#106: Distracted By Hustle Twitter
Distracted By Hustle Twitter
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: A new Notes on Process column with Danyel Smith! Interviews with Billboard reporter Tatiana Cirisano; Chicago music historian Aaron Cohen; and classical music composer and writer Leonard Lehrman. Plus! Pitch me on writing music documentary reviews! And much more! But first…
This Person Has Been Reading Over My Shoulder My Entire Career
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Still Seeking Mentors!
Throughout July, I put a note in the newsletter about creating an informal program of matching mentors and mentees in the music journalism world. The response so far has been great, but I’ve gotten FAR more folks wanting a mentor than the other way around. Are you open to offering up your experience in a mentorship role to a young music journalist? Please email me with the subject line “Mentor” and a little bit about how you think you might be able to help! I’d love to pair you up with someone looking for guidance.
Reading List
- Rolling Stone published a list of the 500 best songs of all-time
- Aliya Chaudhry on how Radio Disney shaped modern pop-rock
- Michael A. Gonzales chats about being 58 years old
- Andrew Ryce looks at the promise of decentralized autonomous organizations in the electronic music world
- Elisabeth Hahn discusses body-shaming in opera
- Shawn Reynaldo highlights the importance of metadata
- Liz Pelly explains how libraries could play an important role in the music ecosystem
- Carina del Valle Schorske writes movingly about dancing in New York this summer
- Nate Rogers takes an in-depth look at the state of music copyright
- Pudding has a visual history of Rickrolling
Notes On Process: Danyel Smith
The latest edition of Notes On Process is here! The idea of this column is simple: I invite a writer to a Google Doc where I’ve copy-pasted one of their pieces and added a bunch of footnotes with flattery, jokes, and questions. They reply to my queries, and then we provide you with a link to the doc where all of our marginalia is visible. The goal is to provide a window into the writing and editing process, so that folks can see how great writers think about their work.
One of Danyel Smith's best known pieces is her ESPN story about Whitney Houston's performance of the "Star Spangled Banner." Danyel has talked about that piece at length elsewhere, not least on her excellent podcast Black Girl Songbook, so I wanted to ask her about something different. We traded some notes on another piece about the Star Spangled Banner, sung by José Feliciano, called "The Perilous Fight." Danyel is one of the best music journalists out there, and she left a lot of wisdom in the doc. I hope you enjoy it!
Check out the Google Doc here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Ronan Munro:
Oxford has a great ongoing project called The Young Women’s Music Project which helps young women learn about and perform music and all the issues around it, via gigs, workshops, talks, training and more. They’re always in need of funds.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Love Music Documentaries? Know How To Take Great Screengrabs? Pitch Me!
Over the past year and a half, I've featured documentary film reviews in the newsletter in the "Stuff You Gotta Watch" column. I'm currently looking for one or two more people to contribute reviews to the section. One of my major goals is to feature films that are NOT in the zeitgeist right now. The more obscure and the less timely, the better. (Seriously!) I'd love to turn people on to unexpected things and/or remind them of long-lost films that deserve a second look. The reviews pay $50 (USD) and are typically two or three paragraphs long. (You'll also need to send me screengrabs from the doc to include with the review.)
For anyone interested, please send me an email with the subject line "PITCH: Music Docs." Please include in the email three screengrabs from your favorite music documentary, a list of your three favorite music documentaries, and some examples of your writing. I’ll take pitches until the end of this week, and then respond to everyone once I’ve had time to go through all of the submissions.
Q&A: Tatiana Cirisano
Tatiana Cirisano is a reporter at Billboard, focused on the intersection of music and technology. Before working at Billboard, she was published in places like Nylon and Complex. She makes her home in Brooklyn. In this excerpt from our interview, Tatiana offers a tip for music journalists.
Don’t take anyone or anything too seriously. I mean, of course, you should take your work seriously and take pride in that. But it’s easy to get distracted by Hustle Twitter, everyone else’s outward projections of success, etc., and start thinking that you don’t belong or that everyone else knows 100% exactly what they're doing (I promise you, they don't). I also say this because I think that this industry can feel so fast-paced and high-stakes that I sometimes forget to enjoy the experiences I’m having, whether that’s interviewing an artist I love or covering an event. Don't forget to have fun with things.
Read the full interview with Tatiana here.
Podcasts!
- Rolling Stone's EJ Dickson and Brittany Spanos are launching a podcast called Don't Let This Flop
- Music lawyer and The Alternative founder Henderson Cole was interviewed on Next Lawyer Up
- MC Serch is launching a podcast about MF Doom
- Michailo Todua discusses the sociopolitical climate and electronic music in post-Soviet Georgia on Electronic Beats
- Dave Holmes will search for an obscure '90s boy band in a new podcast
- Pablo, The Don from Back Catalog explains why critics suck (sometimes)
Trivia Time
A UK artist once complained, “These critics approach music like books, like book collectors. They don’t listen with their ears. You never get a sense that they like music.” Who said it?
How Do You Do, Fellow TikTokers?
- @craigspoplife flips through a 1988 issue of Blues & Soul
- @garburator has a poetic video about the importance of deep listening
- @tommcgovern27 takes a trip to Guitar Center
- @marg.mp3 has a quick intro to Yellow Magic Orchestra
- @gwencarole becomes a living radio promo
Oh Hipster, Where Are You Now? (In Pickerel Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?)
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Q&A: Aaron Cohen
Aaron Cohen teaches humanities and English composition at City Colleges of Chicago and writes for numerous publications. His most recent book, Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power, is all about the outside forces that shaped R&B in Chicago during the 1960s and 1970s. The reason that I got in touch with Aaron, though, is because of a recent Chicago music history project for which he wrote about 50 Chicago music landmarks. In this excerpt from our interview, Aaron explains what it’s all about.
The project is an effort by the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) to mark significant spots of musical history in Chicago. The city is working with the graphic arts company Sonnezimmer to design a web site that includes a map of the locations, photos of what the locations look like today, and also vinyl markers on the sidewalks in front of each location. People can use their smart phones to tap the code at each location and read about its musical significance. The ideal is for the first 50 markers to also represent the diverse range of musical idioms that have been crucial not just to Chicago, but showcase how much music the city has given to the world: blues, jazz, classical, folk, rock, house, gospel, soul to name just a few. Some markers also show how Chicago is not just the birth place for musical styles, but also is crucial for the history of manufacturing and selling instruments (from the Hammond organ to the harp) and jukeboxes. So I'm excited about how wide ranging the project is, especially since so many people in and outside of Chicago need to know how much range and depth there is to this history.
Read the full interview with Aaron here.
Bits, Bobs
- Creative lead and brand developer William Rauscher has a new newsletter
- Jonathan Valania has passed away
- The Creative Independent is turning five and looking for readers to record birthday messages
- theLAnd has launched a Kickstarter for its latest issue
- In 2019, Maureen Mahon created a poster for The Shed that outlines Black contributions to just about every genre of music you can imagine
Pivoting to Video
- Ted Gioia makes the case that three-minute songs are bad for music
- Polyphonic pens a love letter to pop punk
- Aubrey Bergauer recently hosted a panel about classical music and NFTs
- The Punk Rock MBA wonders what killed thrash metal
- Grady Smith goes deep on country music TikTok
Sounds Like I Qualify For A Visiting Professorship!
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Academic Stuff
- Call for Proposals: The 2022 Pop Conference theme is “When I Think of Home: Race and Borders in Popular Music” [Proposals due November 15 to proposals@popconference.org]
- New issues: Ethnomusicology Forum, Journal of the Society for American Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Notes, Muziki, and American Music
- The Popular Music Books in Process event series is returning, starting today with a talk by Joshua Clover
- Call for Proposals: Music and Antifascism: Reflections on the Past and Possibilities in the Present [Due October 15]
- Call for Proposals: A special edition of Perfect Beat on Metal and Hardcore in Aotearoa and the Pacific Islands [Due September 20]
- Call for Proposals: "Press Start": A Video Game Music Symposium [Due October 31]
- The Latin GRAMMY Cultural Foundation has opened the application window for their 2022 Research and Preservation Grants Program [Deadline November 20]
- Registration is now open for the conference Responses in Music to Climate Change
- The Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum will take place on November 8th and 9th
Q&A: Leonard Lehrman
Leonard Lehrman has been passionate about music since birth. In his interview with me, he says, "I was given a toy piano, songbooks, and crayons, and promptly started to try devising my own notation to help me remember melodies." In addition to writing music, he's written for countless outlets, including Opera Monthly, Jewish Currents, and SoundWordSight.com. In this excerpt from our interview, he breaks down a typical week.
Sunday mornings, I play at a mostly Black Lutheran church 8 minutes away, where I've been since 2014... Mondays (and other days as needed) I work as Reference Librarian at Oyster Bay-East Norwich Public Library, where I've been since March 1995. (I’m the oldest librarian there, and also the one who's been there the longest). Tuesdays I rehearse with violinist Daniel Hyman, whom I've known for 10 years, and with whom I've been doing monthly Zoom concerts (along with soprano Helene Williams) since last December, in conjunction with our local Valley Stream library. The President of the Library Board recently said we had "put the library on the map."(!) Other days I work at editing, archiving, arranging, orchestrating, or printing out parts for my 12 operas, 7 musicals, 237 other works, adaptations and translations (from German, Russian, French, Romanian, Yiddish, Hebrew and Ladino) and organizing performances of them, as well as writing occasional reviews of performances and recordings. I just finished what I believe is the first complete setting of Amanda Gorman's poem "The Hill We Climb."
Read the full interview with Leonard here.
The Closing Credits
Thanks for reading! 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
The artist in question is Neil Tennant, one half of the Pet Shop Boys. He said it in The Bulletin in 1986. [h/t rockcritics.com]
A Final Note
Thanks for reading! 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…