Javier Rodríguez-Camacho Interview
I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. Click here to subscribe!
Javier Rodríguez-Camacho is a Bolivian music writer. He has been active as a podcaster, journalist, and critic since 2006. He is the author of Testigos del fin del mundo, a retrospective of Latin indie music in the 2010s. Between 2014 and 2020, he was a staff writer at Tiny Mix Tapes, and since 2020, he’s published the newsletter Visiones Incomunicadas. He is also an associate professor at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I was born in Bolivia and lived there until I turned twenty. My family was precariously middle class, but my parents made their best effort to keep us surrounded by books, music, and film. I vividly remember reading Giotto’s biography when I was eight, it was part of a series of books my parents bought from a traveling salesman, probably nothing special, but I think that's when I realized it was possible to write about art and artists.
Not much later, we got internet at home. The late 90s internet was a wild frontier, and I was the right age to make the most of it. The first song I downloaded was "Anarchy in the UK," shortly followed by more typical (and less cool) alt-rock tracks. I got into a lot of trouble in mIRC and ICQ chatrooms, filled my family’s computer with all sorts of viruses… but the internet not only gave me the opportunity to access information otherwise unavailable in what was then the poorest country in South America; I was provided with the tools to publish my writing. My earliest pieces are probably still out there on IMDb, Last.fm and Rate Your Music. Shortly after that, blogs became common. In 2006, we created one with my brother and some friends. Also in 2006, we started “La música que escuchan todos”, arguably the first Bolivian podcast. We produced it weekly for two years. You can still listen to it if you are curious about our very teenaged opinions and voices. Those roots are probably why I feel most at home writing for digital media and, more often than not, self-publishing.
In parallel to DIY digital media, I started writing for Bolpress and La Epoca in 2004. Nevertheless, it was the notoriety of the film reviews that we published in our blog that caught the attention of Andrés Laguna, Editor in Chief of La Ramona, the cultural magazine published by Opinión, a national newspaper based in my hometown. He invited me and my brother to write for them and we became regular contributors in October 2006. We joined an incredibly young and enthusiastic team. The oldest writer was in their late twenties, and we all wanted to do things differently, talk about new artists, and look beyond our borders. In a way, to react to the effect the internet had in our upbringings.
I left Bolivia in 2009, so my time as a staff member at La Ramona was brief, though those were unrepeatable years for good and bad. In 2008 the financial crisis did away with the last remnants of traditional music media and the advent of social networks and video streaming set things up for the ripples we are still experiencing today. In La Ramona, we were naïve enough to start a new media firm, even obtaining seed funds from the World Bank, but that proved to be a fool’s errand. We crashed and burned within a year, the victim of young hubris and poor management. Luckily the newspaper wanted us back and that adventure did not become the complete disaster it could have been.
Before moving to Barcelona, where I went to grad school between 2009 and 2016, I was named “The Next Great Rock Critic” by Crawdaddy! Magazine. They had a contest; I sent my clippings and things went far better than expected. It was a tremendous honor and instilled in me some sense of responsibility, a life mission of sorts. I committed to chronicling independent music from the Spanish-speaking world because of that. The timing was not the best, though, since I was moving to Barcelona and could hardly pitch consistently to the magazine, not to mention the financial crisis eventually shuttered the whole thing. I don’t know if I could have used that opportunity to build a writing career had I fully committed to it instead of becoming an academician. I know some other contest finalists are still writing but also went into academia. Perhaps there was no other way. I do hope that I can still live up to the expectations that came with the accolade.
What happened next?
Moving to Barcelona was key to pursuing my present professional path. I am a university professor, and that has been my day job since 2016. In September of that year, I left Barcelona and moved to Bogotá to join Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. My research and lecturing are related to the creative industries, but I often approach them from the business side.
I still write about music, although the grad school years marked a shift to longform writing and music criticism instead of journalism. While in Barcelona, I published two book chapters and contributed a handful of essays to anthologies in Bolivia and Spain.
However, I was not ready yet to give up journalism. In 2012, I started a new podcast, Radioactividad. It ran for three years and became my main creative outlet. In April 2014, I joined Tiny Mix Tapes as a news writer. I had been a reader for a long time and cherished the opportunity to join the staff. There was no better place to chronicle the online avant-garde; vaporwave, deconstructed club, and PC Music had their earliest champions on the site. And not only that, Tiny Mix Tapes used the antieconomic nature of music writing as a weapon against the industry and would encourage originality at all costs. My voice and taste were fundamentally shaped by my experience as a staff writer. In time, I started writing features, film and album reviews, doing interviews and covering festivals. It was not exactly a shock when we went on hiatus in 2020, since Tiny Mix Tapes had been running on the heroic efforts of a few editors for far too long, but it was no less disheartening for that. Without a home, I focused on writing my book, started a newsletter, had new bylines in Colombia and the US, and began writing for La Ramona again. That’s pretty much where I am today.
Did you have any mentors along the way? What did they teach you?
I did not study anything related to media or journalism. I learned the trade by observing what others did and letting them guide me when they felt I could do things differently. I benefited tremendously from all the colleagues and editors I have worked with. That said, the closest thing to a mentor I had was not a journalist, either. Juan González was a mysterious character I never met in person but whom I became close to basically through the internet. We met through my blog and kept in contact via email between 2006 and 2009. He was a writer, translator, and literary critic who had to leave Bolivia for the US amidst some scandal I never fully understood. As far as I know, it involved opposing factions of cultural journalists, a literary prize, and Juan's habit of writing using pseudonyms. Those involved never spoke about it, and the matter seemed settled with Juan's banishment since he not only left the country but the whole cultural scene. In the US he worked for a satellite company or something similar.
I did not know any of that when I met him. He was just some guy who would write interesting comments in my blog posts and keep coming back. Then we started corresponding. What I valued the most from our interactions was having someone to talk to who was willing to listen to me as a peer. He was generous not to fault me for being an over-eager young writer who ran his mouth too often and thought he had it all figured out. Juan would read my work and provide encouragement or criticism, sharing things that might help expand my worldview and challenge some preconceptions. He was also open to writing together despite the age and prestige disparity; he was in his early 40s when we met and had given up a notable literary career. I was just some blogger. He was a good friend until, true to character, he vanished without notice, cutting all ties with Bolivia as his profile had become too prominent for his liking. No one heard from him again until a few weeks ago, when we learned he passed away in 2022.
Walk me through a typical day-to-day for you right now. Most of my time is occupied by my work at the university. I teach two or three times a week and divide the remaining time between research and administrative work. There is a lot of variability within that frame.
I can listen to music while doing my job and do so using headphones at the office and a simple set of speakers at home. If I want to review something, I separate a couple of hours to listen to it properly, without major distractions and taking notes. In my experience, first-listens spark ideas that facilitate the writing process, even if they do not end up in the actual piece. I write a lot less than that, but I probably commit to such a listening session four times a week on average.
On a typical week, I go to two or three concerts. Live music reviews demand great speed, which is rarely possible given my job; I seldom write them. On the other hand, I frequently am on the road for conferences and guest lectures, which lets me attend concerts and festivals outside Bogotá.
I use a spreadsheet to register new releases, annotate, and rate them. I keep two parallel lists, one with Latin American music and another with everything else. Screencaps and note apps are a way to save ideas for later; I have written whole paragraphs on the treadmill, in the back of a taxi, or struggling to fall asleep. I prefer to leave a couple of days between finishing writing and editing a piece, something I can afford since I am not on a daily publishing schedule.
I use lunchtime to skim the music press and bookmark things I want to read later. I do not listen to music while doing chores. I opt for soccer matches, history podcasts, or Cartoonist Kayfabe, my favorite YouTube channel.
How has your approach to your work changed over the past few years?
The writing process itself hasn't changed much in the 17 years I've been doing this. Taking the time to engage with the music, researching, jotting down ideas, fleshing them out, editing... The most significant change happened when I joined Tiny Mix Tapes and got a chance to see how the industry worked: following deadlines, dealing with PR, assuming a house style, navigating the internal processes of a media firm with all the paperwork that needs to be done, etc. I had not been exposed to any of that before. The music industry in Bolivia is nonexistent; there are no major labels in the country and independent managers, press liaisons, and journalists work bordering a state of permanent collapse. It was nothing like being part of a US media organization, even one operating in the alternative circuit. That experience certainly shaped my views and approach to music writing as a profession.
Where do you see music journalism headed?
The development of generative AI and recommendation algorithms like the one TikTok has will likely benefit artists with established catalogs. Big players will remain big while the pond depletes for everyone else. Under those conditions, it’s hard for me to see a path for media focusing on emerging or niche artists, let alone attaining a scale that could sustain a business. However, I am not sure social media and streaming platforms will remain the way they currently are by the end of the decade. The climate crisis and the retreat of venture capital will probably have a say on that. Nonetheless, I am certain music journalism will continue to have a place. Perhaps in the form of smaller conversations, inhabiting closely-knit communities instead of the ever-scalable fiction we’ve been led to believe by tech start-ups. How that works as an economic reality is still an open question. One thing I know for sure: Diderot was writing about music in 1750 and we will be writing about music in 2050.
What would you like to see more of in music journalism right now?
Canons serve a function, but there is also great value in challenging them. The rock/pop music canon is a particularly flawed one, given its predominance of music and musicians from the US and UK, often male and from broadly similar backgrounds. The last decade has seen that canon seriously questioned for the first time. I would like that effort to be more systematic, going from an opportunity to update an old ranking and attract clicks to a meaningful discussion of the political and aesthetic implications of such changes. We have our own imperfect canons in Latin America, too. Class and race are huge limiting issues, not to mention internalized colonialism. I celebrate that conversations along these lines have begun as new voices and experiences have entered music journalism. I would like to see more of that.
What would you like to see less of in music journalism right now?
I sometimes get the impression that we let too much of the music-writing agenda be controlled by the industry. I understand why that happens. We are all trapped in a platform-capitalism hellscape that breeds uniformity, dehumanizes and exploits us. Writers are more likely to listen to an album that gets pushed their way by some algorithm or reaches them through industry efforts. Side jobs and precarious freelance gigs limit what can realistically be done, not to mention editorial demands. Fans will probably want to read a piece on something they know or have heard about. Social media is built on familiarity as the honeypot for engagement and profit. I am not telling you anything you don’t know already. Then let me give you an example. Last year, the same album topped 25 year-end lists across mainstream and alternative publications. I would like to see less of that.
What's one tip that you'd give a music journalist starting out right now?
Music writing is part of the literary arts and can aspire to beauty as great as the toll it takes. Music writing is a craft and needs to be cultivated as such. Music writing is an economic activity and is not immune to market forces. Never losing sight of those three dimensions will save you a lot of heartbreak.
Making a job out of doing something you love also means doing job-things with something you love. If you are interested in a career in music journalism, you must learn about the business and the industry as much as about music and writing. Network, promote, plan, compromise. There will probably be one or more day jobs involved, potentially disconnected from music. That’s a part of the experience not often talked about. On the flip side, if you want to write about music, you will do it because you need to get it out of you to continue to exist. No matter what anyone else does or says. A story or a whole library, you will find a way to get there.
What artist or trend are you most interested in right now?
Feli Colina took a giant leap forward with her album El Valle Encantado (2022), an enthralling mix of North Argentinian folk rhythms, experimental ambitions, and contemporary club music. Her previous album Feroza (2019) had great moments, but this one is just something else: a major multimedia project drenched in ancient mysticism yet invested in the present and its struggles, wholly sustained by Feli Colina’s audacity, charisma, and control of pop and traditional music. She is not part of a trend or connected to a local scene in any explicit way, though her work reflects shifting discourses and sonorities in today’s Argentina, projecting itself forward and backward, beyond the current moment. She has kept her creative pace with LXS INFERNALES (Del Valle Encantado), a collection of B-sides she just released, and a series of increasingly elaborate live shows. I would not want to miss whatever she does next.
What's your favorite part of all this?
Music provides us with a repertoire of stories, sounds, images, and metaphors we can use to express our feelings and find our place in the world. It’s become increasingly hard to articulate and communicate emotion, as the market has commodified even that realm. Artists ignite connections, establishing a collective exercise in empathy. A musician felt something and put it into a song. That song made me feel a certain way and I wrote about it, hopefully conjuring that reaction. Then the reader can close the circle by listening to the song and using it to articulate that emotion in their environment. The opportunity to participate in that cycle is all I’m here for.
What was the best track / video or film / book you've consumed in the past 12 months?
Por culpa de una flor by María Medem. It’s a graphic novel about loneliness and estrangement, a work both personal and preoccupied with the rural Spanish villages that are being emptied out as young people leave them for the cities. It also establishes a dialog with flamenco, letting the colors and shapes of the images rhyme, sometimes approaching a peculiar state of synesthesia. It’s a beautiful comic that will move you even if you do not understand a word of Spanish.
If you had to point folks to one piece of yours, what would it be and why?
My 2022 best-of lists accurately illustrate what interests me right now, though there is not a lot of writing there and it is all in Spanish. Considering that, my review of Helado Negro’s This Is How You Smile for Tiny Mix Tapes might be a good sample of where I was at the end of my tenure as a staff writer there.
Anything you want to plug?
I have a new book out: Testigos del fin del mundo, a retrospective of independent music in the Spanish-speaking world in the 2010s. It is a collection of 120 reviews mapping the sounds of a continent and its people across a decade, a period going from localized and mostly analog DIY scenes to hyper-connected global stardom. Nonetheless, more than following a historiographic approach, I attempted to write the emotional chronicle of so-called millennials as they entered adulthood in a world that slowly fell apart. The book features artists such as Javiera Mena, Elysia Crampton, Lucrecia Dalt, El Guincho, El mató a un policía motorizado, Arca, Matías Aguayo, Niño de Elche, Los Pirañas, Rosalía, Últimos Glaciares, and many more.
Did you enjoy this interview? You can support this newsletter by subscribing here. Among other things, you’ll get full access to all 600+ interviews I’ve done as part of the newsletter. I’ve talked with writers and editors from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, and many more.