Rachel Narozniak Interview
Rachel Narozniak is a senior writer at Dancing Astronaut and a freelance music journalist with bylines in Billboard Dance. As she puts it, “I used to be very focused on the minutiae of the dance/electronic space when it came to developing features and pitches. Now, I try to focus on what this minutia adds up to: the bigger-picture, conceptual angles that allow music journalists like myself to point to emergent trends and existing patterns in this space. I used to be very zoomed in, so to speak. These days, I’ve zoomed out and have started to look from more of a birds-eye view perspective.”
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I always like to say that I got into music journalism completely by accident. During my senior year (2017) at Rutgers University, where I majored in English, I took a creative writing course. One of the assignments was to create a tabloid-style celebrity profile that took an unconventional angle. I chose to write about Marshmello (who was the hottest thing going in the dance/electronic space at the time), focusing not on the expected question at the time—“who’s under the helmet?”—but rather, his philanthropic partnership with Electric Family. I tweeted the story at him, hoping he’d see it. He didn’t, but Crust Nation, a New York events producer and promotion company with a small dance/electronic blog, did. One of their personnel DM’d me telling me that I should come write for them. I loved dance/electronic music, and I also loved to write, but beyond this writing assignment, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could combine these two passions. I took a role as Crust Nation’s only Music Editor and was responsible for curating and writing all music, culture, and news pieces for their blog.
As I gained experience at Crust Nation, Dancing Astronaut (DA) and Billboard were the two major outlets that I sought to emulate in my editorial coverage and strategy at Crust Nation. A little over a year after I took the Music Editor role, DA put out a call for writers. I applied and was brought on as a Contributing Writer in July 2017. I’ve been with DA ever since and have held every single editorial role at the outlet, from Contributing Writer to Editor-in-Chief. I stepped down as Editor-in-Chief of DA in September to allow myself more time to develop my career as an independent music journalist. In addition to continuing to serve DA as a Senior Writer, I have started to contribute to Billboard Dance. Knowing how I looked up to these platforms when I was just getting my start in dance/electronic music journalism, it’s very humbling to have had opportunities to write for both.