and Kacey Musgraves (and many other women from The Chicks to Rissi Palmer to Margo Price and Brandy Clark).” In this excerpt from our interview, Marissa explains how she came to the subject for the book.
I landed in Nashville in a funny place—I liked the more “Americana” scene, but I also liked things that showed up on Music Row. But I also really understood very quickly how broken the machine here is—or, more accurately, how it is actually designed to make certain people fail. I also really enjoy exercising my reporting chops, that is a big part of who I am, and I felt like that was really missing from the country scene in a lot of ways (Rolling Stone Country opening up in Nashville really changed things and filled that void for me, and was instrumental to me at the time). So I started reporting hard on these injustices, and I started using my space to tell stories and write features and give attention to women that weren’t going to be getting it on country radio. So naturally, that ended up becoming the subject matter for Her Country. This is the story the Billboard charts won’t tell you about the past twenty years.
How did you go about writing the actual book?
What ended up being best for me is to write in one massive document, and I know that idea might make some people nauseated. But I had to do it that way for some reason. I did not write anything in order, rather finished chapters as I was motivated to do so, or felt inspired. Once I had the first draft down, I went through and made notecards that tracked plot points, characters, topics, subjects, everything, on color-coded cards and post-its so I could make sure I had enough of this, enough of that, that everything flowed, that it felt equitable. And then I could move things around a lot too, by just shifting the cards. I did a lot of editing that way.
Read the full interview with Marissa here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Marissa R. Moss:
Support the Black Opry! Because the future of country music should represent everyone, not just a chosen few.
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.
How do you define a scene? Usually, it begins with a great migration—and the emergence of Los Angeles as a pop cosmos is no different. As the music industry shifted coasts in the mid-’60s, it also got sucked into a Midas vortex where everything seemed to turn into gold, kicking off a journey from creative innocence to the corporatization of rock.
This process is portrayed by the BBC documentary Hotel California: LA from the Byrds to the Eagles, which covers a magical yet overwhelming decade of pop music whose rapid changes sometimes make it feel more like a lifetime. Based on Barney Hoskyns’ book of the same name, the film is based on testimonies of those who lived through it (David Crosby, Bonnie Raitt, David Geffen, Pamela Des Barres, Jac Holzman, and J.D. Souther, among many others). They provide a critical and insightful look at the legendary Laurel Canyon scene from the psych folk explosion to cocaine-tainted country rock. And how what started as a wholesome refuge eventually ended up a dark place of egomania and privilege. Luckily, the music that soundtracks it all is fantastic.
How Do You Do, Fellow TikTokers?
- @luxxuryxx hosts a guest who explains how Weird Al gets legal permission for his parodies
- @bruisedamanita charts the rise and fall of nu metal
- @cultureunfiltered on house music’s Chicago origins
- @tiffanyericawilliams cites studies on why 120 is the standard BPM for pop songs
- @thechrismichael says the term EDM distances dance music from its Black and queer roots
Q&A: David Cantwell
David Cantwell is a freelance writer and critic based in Kansas City. He’s had a long and storied career in music journalism, which he lays out at length in our interview. He ends the discussion of his career, however, with one important point: “I was only able to do the work I describe… because my wife encouraged me to do it and because she was successful enough in her own profession to be able to support us both while I did it.” David has just released an expanded edition of The Running Kind: Listening to Merle Haggard. In this excerpt from our interview, he explains why Haggard is so interesting to him.
I’ve been listening to Haggard for most of my life. The first 45 I ever bought was “War” by Edwin Starr, which is a pretty politically savvy pick for a nine- or ten-year-old kid. But the truth is that I chose “War” only because the Safeway was sold out of the record I’d intended to pick up, “The Fightin’ Side of Me” by Merle Haggard. That was not politically savvy on my part and, in its attitudes toward protest and the Vietnam War, precisely opposite of the Starr record. As I say in the book, I wasn’t sharp enough yet really to catch the tension between those singles; I liked both records because I thought they both sounded really cool—and still do. But I quickly learned the issues at stake, watching the news each night and listening to my dad complain about paying the bills and the war, and civil rights and so on. That kitchen table talk showed up again and again in Merle’s lyrics back then. My dad, who was an unskilled union laborer working construction, basically lived “Working Man Blues” and so many more of Haggard’s songs. It made a big impression on me.
As a critic who’s come to focus on country music, Haggard’s career provides a great lens through which to examine how country music maintained a more or less consistent identity through the decades while changing dramatically and repeatedly. I think Haggard is thought of today as a hyper twangy, old-school kind of artist. He’s real country, so-called. But the truth is that his songwriting, which was not as autobiographically based as is often presumed, and his sounds were consistently innovative and influential, pop inclined and at least rock adjacent. He was always keeping up in the country scene, when not leading the way outright, from the Nashville Sound era into the Bakersfield Sound years, in country soul and countrypolitan and country rock, in the Outlaw movement, in the Urban Cowboy moment, and on and on. Telling the story of Merle’s style let me tell the story of country music.
Read the full interview with David here.
Trivia Time
Founded in Beijing in 2000, what publication is generally considered China’s first heavy music magazine?
Bits, Bobs
- Dom Phillips, Joel Whitburn, and Meghan Stabile have passed away
- Jaelani Turner-Williams recommends 15 books for Black music month
- There’s a new website all about ancient Greek and Roman music
- Ramón Hernández has received the Henry Guerra Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Journalism
- Andy O’Connor is the new metal columnist for CREEM
- Hasan Hujairi has a new newsletter
I Think This Makes Sense?
Source
Q&A: Mitchell Cohen
Mitchell Cohen is a writer and A&R Executive. Over his years in the music industry, Mitchell worked for Verve, Columbia, and Arista. That last label is the subject of his book, Looking for the Magic: New York City, the ’70s and the Rise of Arista Records. In it, Mitchell covers the label, the city, and the culture surrounding it. But as he puts it in our interview, “I wanted to tell stories that haven’t been explored much, about artists who deserve more attention, like Willie Nile, David Forman, Quazar’s Glenn Goins, Linda Lewis, Janey Street.” In this excerpt from our interview, Mitchell describes his research process.
It was a three-tiered thing: my memories, obviously. And interviews—I think around thirty?—with executives, artists, producers who were around then and had an Arista connection. Finally, months and months on the internet, looking through old issues of music trade magazines (Billboard, Record World, Cash Box), which helped me piece the story together in kind of “real time”: week by week, through articles and reviews of records that were coming out. And I have a vast record collection, so I was diving into that.
What are a few tracks / videos / films / books we should also look at, in addition to your book, to get a better sense of the topic?
As I say in the book, if you want a more complete picture of Arista, start to finish, there is the memoir from Clive Davis, and his documentary on Netflix. I think of my book as like a “remix”: bringing up different elements, not emphasizing the hits, but trying to provide another way of looking at Arista beyond the accepted narrative. There are playlists on Spotify of three aspects of Looking for the Magic, and those are worth checking out, especially since I’m writing about a bunch of artists who are not that well-known.
Read the full interview with Mitchell here.
Academic Stuff
- New Issues: Latin American Music Review, Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal, Cambridge Opera Journal, Music Theory Online, Acta Musicologica, Computer Music Journal, Twentieth-Century Music, Popular Music History, and Analytical Approaches to World Music Journal
- MusicID is accepting applications for its Digital Research Fellowship
- Call for Papers: 78 RPM at Home: Local Perspectives on the Early Recording Industry
- The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress has announced the 2022 recipients of its annual fellowships and awards programs
- Joe Steinhardt and Nikki McClaran have published an article about how narratives influence listener’s perceptions of an artist’s work
- Registration is open for Racialised Performance in Western Classical Music
- Call for Papers: Music and Transcendence in a Posthuman Age
The Closing Credits
Thanks for reading! And thanks to Miranda Reinert and Aliya Chaudhry for their help with this edition of the newsletter. Shout out to Aaron Gonsher for the idea of the “lede of the week” section! 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
China’s first heavy music magazine was called Painkiller.
A Final Note
Thanks for reading! I make playlists from time to time. Check them out if you’re interested. 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 Twitter, it’s @JournalismMusic. Until next time…