October 30 - Recommendations Smörgåsbord
October 30 - Recommendations Smörgåsbord
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.
Hey y’all! It’s been a week / month / year for everyone. As a way of focusing on what made many of us fall in love with music journalism in the first place, I thought it might be nice to take a break from the usual this week and just celebrate great things. So I’m giving the newsletter over to a sampling of recommendations offered up by the folks that I’ve interviewed. I hope you find something that inspires you.
Jason Schneider
My favourite writer is Nick Tosches, and one of his pieces I’d recommend is “The Devil In George Jones,” published in Texas Monthly, July 1994. It’s also in The Nick Tosches Reader anthology, which is where I first saw it, and it might be the most insightful and thorough profile of an artist in any genre I’ve ever read. Along with providing a detailed overview of Jones’ career, Nick shows incredible empathy in describing the many contradictions in Jones’ personality. Anyone who’s enjoyed the George & Tammy mini-series should definitely read it.
Quinn Moreland
Amanda Petrusich is obviously the GOAT for many reasons but I consistently return to her May 2020 profile of Phoebe Bridgers. This piece has everything but I particularly love the scene-setting. It begins at a benefit for Tibet House U.S. and then moves to lunch at Grand Central Oyster Bar. Both scenarios offer rich glimpses into Bridgers’ character. The latter half takes place over FaceTime and Amanda highlights the weirdness of this setup without letting the piece suffer.
Richard Osborne
Bernard Gendron’s "Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs." It provides a great response to Adorno’s critiques of the mass production of popular music and has a good conceit: Adorno compares the production of songs to the production of cars; Gendron provides his response by looking at a doo-wop group who were named after a car.
Allie Martin
Every one of my students has to read at least three chapters of Fernando Orejuela’s Rap and Hip-Hop Culture, because it sets the stage for how I teach music in general. We start from cultural context, thinking about how and why people make the sonic decisions that they do. Rap and Hip-Hop Culture gives us multiple origin stories of what made hip-hop into the global force that it is today: South Bronx, Afro-Diasporic, and musical. This is how I think we should learn and teach music, so all of my students read it at some point.
Aidan Levy
I’ll throw a few out there: Brent Hayes Edwards and Katherine Whatley’s “‘Ornette at Prince Street’: A Glimpse from the Archives” in Point of Departure is a deep dive into the politics and soundscape of Ornette Coleman’s Prince Street loft.
Damien Love wrote a series of pieces on Lou Reed’s late ’70s output and goes long on his blog. Insightful oral history, particularly the one on Street Hassle.
Part of Roland Barthes’s “The Grain of the Voice” discusses what he terms “adjectival criticism.” It’s worth considering the overuse of adjectives in music criticism, either deciding to earn each adjective or to acknowledge them as to some extent inherently subjective.
Monique Charles
Outside of my own musicological discourse analysis paper, I recommend Jennifer Lena's Banding Together. This book is excellent because it provides students with the sense of music genres and their life cycles. It helps students to connect and understand the life cycle of a journal of music understanding music in this framework facilitates ease of discussion with my students.
Lambros Fatsis
Here’s a text that is not “music journalism” per se, but writing about music nevertheless: Ralph Ellison’s essay "Living with Music" from Shadow and Act. I think it will resonate with all music heads as reassurance that this is a life worth living and that tuning into beats, bars and their effect on our consciousness is vital, important and serious as (y)our life!
Also, June Jordan’s only published novel: His Own Where. Written entirely in Black English [AAVE], it is a love story which was written—as Jordan tells us—as "a way of familiarising kids with activist principles of urban redesign or, in other words, activist habits of response to environment […] for the promotion of flexible and pacific communal street life." So, using a novel to sensitise us to a different politics of (urban) social life sounds so inspiring to me—as a reminder of how rarely we draw on culture to improve our politics; not as/for the administration of the state, but as the very life of the polis: the public/civic realm.
Hannah Edgar
Every music writer should read this awe-inspiring Bitter Southerner feature about the origins of the folk song "Swannanoa Tunnel." To me, it's a reminder that it's just as essential to apply our critical faculties to aesthetic discourses of the past as to the discourses of today and tomorrow. You never know what falsehoods have been left to fester.
Will Groff
This obituary of legendary country music journalist Peter Cooper, which includes the full transcript of a speech he gave at a writers’ conference last year, hit me right in the gut. I never met Peter, but his career has been hugely inspirational to me and I just love the way he talks about writing. “Try for the occasional big hit, but embrace the single to right” is an unforgettable piece of advice, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t know the first thing about baseball.
Julia Grella O'Connell
“The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie: On the Trail of the Phantom Women Who Changed American Music and Vanished without a Trace” by John Jeremiah Sullivan is a piece I love. It’s an encapsulation of the whole lost world of the country blues, the little-known contributions of women artists to it, and subsequent blues fandoms and collecting crazes, in a piece that transcends its form and moves into the realm of digital humanities.
Also, an assignment I give to every class is the short story “The Appropriation of Cultures” by novelist Percival Everett. It’s funny, moving, utopian, and understated, and it really makes students think about race, class, and the iconography that demonstrates those things. There’s a wonderful recording of a live reading by Ruben Santiago-Hudson that you can find on YouTube.
The Closing Credits
Thanks for reading! 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.
How Can I Support The Newsletter?
Here are three easy ways you can support the newsletter:
- Forward it to a friend
- Buy me a coffee
- Become an ongoing supporter of the newsletter
What sort of perks are there for ongoing supporters?
Insider Extra - An additional e-mail from me each week, usually featuring job listings, freelance calls, and more
How To Pitch Database - Access to a database with contact information and pitching info for hundreds of publications
Reading Recommendations - Access to a resource page collecting great pieces of music journalism, sourced from great music journalists
Advice - Access to a resource page devoted to collecting advice from journalists and editors on how to excel at music journalism
Interviews - Access to the hundreds of interviews that have appeared in the newsletter, with writers and editors from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, and more
A Friendly Reminder
If you can’t afford to subscribe for access to ongoing supporter extras, no matter the reason, please hit me up at music.journalism.insider@gmail.com. I’ll be happy to give you a free one-year subscription to the newsletter. This offer is extended especially for college students and recent grads, but is open to anyone.
Some Final Notes
Thanks for reading! I make playlists every single week. Check them here! 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 X, it’s @JournalismMusic. Until next time...