#171: Swaying On The Sabbath
Swaying On The Sabbath
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 No Depression editor Stacy Chandler, blogger Corrigan Blanchfield, and music scholar Lauren Istvandity. Plus! Reading recommendations, an electronic music documentary, and much more! But first…
This All Tracks
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Reading List
- Eleanor Halls asks: What does an artist “owe” their fans?
- Josh Terry muses on the current state of music journalism
- Nina Vázquez pens a quick history of freestyle
- Mano Sundaresan runs down some of his favorite internet haunts
- T. M. Brown reports on the battle over techno’s origins
- Complex celebrates hip-hop media pioneers
- Daisy Alioto interviews CREEM’s Fred Pessaro
- Bunji Garlin explains the connection between Jamaica and carnival
- Israel Daramola wonders: How did hip-hop media get so bad?
- Jeff Weiss went to Coachella
Lede of the Week
“They’re all here waiting. Anxiously swaying on the Sabbath. Impatiently jostling for better sight lines. Blinking with the neuroses that begin to take root when the face of the messiah will never be revealed, no matter how many months of rent are sacrificed for a ‘Jester on Dice’ Homer pendant studded with nine lab-grown diamonds and 18 karats of gold.” - Jeff Weiss
Q&A: Stacy Chandler
Stacy Chandler is an assistant editor at No Depression. After working for a variety of daily newspapers for a decade, she began working for the magazine in 2013. These days, the magazine is "fully remote,” explains Stacy. “So I [work] from a little home office in Raleigh, usually directly supervised by my dog, Sabine.” In this excerpt from our interview, Stacy offers a tip for music journalists just starting out.
Don’t do it for fame (or being adjacent to fame) or glory. Sure, you get to talk to some of your heroes and hang out backstage from time to time. But you also find out some of your heroes can be assholes, and fame and glory don’t help you when you’re up against a tight deadline or the right words won’t come for your story. You should only do this if you’re in service to the story, and you are never the story.
How do you typically listen to music, both in a professional and personal sense?
I carve out time as best I can throughout each work day to listen to upcoming releases, which sometimes I have to remind myself is work, especially since I haven’t figured out how to write or edit at the same time. I’m usually sitting at my desk listening through nice speakers or headphones, and I keep an embroidery project close by so I can do something with my hands while I’m listening. In the evenings, I listen to music with my family over dinner, and that’s when it’s time for personal favorites.
Read the full interview with Stacy here.
Does Bob… Write For The Quietus?
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Podcasts!
- Marissa R. Moss discusses country music divorce albums on Popcast
- Holly Bishop from NME discusses music journalism on The Future of Media, Explained
- Will Robin and Kerry O’Brien discuss their new book about minimalism on Sound Expertise
- The folks behind ItsTheReal have launched a new podcast about the blog era
- Leon Neyfakh and Jay Smooth are launching a podcast about Michael Jackson
Q&A: Corrigan Blanchfield
Corrigan Blanchfield has freelanced for Tone Glow and Passion of the Weiss, among other publications, but these days he identifies himself as a blogger. He recently relaunched his website, “providing myself a venue for links and posts of any shape,” he writes, “while staying un-beholden to any particular platform or the perverse incentives thereof.” In this excerpt from our interview, Corrigan explains how his approach to work has changed over the past few years.
Having graduated from scamming music festivals, I re-focused my interviewing around larger, more thought-out projects—in 2018 and 2019, respectively, I took trips over Thanksgiving to Houston and New Orleans, seeking out major figures of each city’s rap lineage, and I did a similarly-minded series of phone interviews with some luminaries of Chicago’s dance music history as well. All three projects were hugely gratifying; the most fascinating people in the world, as far as I’m concerned, are just sitting out there on the other end of a Hotmail address or a personal phone number that you can find in thirty seconds or less, brimming with stories.
These more recent interviews have had very slightly more of an explicitly historical, when did this happen?, how’d you meet so-and-so?, which synths were you using then? bent, but from the start my goal has always been to put as little of myself on the page as possible while prompting the subject to provide the fullest possible stream of consciousness. The cut-and-paste, paragraph of exposition before dropping half a sentence of the artist’s words thing is so weird.
Like, watch any video of Sun Ra speaking and imagine some SEO dweeb combing through, thinking “alright, what’re the bullet points here?” The amount of times I’ve had people reach out after their interview goes online and express their appreciation for transcribing it exactly as spoken, as if it’s the most novel idea in the world, is astounding. And I really mean that, lest it sound like I’m just feeling myself; as people whose self-worth hinges on the value of language, writers allowing artists their own words should be the barest of minimums.
Read the full interview with Corrigan here.
Causes Worth Supporting
From Corrigan Blanchfield:
Denver Zine Library (self-explanatory), or GLOB, the city’s last DIY space.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Trivia Time
When did The Quietus launch its subscriber model?
Stuff You Gotta Watch
Stuff You Gotta Watch celebrates music journalism in video form. This week’s column is by Ana Leorne.
"The world is not binary; it's chaos," Genesis P-Orridge states at the beginning of Modulations. Genesis feels the turning point in music happened when "we discovered that [...] everything to do with culture could be cut up and reassembled in ways that didn't exist before." This epiphany, made possible by galloping technology and insatiable curiosity, is essential to understanding the history and evolution of electronic music as we know it today: an arena of constant reinvention and brilliant impermanence.
One third of a project that also includes a book by Peter Shapiro and a soundtrack album, Iara Lee's documentary examines the intense relationship between human and machine that lies at the core of electronic music, in the way it is both made and perceived. Throughout a voyage that begins with Luigi Russolo's 1913 Futurist manifesto The Art of Noises and concludes with drum & bass in the mid 1990s, we are treated to highlight moments from nearly a century of transforming the acoustic wave into a fantastic multiverse of frequencies.
Assembled like the jump-cut technique that first enabled sounds to be thought (and heard) differently, Modulations gathers interviews, live performances, studio footage, and myriad stunning images to create a poetic reflection on the past, present, and future paths of electronic music.
Real Scenes
- Jeong Park on trot
- Lily Moayeri on the pop drum & bass resurrection
- Adesh Thapliyal on South Indian Kuthu and Teenmaar Music
- Felicity Martin on speed garage
- Houda Fansa Jawadi and Web Mica on rap in Syria and Lebanon
Bits, Bobs
- The Quietus needs 350 more subscribers to stay afloat
- gal-dem has shared a list of its contributors
- Joe Muggs and Brian David Stevens are launching a newsletter
- S.W. Lauden has launched a guitar pop journal
- Todd Owyoung is compiling a music photo rates spreadsheet
- Amir Said has launched a Kickstarter to update The Art of Sampling
But Please Do Turn Off And Stow Away All Personal Electronic Devices
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Q&A: Lauren Istvandity
Lauren Istvandity works at the University of the Sunshine Coast, focusing her research on the subject of music, memory, and heritage. More recently, she’s the co-author of a new book in the 33 1/3 series on the album Unit, by Brisbane rock band Regurgitator. In this excerpt from our interview, Lauren talks about her area of research.
At present I'm very interested in the ways in which creativity intersects with heritage, which, in the first instance, might seem like a slightly odd match. But the more you dig into it, the more it makes sense. I'm quite interested in how creative practice both reflects and becomes heritage in time, and the ways in which creativity can help bring the past into the present, particularly in terms of activating cultural heritage. Alongside this is the way in which well-being intersects with these elements for different parts of the community.
What's one tip that you'd give a student considering a life in music scholarship starting out right now?
Get reading! And look ahead. If you want to have a novel idea for your writing, be it long or short, you’ve got to get your head around what’s come before you. At the same time, you should start to get an idea of what is important to your audience now, and in the future, so that your ideas might get taken up, helping you to make a contribution in the field.
Read the full interview with Lauren here.
Registration Is Open For…
- Pop Conference
- Association for Recorded Sound Collections Conference
- A Century of Broadcasting: Preservation and Renewal
- Black Sacred Arts Conference
- Low End Theories
- Music Studies and the Anthropocene Conference
Academic Calls
- Rhythm in Music Since 1900 [Submissions due May 1]
- Music, Migration, Belonging/s in 21st-Century Europe [Proposals due May 15]
- Pop After Communism. The Transformation of Popular Culture after 1989/90 [Proposals due May 31]
- Music & Minorities is preparing the special edition on "Contemporary Views on Romani Music and Romani Music Studies" [Abstracts due June 15]
- Resounding Cities. Music, Sound, Noise in Urban Environments (1500-1800) [Proposals due June 24]
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
The Quietus launched its subscriber model in 2020.
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...