#137: A Tremendous Opportunity
A Tremendous Opportunity
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 JJ Kramer of CREEM; extreme music enthusiast Michael Tau; and chart chart expert Dr. Bill Carroll. Plus! Reading recommendations, a documentary about Creation Records, and more! But first…
Coming Soon: Geology Journalism Insider
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Reading List
- Kaitlyn Tiffany explores why fangirls scream
- Sam Valenti IV celebrates the art of the DJ mix
- Ryan Dyer talks to his mom about what it’s like being an aging concertgoer
- Caitlin Wolper chats with Marissa R. Moss about her new book Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be
- Miki Hellerbach profiles hip-hop artists who have embraced a content creator strategy
- Shawn Reynaldo breaks down his media diet
- Ariane Todes investigates the importance of eye contact between musicians (h/t Music REDEF)
- Robert Cottrell highlights musicians, composers, and philosophers who have written compellingly about music
- Lottie Brazier visits the British Pop Archive
- Simon Reynolds elaborates on the armpit foghorn
Q&A: JJ Kramer
JJ Kramer is the son of CREEM founder Barry Kramer. He’s among those bringing the magazine back after a years-long effort to untangle rights issues. This week has seen numerous profiles and interviews with Kramer that outline the story and the aims of the new magazine; I hopped on the bandwagon and sent Kramer a few questions myself. In this excerpt from our interview, JJ describes why he wanted to bring the magazine back now.
There used to be an ecosystem between the bands, the writers, and the fans, where each would hold the others accountable. That ecosystem is broken. Music journalism has become fragmented, sanitized, and productized. Editorial decisions are based on clicks and algorithms and, as a result, music journalism (and the music itself) has suffered. CREEM views this as a tremendous opportunity.
How is this all going to work financially?
We’ve created a business model that is not dependent on advertising revenue. Instead, we’re focused on subscriptions. We firmly believe that consumers will pay for premium content and that’s what we intend to deliver. We will have both digital-only and digital + print subscriptions, which will provide customers with different opportunities to interact with the CREEM. In addition, we will have a free weekly newsletter and limited digital content for those that aren’t quite ready to subscribe.
What would you like to see more of in music journalism right now?
More editorial freedom, originality, and authenticity. Click-driven editorial decisions have ripped the soul out of music journalism. Subjects are chosen based on algorithms and advertisers, rather than what’s really important: talent. We aim to remedy that. CREEM will champion bands that we believe in (regardless of their lack of notoriety) and will skewer bands that deserve it (regardless of their fame). At the end of the day, CREEM leads with passion and is accountable only to its readership.
Read the full interview with JJ here.
CREEMapalozoa
- Brian McCollum of The Detroit Free Press gives the story a local angle
- Michael Hann of The Guardian takes a historical view
- The entirety of the magazine’s decades-long original run is now online
- The new magazine has an anonymous gossip column
- Emma Garland reviews the original CREEM review of David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
As A Former Electronic Music Editor, I’ve Seen A Lot Of Opinions
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Podcasts!
- Song Exploder got rickrolled
- Rock Docs talked with Oscar-winning producer Joseph Patel
- Tamar Herman joined Name 3 Songs to ponder the question: “Does America hate girl groups?”
- Automated Beat Machine took a look at lo-fi and loneliness
- Timmhotep Aku sat down with The Next Movement to discuss his career in hip-hop writing
Q&A: Michael Tau
Michael Tau is the author of Extreme Music: Silence to Noise and Everything In Between. Michael is a geriatric psychiatrist by day, and by night, he’s a music journalist, with bylines in numerous underground music publications. (He’s also created several music zines.) The questioning nature of psychiatry and his love of underground music inform the book in equal measure. In this excerpt from our interview, Michael explains further.
I consider my book an exploration of “unusual musical phenomena.” Specifically, Extreme Music examines several conceptual extremes in the fringes of music. For example, music that is very “loud”—so loud that it is just a block of unchanging white noise. Or music that is very “fast”: a subculture of electronic music with beats so fast they end up perceived as pure tones. Or music that is “unplayable”: records that are completely silent, or that can’t be played (because they have no grooves, or are locked in an unopenable box, or because there is no record at all). Those are a few of the many different extreme concepts discussed in the book.
Each section looks at a subset of these extreme concepts—genre extremes, packaging extremes, extremes of duration (e.g. music compositions that are thousands of years long), etc.—each one divided into several subsections. The core question I try to answer is: what compels people to create this unusual music? The end result is something like a catalogue of these unusual musical phenomena, aiming to tell the stories behind the artifacts.
How did you come to this subject for a book? What made the topic so interesting to you?
After years spent writing about profoundly bizarre music I became fascinated with a simple question: why? What motivates people to create this unusual music? For example, why would someone package a CD in a box of rotting cooked pasta, then ship it out to customers? Why would someone create a piece of music that is billions of years long? Why would someone create a label to release music exclusively on microcassette? To me, these questions are intrinsically interesting—it’s a bit like uncovering a mystery.
At the same time, I noticed that a lot of music writing was descriptive, but short on narrative. So I wanted to tell the stories behind these strange musical ideas. I wanted my music to investigate these “unusual musical phenomena” and to do so in a compelling way—not in a technical or academic style, but in plain and interesting terms.
Read the full interview with Michael here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Michael Tau:
Partners in Health. It’s an organization that helps develop public health systems in developing countries, often in remote and rural areas. This is typically achieved by hiring local workers and training them to provide healthcare within their given community. Full disclosure: my wife does some work with them in Liberia.
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.
Bastards: Pathways of the Portuguese Punk 1977-2014 covers four decades of Portuguese punk. The narrative begins shortly after democracy is implemented in Portugal, with the release of Aqui D’El Rock’s 1978 debut single “Há Que Violentar O Sistema” (“The System Must Be Violated”), which is largely considered the first Portuguese punk record. We’re then gradually brought to the 21st century through first-person testimonies from members of seminal bands such as Xutos & Pontapés, Cães Vadios, Mata-Ratos, Os Faíscas (the first incarnation of Heróis do Mar), or Peste & Sida, as well as journalists, visual artists, and label owners.
With its direction anonymously credited to KISMIF (an acronym for Keep It Simple, Make It Fast), the documentary revolves around the idea of delivering a collective story made up of several personal narratives that connect to create a fascinating patchwork history of the punk scene in Portugal. Birthed in an academic environment, Bastards never loses sight of its anthropological goal and features an admirable amount of data. Available online—for free and with English subtitles—Bastards is an important attempt to preserve a cultural record (and make it accessible) long after all the main characters have disappeared.
Bits, Bobs
- Columbus Alive is no more
- The Guardian is looking for a short-term deputy music editor
- Paul Hanford will talk about his new book, Coming to Berlin: Global Journeys into an Electronic Music and Club Culture Capital, on Lauren Laverne’s 6Music show this week
How Do You Do, Fellow TikTokers?
- @danielswall explains formant shifting
- @katesiamro shares a list of artists who made it in their 30s
- @jaydotbell talks about the costs of being vulnerable as a Black artist
- @bruisedamanita provides a vaporwave explainer
- @drayelectronica celebrates battle rap
Trivia Time
Which iconic hardcore zine founder is credited with coining the phrase “rage against the machine”?
Q&A: Dr. Bill Carroll
Dr. Bill Carroll is Adjunct Professor of Chemistry at Indiana University, Bloomington. Bill has been a music lover all his life. “From the time I was about five, I was fascinated by the charts—the earliest being Dick Clark’s top tens in the late 1950s. Growing up in Chicago, I had WLS Silver Dollar Surveys taped to my bedroom wall. I worked in radio in college and grad school and read Billboard faithfully. Later, my company was in the business of making vinyl resin for records, and I got the company to spring for Billboard as a business expense.” Recently, Bill published the article “Did Billboard, Cash Box, and Record World Charts Tell the Same Story? Perception and Reality, 1960-1979.” Fascinated by the premise and methodology, I reached out to Bill to hear more. In this excerpt from our interview, Bill explains what the article is all about.
I like to formulate questions that can be answered explicitly by [my] methods, and this article contained two of those questions. Despite the fact that each magazine’s “secret sauce” for creating its charts was unknown to those outside the magazine, people in the industry believed that the three magazines measured record performance differently. There is a quote from Tommy James in the paper that outlines his opinions of how the magazines were grossly and systematically different. He wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Were they correct?
Similarly, the godfather of chartology, Professor Peter Hesbacher of the University of Pennsylvania tried to relate the performance of number one records in the 1970s between Billboard and Record World. While he found concordance in the popularity of the very top records of the decade between the two magazines, just below the very top he found gross disparity. How could “How Deep Is Your Love?” by the Bee Gees rank seventh for the decade in Billboard but 99th in Record World?
The paper set out to answer those questions. I constructed a dataset of the lifecycles week-to-week of 4578 records, each of which peaked in the top 40 in all three magazines for the era 1960-1979.
Read the full interview with Bill here.
Me, Except Looking For The Tab Playing Music
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Academic Stuff
- New issues: Journal of Music, Technology & Education and IMS Musicological Brainfood
- North American British Music Studies Association Biennial Conference is open for registration
- Here’s a Twitter thread with a lot of great book suggestions
- The 4th Transnational Opera Studies Conference is open for registration
- The Global Media: Sound, Image, Materiality Conference is open for registration
- The Scoring Peak TV Conference is open for registration
The Closing Credits
Thanks for reading! And thanks to Miranda Reinert and Aliya Chaudhry for their help with this edition of the newsletter. In case you’ve missed them, I’ve published a number of special features 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
Kent McClard, owner of HeartattaCk and Ebullition Records, is credited with coining the phrase “rage against the machine.”
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…