#174: Retro-stans
Retro-stans
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 grime expert Alex de Lacey, Icelandic music authority Tore Størvold, and conjunto music scholar Erin E. Bauer. Plus! Reading and podcast recommendations! And more! But first…
The CDJ Is A Nice Touch
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Reading List
- Jaime Brooks provides a comprehensive guide to ghostwriters, virtual pop stars, and the world to come
- Gina Arnold watches Eurovision
- Jumi Akinfenwa is curious where all these cringe DJ names are coming from
- Ernie Smith hopes for a world where digital preservation is easier
- Philip Sherburne reports on a French drone festival interrupted by right-wing extremists
- Allison Hussey illuminates the invisible work of mothers in music
- MacEagon Voyce takes stock of Water & Music’s inaugural Wavelengths summit [h/t Music REDEF]
- Zach Schonfeld ranks every album called The Album
- Eli Enis explains why reading Bruce Pavitt’s Sub Pop has him optimistic about music criticism
- Craig Seymour has a warning for retro music stans
Lede Of The Week
Retro-stans need to keep in mind that they are perpetuating racism, classism, regionalism, and homophobia by using MTV play, chart positions, and commercial sales as indicators of popularity. - Craig Seymour
Q&A: Alex de Lacey
Alex de Lacey is an assistant professor of popular music at University of Groningen. His new book is Level Up: Live Performance and Creative Process in Grime Music, which is billed as “the first long-form ethnographic study of grime practice.” In this excerpt from our interview, Alex explained what drew him to the topic.
I spent my teenage years playing in jazz bands by day and listening to the radio at night. These contexts are sometimes seen as quite far apart from each other, but I could see so many similarities. Grime music is part of a longstanding trajectory of Black Atlantic practice, so really it’s no surprise that improvisation is a core component.
I was also pretty annoyed at some of the discourse around grime. As with many Black musical forms, a sense of moral panic was conjured by journalists and commentators at the time. Its intricacy and complexities were downplayed in favour of presenting it as a load of people shouting down a microphone with no rhyme or reason. The Guardian in 2004 referred to its "alien sound." Rather than performing, these artists bared their teeth to air "lyrical threats of extreme violence." These sorts of narratives disavowed its brilliance, and provided fuel to the fire of racist policing initiatives—most famously Form 696, a “risk assessment” document issued by the Metropolitan Police that requested the ethnicity of performers and likely attendees—that regularly shut down grime events and criminalised performers.
I wanted grime to be acknowledged for what it actually is: a nuanced, complex and vibrant form upheld by a fervent community of practitioners and fans that understand its conventions and hold them dear. In doing so, I hoped to address a critical lack and provide practitioners’ perspectives on the grounded performance networks of the London grime scene.
Read the full interview with Alex here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Alex de Lacey:
My best friend’s mum very sadly passed away at the end of last year. She worked closely with Find a Voice UK, a charity that helps children and adults with severe speech difficulties. My friend has signed up for SwimathonUK that’ll take place later this month, and is looking for donations to help the charity with the acquisiton of communication aids for their learning library.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Just Tying Up Some Loose Ends!
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Podcasts!
- Sound Expertise has launched its third season
- The JJA Podcast welcomes Geoffrey Himes and Tom Hull to talk jazz polls
- The Stack talks with graphic designer Neville Brody
- Switched On Pop is celebrating Daft Punk
- The New York Times chats with the team behind The Blog Era
Q&A: Tore Størvold
Tore Størvold is an associate professor of musicology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. His new book is Dissonant Landscapes: Music, Nature, and the Performance of Iceland. In describing his writing process, Tore explains that “usually, I can always cut the first paragraph of every section, because that paragraph is just me finding my way into the topic and ‘warming up.’ The reader does not need my warmup.“ In this excerpt from our interview, Tore explains what drew him to the topic.
I had long been troubled by a particularly persistent narrative about Iceland as a “naturally” musical—or musically natural—country, a place where glistening glaciers and erupting volcanoes inspire elfin locals to sound their voices and strum their guitars in mythic ways. I found these stereotypical accounts to be insufficient and damaging. That is why I wrote this book. I wanted to get beneath the ice and figure out what was actually going on.
The book has been many years in the making. I first visited Iceland back in 2012 for the annual Iceland Airwaves music festival in Reykjavík. This was around the time that I had to decide on a topic for my master’s thesis. For the longest time, I did not want to write about nature and landscape, as I did not want to play into the hands of the Icelandic tourist industry and its co-option of the island’s excitingly diverse musical culture. I feared I would only contribute to the ongoing romanticizing of the exotic North, a process that is felt strongly in Norway as well.
A few years later, when I began my doctoral studies, I discovered new frameworks for cultural analysis, such as ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, which taught me to write critically and reflexively about this squishy set of ideas that we call "nature." I was then able to probe the Icelandic "nature-music" narrative to uncover where it comes from and how it works as a cultural phenomenon.
Read the full interview with Tore here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Tore Størvold:
Julie’s Bicycle does a wonderful job of mobilizing diverse communities from across the arts to inspire cultural and political transitions needed to face the climate crisis.
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.
In the 1930s and ’40s, hundreds of female jazz musicians took the US by storm, playing both in all-girl bands and alongside their male counterparts. While some, like Melba Liston or Mary Lou Williams, managed to escape obscurity, by the 1950s most of them had been forgotten—until recently, that is.
The Girls in the Band is a fascinating documentary detailing the lives and artistry of those women who dared to defy gender norms in order to pursue a passion. As Clora Bryant, Roz Cron, Peggy Gilbert, Billie Rogers, and many others guide us through their upbringing and careers, we are introduced to a world where joy and talent reigned supreme despite the sexism, racism, and other types of oppression they endured. Besides the invaluable first-person testimonies, we are also treated to superb archival footage of the era, including performances from all-girl big bands such as Ina Ray Hutton and Her Melodears, Ada Leonard’s All-American Girl Orchestra, and Sweethearts of Rhythm.
Produced and directed by PBS documentarian Judy Chaikin, The Girls in the Band demonstrates how history often needs to be rewritten to reflect music genres and scenes more accurately, and how–in the process–it can provide inspiration to those who keep fighting the senseless barriers society imposes on them.
Bits, Bobs
- Alanna Nash has received this year's Rolling Stone Chet Flippo Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism
- Bandcamp employees have unionized
- The Internet Archive explains how it’s using AI to build its library of 78 RPM records
- Scott Poulson-Bryant looks back at the press history of voguing
Trivia Time
Scott Poulson-Bryant is credited as the co-founding editor of what magazine?
Pivoting To Video
- Def Goldbloom ponders the question: “Who was the first rapper?”
- Damien Riehl makes the case for why all melodies should be free to use
- Rick Beato dives deep into AI
- Polyphonic offers a brief history of the concept album
- Trash Theory explores how industrial became pop music
It’s Easier Than You Think!
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Q&A: Erin E. Bauer
Erin E. Bauer is an associate professor of musicology and chair of the music department at Muskingum University. Her new book is Flaco’s Legacy: The Globalization of Conjunto. With its publication, Erin says that she’s “wrapping up a long series of projects on Texas-Mexican conjunto music” and looking forward to new “work on roots-rock musician Ry Cooder and the use of the vocal stutter in popular and other musics in the twentieth century.” In this excerpt from our interview, Erin explains the focus of her research into conjunto.
In the realm of Texas-Mexican music, I’ve focused on the recent globalization and commercialization of what is often seen as (and is, in many ways) a locally-based folkloric genre. I’ve used music that functions outside of those stereotypes in style, participation, and audience to explore the nature of globalization, the definition of music as one particular genre or another, and how these ideas tie into self-imposed and also externally-based depictions of identity. For example, I explore how music that is characterized as “conjunto” tends to receive that classification (among audiences, commercial marketing efforts, awards shows, etc.) based on who is performing that music, rather than stylistic traits.
Artists who fall into stereotypical definitions of the typical conjunto practitioner are frequently characterized as quintessentially “conjunto,” even when the music itself challenges the stylistic boundaries of the genre and even when the artists describe their work alternatively. Meanwhile, the music of those whose hometown, cultural heritage, socioeconomic identity, etc., does not align with the most common “conjunto” identity tends to be defined as something other than conjunto. These ideas are not unique to conjunto, so my work helps to understand similar classifications throughout a range of musical styles.
Read the full interview with Erin here.
Academic Stuff
- New issues: American Music Perspectives, Journal of Mathematics and Music, Journal of the Society for American Music and Contemporary Music Review
- Call for Papers: Journal of Sonic Studies (Abstracts due July 30]
- Registration is open for The Aesthetics of Absence in Music of the Twenty-First Century
- Call for Papers: The Nineteenth Century Today: Interdisciplinary, International, Intertemporal [Abstracts due September 1]
- Vassar College has completed their audio archival collection digitization project
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.
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Trivia Time Answer
Scott Poulson-Bryant is credited as a co-founding editor of Vibe.
A Final Note
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 Twitter, it’s @JournalismMusic. Until next time...