#127: Gradually Mechanized
Gradually Mechanized
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 The Bridge executive producer Jayson Rodriguez; podcasters Matt Linder & Krystal Nylle Roberts; and musicologist and historian of technology Nikita Braguinski. Plus! Lots and lots of recommendations for things to read, listen to, and watch. But first…
May I Recommend Tequila Shots To "Into Dust"?
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Reading List
- The annual New York Times Magazine music issue dropped this week
- Rachel Cholst wonders whether there is a queer country sound
- Andre Gee shows how memes rap changed the rap game
- Margaret Frainier explains what Sergei Rachmaninov’s legacy tells us about musicians under the Putin regime
- Raffi Joe Wartanian looks at the history of the oud
- Philip Sherburne looks at how electronic music is using folk music as inspiration
- Tamlin Magee tells the tale of an EDM artist that has hijacked countless Spotify playlists
- Ernest Owens breaks down the hip-hop blogosphere's misinformation problem
- Sal DiGioia has a zine about concert-going in 2021
- Zack O’Malley Greenburg argues clowns and musicians are a lot more alike than you might think
Q&A: Jayson Rodriguez
Jayson Rodriguez is the showrunner and executive producer of The Bridge. Hosted by Nas and Miss Info, the podcast features "candid conversations with legendary figures who developed [hip-hop] culture and the new generation of voices carrying hip-hop forward." He's also the man behind the excellent newsletter Backseat Freestyle, an essential read for anyone looking to gain insight into the hip-hop landscape. In this excerpt from our interview, he explains who his approach to his work has changed over the past few years.
I think before I tried to have a totalist nature to my approach. Read every magazine cover to cover and listen to even mixtape and album. Now with so many outlets covering hip-hop, it’s just not possible to read everything. And now that content is also in podcast and video form. I just can’t attempt to have the same metabolism for that or I’ll never have the bandwidth to actually do work. So now I’m comfortable skimming or skipping and trying to hold onto the gist, here and there. While consuming in full the things that rise to the top or I find compelling.
How do you organize your work?
This part hasn't changed at all for me, but it’s always the lede and the quotes first. Whether I’m doing writing, video or audio, I have to have the lede or start together. That’s the nail from which I hand everything else. Then I organize the flow of my quotes to find an arc. Then I pursue the arc: what do I need to connect the lede to this quote, to create a middle, to start driving to the end. When I was younger, this was a process I was very comfortable with doing at night and late into the night. But now I like to do things early in the morning. Late at night I think about the next day too much. Early gives me more clarity. And I always outline in some loose, abstract way: bullet points, historical nuggets and drawing lines to connect points.
Read the full interview with Jayson here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Jayson Rodriguez:
I regularly donate to Foundation for Puerto Rico. Our education system didn’t do a great job of teaching students about the history of the island before the pandemic and with this revolt that’s happening now to ban books and limit teachings, I don't know if our country will ever truly know. But Puerto Rico really has been under America’s thumb for over 100 years and it’s made it such a challenge to install a functioning government. Add in the hurricane and earthquakes of recent years and outside of San Juan, you have a lot of people still trying to rebuild in a New Orleans type of way. They could use help.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
"The Closing Song Has Dynamics Unheard Elsewhere on the Album"
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Podcasts!
- Popcast charts the state of play in reggaeton
- Reply All solves a Spotify Wrapped mystery
- The Ringer Music Show wonders: Where are hip-hop's superstars?
- All Songs Considered hosts a roundtable on the albums that changed the lives of music writers
- SMT-Pod talks about the music theory subreddit
Q&A: Matt Linder & Krystal Nylle Roberts
Matt Linder is a hip-hop scholar, freelance podcast producer, and the creator of Flickers, a podcast exploring the work and lives of musicians who incorporate spirituality in their music. The newest season is all about Lauryn Hill, which is why Matt brought on Krystal Nylle Roberts, a writer and self-described "Lauryn Hill researcher." In this excerpt from our interview, both explain what they'd like to see more of in music podcasts.
Matt Linder: I want them to allow themselves to get really weird and wild. Explore new ways in which we can tell stories about music that makes you as a listener hear music through new ears.
Krystal Nylle Roberts: I don’t have enough knowledge about what’s out there in the world of music podcasts, but I can never get enough of storytelling. I feel like there is a litany of stories to be told from the music, to the artists, to the structure of the podcast itself that I think has the potential to garner long-term investment from listeners, which I believe is the power of storytelling.
What's one tip that you'd give a music podcaster starting out right now?
Matt Linder: Don’t overload yourself with your production schedule. Work on creating really high quality shows rather than putting out a ton of shows. If you are doing a narrative podcast and you are not required to release episodes by a certain date, produce all the episodes before you release the first episode. That way you can enjoy the ride of releasing episodes and not worry about having to produce the next ones while the others are coming out.
Krystal Nylle Roberts: I’m a newbie myself, so I would just say immerse yourself in your subject matter so that your podcast offers listeners as rich of an experience as possible.
Read the full interview with Matt and Krystal here.
Stuff You Gotta Watch
Stuff You Gotta Watch celebrates music journalism in video form. This week’s column is about Dzi Croquettes and written by Ana Leorne.
Four years were more than enough for dance and theatre group Dzi Croquettes to make their mark in Brazil. From 1972 until 1976—with the country under a strict (and often violent) military dictatorship—the androgynous troupe defied Brazil's traditionalist system and a strangling censorship that menaced each and every alternative cultural paradigm.
The name, of course, says it all: drawing inspiration from the San Franciscan legendary Cockettes, 13 men regularly put on outrageous shows that mixed musical revue, Broadway, and a great dose of humour in order to bring much needed colour to Brazilian society. Their contagious energy spread abroad, too: "I was knocked out!," exclaims Liza Minnelli, who later supported the group during their exile in Paris, where they wowed Josephine Baker and collaborated with Claude Lelouch in his film Le Chat et la Souris.
Gathering testimonies from almost every living member of the group, as well as several well-known names from the Brazilian artistic universe such as Ney Matogrosso, Betty Faria, Gilberto Gil, Miguel Falabella, and Cláudia Raia, this documentary details the spectacular rise and fall of Dzi Croquettes, from their Rio de Janeiro beginnings to unexpected glory in Europe and a disgraceful ending involving drugs, AIDS, and even murder.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Ana Leorne:
The record label Binaural Space has put out a compilation to raise money for People In Need - SOS Ukraine.
Trivia Time
Who was on the cover of the first issue of Crawdaddy?
Bits, Bobs
- NME celebrated its 70th anniversary this week
- Forget Wordle, here's Heardle
- Ellen Zoe Golden and Gavin Martin have passed away
- Music publicist Cary Baker is retiring
- Saffron Records has published the first edition of Saffron 'Zine
How Do You Do, Fellow TikTokers?
- @jaydotbell goes deep on the history of ghostwriting in hip-hop
- @raised_by_hippies pays tribute to Mark Lanegan
- @pablothedon rebuts the idea that R&B is a declining genre
- @markmallman remembers the deliciousness of Prince's pancakes
- @bakurifuto breaks down the difference between a soundtrack and a score
"It's Gonna Be Late... But It's Gonna Be Fantastic"
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Q&A: Nikita Braguinski
Nikita Braguinski is a musicologist and historian of technology. He studied musicology at the University of Cologne and wrote his PhD in media theory at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, a postdoctoral fellow in the music department at Harvard University, and most recently a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. His new book is Mathematical Music: From Antiquity to Music AI. In this excerpt from our interview, Nikita explains what made this area of research so interesting to him.
I am fascinated by the tension between music as a deeply personal experience and practice, and music as an almost fully formalized, standardized, and even mechanized set of “rules.” I think, the fact that music created in this semi-automatic way can be quite credible for a lot of people deserves a lot of attention, and could lead to deeper insights into what, ultimately, constitutes music. Of course, the issue of automation of human labor is a very urgent one, and it also has motivated me to study possible future scenarios around musical AI.
Can you briefly summarize your book?
My book, Mathematical Music. From Antiquity to Music AI, is a concise history of the ways in which mathematics has been used to create music. And since modern AI, such as machine learning, is based on a lot of mathematics, my book also looks at musical uses of artificial intelligence. I wrote the book for the non-specialist general audience, with the hope that it would help readers make sense of today’s music technology by situating it in a larger historical context.
The story of music, mathematics, and technology that I present in my book ranges from ratios in antiquity to random combinations in the 17th century, 20th-century statistics, and contemporary artificial intelligence. It provides a panorama of how thought processes involved in the creation of music became gradually mechanized. In the last chapters, I also take a look at what possibilities the near future of music AI might hold for listeners, musicians, and society.
Read the full interview with Nikita here.
Academic Stuff
- New issues: Early Music History, Journal of Mathematics and Music, Contemporary Music Review, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Metal Music Studies
- Registration is now open for the 2022 Harvard Graduate Music Forum Conference
- Elliott H. Powell has been elected to the American Studies Association National Council
- Call for Proposals: Black Feminism on the Edge book series
- Robin James is the new Acquisitions Editor for Philosophy and Media & Cultural Studies for Palgrave Macmillan
- Call for Chapter Proposals: Inscribed on Flesh: Culture, Trauma, and the Reemergence of Biopower during Times of Pandemic (Proposals due May 1)
- Registration is now open for Popular Music, Populism and Nationalism in Contemporary Europe
- Call for Conference Papers and Creative Practice: Voices In and Out of Place: Misplaced, Displaced, Replaced and Interlaced Voices (Submissions due April 30)
- Registration is now open for the Sixth International Conference of the Performance Studies Network
- Call for Papers: Composers’ Libraries: Cultures of Reading, Sites of Creation (Proposals due April 30)
- Registration is now open for Differentiating Sound Studies: Politics of Sound and Listening
- Call for Papers: AEMC Music and Politics Conference (Abstracts due April 30)
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 first issue of Crawdaddy didn't have anyone on the cover. It was a sheet of white paper that featured a quote by The Fortunes.
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...