#140: Precariousness Requires Community
Precariousness Requires Community
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 foghorn enthusiast Jennifer Lucy Allan, dance music freelance writer Arielle Lana LeJarde, and Australian music expert Graeme Turner. Plus! Reading recommendations, a Britpop doc, and more! But first…
Food For Thought
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Reading List
- Julyssa Lopez goes to Uvalde, reporting in the wake of the horrific school shooting in May
- Nitish Pahwa chats with Jim DeRogatis about the R. Kelly verdict
- Marc Burrows did not enjoy Glastonbury
- Lisa Whittington-Hill celebrates the women who built grunge
- Mychal Denzel Smith reveals what it’s like to be a long-time conscious hip-hop fan
- Joe Bebco profiles the jazz writer Scott Yanow
- Ruth Hartt explains how audiences once behaved at Mozart's operas
- Rod Davies reports on Australia's lack of support for session musicians
- Clarissa Brooks talks about her favorite (and least favorite) things on the internet
- Ted Gioia pulls back the covers on the hot mess of fair use and music
Lede Of The Week
I’ve been writing about music for decades, but I still can’t tell you when I can share part of a song for educational purposes. - Ted Gioia
Q&A: Jennifer Lucy Allan
Jennifer Lucy Allan is a writer and broadcaster. She’s currently a freelance writer for The Quietus, The Wire, and The Guardian, among other places, as well as one of the hosts of BBC Radio 3's Late Junction. Her first book, The Foghorn's Lament, was released in 2021. She’s currently working on a second, due out in 2024. In this excerpt from our interview, Jennifer explains how her approach to her work has changed in the past few years.
I had a fairly critical burnout around 2010, a period where I was working full time and coming home and doing freelance writing. It took me a while to work out what it was—I felt empty, subject to very bad moods, and just generally flat and completely uninspired by music. I'm a fairly robust person, and was ill equipped to deal with this state of mind. I never want to go there again, so I don't often work past about 6:30-7pm, and I don't work weekends unless it's absolutely necessary. John Doran gives me Sunday deadlines for my column [at The Quietus] and I change them in my diary to Friday. Mainly, I try to keep the freelancer's guilt about any minute not working at bay. I am in a position now where I have enough work coming in that I don't need to spend days chasing it. There are still good months and bad months, but I'd rather be a bit skint and spend an afternoon reading for pleasure, than wring myself out for an extra £150.
More philosophically speaking, my approach to writing has changed enormously in the last few years, I've moved from being largely a critic to being more of a cheerleader. John Doran gave me the Rum Music column at The Quietus, and the radio is a place where I'm mostly shouting about what I love; what I'm fascinated by; what's blown my mind. I think my old self would have scoffed at this, or seen it as a betrayal of the craft or something, but I feel that I'm now in a position to be a champion and have a platform with certain cultural capital, which I can use to everyone's advantage to keep the big ship avant-garde afloat. That's not to say there isn't music I dislike with a passion, but my main role is to sift through the mire and point to what I think is brilliant. I also think the landscape has changed a lot—precariousness requires community.
Read the full interview with Jennifer here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Jennifer Lucy Allan:
There is so much that needs support right now, let's keep it specific to culture. Mentoring is a really crucial way of giving back once you're an established writer. It is much more difficult to stay in journalism now than when I was starting out, so if you're a stable professional, think about providing some form of mentorship or donating to organisations such as Arts Emergency in the UK.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
You Might Be A Music Journalist If...
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Podcasts!
- Love is the Message explores Brazilian music
- Jim DeRogatis interviews winners of the Sounds Opinions arts criticism prize
- Michael Barclay joins The Bottlemen to talk about his new book on Canadian music
- Nyshka Chandran discusses her recent article on Web3 for The Exchange
- Dan Charnas chats about his recent J. Dilla book on Broken Record
Q&A: Arielle Lana LeJarde
Arielle Lana LeJarde is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. She focuses on profiling and interviewing underrepresented underground acts in hip-hop and dance music, and has bylines in Pitchfork, Mixmag, and more. In addition to her music writing, Arielle works at a booking agency, and does artist management and PR work on the side. (She's been cited for her work on inclusion riders in live events in dance music.) In this excerpt from our interview, Arielle talks about how her approach has changed over the past few years.
Kat Bein taught me this, but I’ve learned to treat music journalism more as a part of the journalism industry, rather than the music industry. I’m not writing to make artists like me anymore. I’m not even writing to make them happy. I’m writing to help tell a story or provide context about a bigger issue or the industry at large. Writing without the urge to please people has made me a better writer for sure.
Where do you see music journalism headed?
This has been happening for a while, but I see it headed towards video and audio. That’s not to say that I think everyone with a YouTube channel, TikTok account, or a podcast, is a journalist. Most of them are just media or social media personalities. But unfortunately, I don’t see print or written journalism as respected as it once was. A lot of it has become glorified PR. It’s sad. In 10 years, when people want to look back at how music is now, that’s what they’ll be reading.
Read the full interview with Arielle here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Arielle Lana LeJarde:
Nightlife Safety Summit is a femme presenting and queer-led educational program on nightlife violence prevention for dance music industry professionals. It differs from every other program due to its year-long commitment and processing (a guided safe space to process thoughts, emotions, and experiences of heavy topics).
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.
A new music scene often has a way of developing organically out of what came before it. This was the case with Britpop, which emerged in the early to mid-’90s as a direct reaction to the grungification of British music and as a natural extension of homegrown shoegaze.
But while the genre's unique musical identity slowed the import of cultural Americanisms, it also promoted numerous toxic behaviors like lad culture, which relied on class tourism and problematic masculinity. What came out of it, though, was some unforgettable songs that remain indelible cornerstones of British music.
The Britpop Story details the entire process in a remarkably concise manner. Subtitled "It Really Really Really Could Happen" (after a lyric from Blur's "The Universal"), this short BBC documentary narrated by The Last Party author John Harris explains the whats, whos, and whys behind the rise and fall of Britpop, from its beginnings as the glorified recovery of a lost "Englishness" to an inevitable drug-saturated implosion.
Pivoting To Video
- Vox and The Pudding examine what happens after a song goes viral on TikTok
- David Bruce asks, "What is the wildest music humanly possible?"
- Grady Smith has a few country music trends you can't unhear
- Polyphonic explains why folk music defeated the Soviet Union
- Nahre Sol shares a lot of opinions on what makes music cheesy
Trivia Time
What animal starred with Stevie Nicks on her 1981 solo cover of Rolling Stone?
Five Things: The First Editor's Letter
Nothing is more passionate than a magazine's first editor’s letter. It spells out exactly what you want to do, why you want to do it, and often why you hate everything else happening right now. Here are five inaugural Editor’s Letters from a variety of music publications:
Gary Sperrazza, The Shakin Street Gazette, 1973: It’s hard to be original in Buffalo. And that ain’t sayin’ much about the competition. It’s just that no one will let you… So we don’t plan on being ‘original.’ We’re just gonna do it the way it shoulda been done in the first way. And if that’s original, well…
Ira Robbins and Karen Rose, Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press, 1974: “The Trouser Press” is the name of a song by the Bonzo Dog Band. It became our name because one of our editors has an odd attraction to the word “press.” “Trans-Oceanic” joined “Trouser” (and our hero, “Press”) in order to define our scope of interest, information, and, we hope someday, readership. Yeah. “Trans-Oceanic” also comes in handy in forming our initials, TOTP, which cleverly stand for “Top of the Pops,” the Kinks’ song, or “Tops of the Pops,” the British TV show. So we’re the Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press, the Trouser Press, or just plain TOTP. Call us what you will.
Disc, 1958: It’s usual on these occasions to say “We hope you like it.” We don’t “hope,” we are “sure” you are going to like this new paper. We are going to keep it fresh, invigorating and up-to-the-minute, with plenty of pictures and the best in expert comment in all fields.
Anthony Wood, The Wire, 1982: So, why this new magazine? Quite simply - as a country that has one of the largest jazz consumptions in Europe, it is poorly served by information, comment and opinion on the subject. This situation has become more pronounced by Melody Maker's recent abandonment of jazz (sorry, Mike Oldfield, but a token eighth-of-a-page of news does not a jazz coverage make).
Geoff Barton, Kerrang!, 1981: WOOARGHHH! And welcome to Kerrang!, perhaps the loudest rock magazine of all time… The popularity of HM is eternal. And although it may now no longer be fashionable for the likes of the Sun to cover the scene, the fact remains that today more devastating discs are being bought than ever before.
Got a fascinating first Editor's Letter you'd like to share? Hit reply on this email and let me know. I'm especially interested in digital publications.
Bits, Bobs
- Richard Traruskin has passed away
- Paste Magazine turned 20 years old
- Emery Kerekes won the 2022 Rubin Prize in Music Criticism
- Stereogum launched a new membership subscription
- John Earls has been named Best Writer in the Specialist category at the British Society of Magazine Editors Talent Awards
- UC Riverside has one of the biggest Japanese hip-hop collections in the world
Try Academic Twitter...
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Q&A: Graeme Turner
Graeme Turner is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. He’s the founding director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, and one of the leading figures in cultural and media studies in Australia. His new book is a 33 1/3 about John Farnham's Whispering Jack. It's the inaugural edition of the "Oceania" list, which aims to publish work about music from Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific. In this excerpt from our interview, he describes the book.
The series publishes books dealing with important record albums, and so the choice of Whispering Jack was in many ways a no-brainer. It's still the best selling Australian produced album in Australia, the basis for the revival of John Farnham's career, and the record which turned him and many of his songs into national icons.
I had done some research into John Farnham during the 1980s, when I was interested in the arrival of an Australian version of arena-rock—mainly Farnham and Tina Arena, at the time. I had become interested too in his national status, as the loved good guy of Australian rock, on the one hand, but also the "singer’s singer," someone who everyone in the business respected and admired for his talent and ability.
Despite his prominence in our rock history, there had been literally no interest in him from the academic field of popular music studies in Australia, and so there was an important gap to be filled. He was clearly unfashionable for music academics, and for some of the music journalists, and his lack of the street cred that comes from building your audience in the pub circuit probably played a part in this. But it is quite a gap to leave in our account of the history of Australian popular music, and in any case I had been admirer of his work for years, so it seemed like a good topic to explore.
Read the full interview with Graeme here.
Academic Stuff
- New issues: M/C Journal, Contemporary Music Review, Music & Science, and SMT-V
- Call for Papers: Between Old Worlds and New: Keyboard Encounters, c. 1700-1900 (Proposals due August 31)
- The National Endowment for the Humanities is currently accepting applications for its Archaeological and Ethnographic Field Research program
- Just launched: the True Echoes project, which “reconnects early sound recordings on wax cylinders from Australia, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, that are archived in the British Library Sound Archive with the communities in which they were made over a century ago”
- Registration is open for Music/Sound Through the Lens of Trauma: Methodology, Theory and History
- Call for Papers: The Aesthetics of Absence in Music of the Twenty-First Century (Abstracts due December 1)
- Registration is open for AMS-SEM-SMT 2022
- Call for Papers: Music, Research, and Activism (Proposals due October 15)
The Closing Credits
Thanks for reading! And thanks to Miranda Reinert for their help with this edition of the newsletter. 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.
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Trivia Time Answer
The animal that featured alongside Stevie Nicks was a cockatoo named Maxwellington, owned by her brother.
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...