#111: This Big Vat Of Sludge
This Big Vat Of Sludge
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 freelance writer Shaad D’Souza; Laurie Matheson, the director of University of Illinois Press; and gospel music expert Robert M. Marovich. Plus! Reading recommendations, TikToks to check out, and more! But first…
When It Rains, It Pours
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Final Call For Mentors
Throughout the summer, I put a note in the newsletter about creating an informal program of matching mentors and mentees in the music journalism world. I’ve been able to match up a lot of folks, thankfully, but there are still a few folks remaining who are looking for mentors. Are you open to offering up your experience in a mentorship role to a young music journalist? Please email me with the subject line “Mentor” and a little bit about how you think you might be able to help! I’d love to pair you up with someone looking for guidance.
Reading List
- Alison Kinney explains how opera invented the modern fan
- Steven Perlberg profiles Rolling Stone as it welcomes its new editor-in-chief
- Jesse Bernard explains how record collecting is a family tradition
- Michelle Lhooq on how music is being used in healing psychedelic trips
- Jeremy Leslie interviews Zak Kyes, the man behind the design of the print edition of Fact
- Yasmine Summan wonders what we can learn from the double standard applied to women in rock
- Ben Sisario looks at the state of the vinyl industry
- Ecleen Luzmila Caraballo celebrates Black women in reggaetón [h/t MusicREDEF]
- Avery Kleinman explores the state of jazz venues across the United States
- Last week was emo week on Dirt
Q&A: Shaad D’Souza
Shaad D’Souza is a freelance writer with bylines in places such as Pitchfork, The FADER, The Saturday Paper, and many more. Before the pandemic, Shaad was writing quite bit of news for FADER but “my work [was] cut pretty significantly during the pandemic, so now I’m 90% freelance, and I kinda love it: it’s given me more opportunity to write criticism, which I love.” In this excerpt from our interview, Shaad explains how his approach to work has changed over the past few years.
I’m not as competitive as I once was, to be sure. I’m less interested in churning out takes and more interested in making myself a better, smarter, more agile critic. Getting rid of my public Twitter has a lot to do with that—suddenly it feels less about contributing to this big vat of sludge in the most crowd-pleasing way and more focused on my actual writing. It’s a lot easier to be a grounded, clear-minded writer, I find, when the world around you is much smaller and more limited. It sounds counterintuitive, and I’m not saying to disengage from stuff that’s hard to consume or outside your orbit. I just mean that when you’re not overwhelmed by how much is happening all the time, it’s easier to focus and get into a kind of hyper-responsive state, which I think you need for criticism. It’s a lot easier to evaluate something on this elemental level: I can ask myself stuff like: How does this make me feel? How might it make others feel? What does it do to my body, and what is this artist doing with their body as they make the work? How does this look and feel and taste?
That all sounds so heady and hippy-dippy, but I’m all into that shit. A few years ago, I did an interview with Weyes Blood that was never published but that totally changed my life. She basically advocated for this idea that all we owe to this world, and to each other, is to put as much light and positivity into the world as possible. And that’s not saying to not be negative, or to be positive in this toxic way—she was basically just being like, forgive what you can forgive, try to understand others, try to be as open to possibility as you can, because life is really short. There will always be good and bad in the world, but all we can control is ourselves and our own disposition, and maybe that can have a domino effect. Since that day, my life has been like, wildly better, just from trying to accept things in a simpler and more open way. It sounds so stupid, but it’s kinda leached into everything—this like, not even positivity, but curiosity, and willingness to accept everything as it comes.
Read the full interview with Shaad here.
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Hard Relate
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Podcasts!
- Rock’s Backpages welcomed Paul Morley to talk about his career in music journalism
- Culturati offered a history of hip-hop magazine Honey [h/t Craig Seymour]
- Dan Ozzi talked about his new punk rock book on Going Off Track
- Dr. Jan Miyake explained curriculum changes for music students at Oberlin College & Conservatory on Note Doctors
- Zack O’Malley Greenburg discussed his time at Forbes and his new Substack newsletter on Trapital
Q&A: Laurie Matheson
Laurie Matheson is the director of University of Illinois Press. Laurie got her start in the academic world, earning a Doctor of Musical Arts degree. Once she started a graduate assistantship at UIP, however, she knew she had found a home. She’s since worked from that position to the directorship. In this excerpt from our interview, she describes a typical day in her role.
As an acquisitions editor (and even more so as a marketing copy writer) my day-to-day was pretty easy to describe: a set series of tasks that cycled through a lot of different book projects. As director, there is no typical day-to-day or week-to-week. No two days are alike. I continue with [music book] acquisitions work, so I have that typical day-to-day, but on top of that, there is an infinite array of needs and opportunities. I have a lot of meetings—with individual staff, various committees or working groups, executive or administrative groups; also project-specific assessment and planning conversations with authors, staff members, outside partners. I write grant proposals, project descriptions, comments about acquisitions projects. I convene with other Press directors about industry-wide issues.
Many days I begin with a private strategizing session, planning or brainstorming for myself and/or the executive committee and/or the Press and/or preparing for conversations I plan to have with staff members or administrators. I make a lot of lists, to do lists, priority lists, and try to execute as much as I can every day. It is very challenging!
Read the full interview with Laurie here.
Trivia Time
What two artists won the Village Voice Pazz & Jop albums poll the most times?
Stuff You Gotta Watch
Stuff You Gotta Watch celebrates music journalism in video form. This week’s column is about Porto Electronica 1985-2005. It’s by Ana Leorne.
As the so-called “boom of the Portuguese Rock” of the early 1980s faded away and EU membership gradually allowed Portugal to stop being mistaken for a province of Spain, the “much noble and never defeated” city of Porto revamped its nightlife from within. Although the Lisbon underground scene of the 1990s would become more publicised abroad, true connoisseurs knew the absolute dance vanguard was Porto.
Resources were scarce, but a nearly religious devotion to music made it possible to get the message out, while the efforts of a dozen DJs, promoters, and bar owners soon made sure the north of Portugal had more to offer after sundown than a glass of Port wine or two. Teaming up with local communities, art students, and general all-rounders, they transformed the nightclubbing experience in the city, managing to attract attention from international artists and audience.
This short documentary details 20 years of acid house, techno, deep house, post-punk and every other imaginable electronic subgenre in the city of Porto. From the amateurish yet enthusiastic 1980s to the electroclash-ridden 2000s, Porto Electronica 1985-2005 is the after-dark tale of a city that has always been too electric to sit still.
Bits, Bobs
- Rolling Stone considered Ben Smith and James Bennet before hiring Noah Shachtman as their new editor-in-chief
- Tom Morello is now writing for the opinion section of the New York Times
- Charles L. Hughes has posted the forthcoming titles for the American Music Series
- Dale Geist has stepped down from Country Queer after allegations of “unprofessional behavior and racist and transphobic microaggressions“
- Cat Scratch Magazine has launched
- Miranda Reinert has a good tip for music journalists
- The now-defunct magazine Coda, The Journal of Jazz & Improvised Music is now available on archive.org
How Do You Do, Fellow TikTokers?
- @thechrismichael presents an IDM explainer
- @musespod highlights the unique appeal of The Cramps
- @groovysalami isn’t sure about the music taste of his duet partner
- @ryanwasoba lists a few band names that have aged poorly
- @jake.m.blount dispels a common myth about banjos
Q&A: Robert M. Marovich
Robert M. Marovich is one of the foremost experts on gospel music in America. He’s the founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Gospel Music and his latest project is The King of Gospel Music: The Life and Music of Reverend James Cleveland. It’s a book with a four-CD compilation attached, and serves as a comprehensive overview of the gospel music legend. In this excerpt from our interview, Robert explains some of his research process.
To me, writing [about music] is more than getting the facts—it’s also about evaluating its sociopolitical context. So I searched issues of Billboard and gospel music-related periodicals, scoured the gospel discography, interviewed musicians and singers who worked with Cleveland, read whatever secondary sources existed, pored over Gospel Music Workshop of America literature, and listened carefully to the song selections [for the compilation]. I spoke to Cleveland’s sister Betty Brooks and the executor of his estate, Annette May Thomas. I had the benefit of the research and analysis I’d already done on Cleveland while writing [a previous book on] Peace Be Still, which was almost complete in 2019 when I started The King of Gospel Music.
Read the full interview with Robert here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Robert M. Marovich:
I believe that all creatures deserve a fighting chance, and that’s why I have supported Tree House Humane Society, a cat adoption center in Chicago, for two decades. There, cats are not kept in cages until adoption but have rooms where they can roam, soak up the sun on cat condos, and live a happy life until adoption. I was on their board for years, served as president for three years, and continue to support them today. They have a beautiful new building on Chicago’s North Side—it includes a cat café where you can bond with the cats while sipping a latte!
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
The Plight Of Every Young Professor
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Academic Stuff
- New issues: Fontes Artis Musicae and Philosophy of Music Education Review
- The Engaged Music Theory Working Group has launched a blog series focused on equity in music studies
- Call for Chapters: The Chiptune Studies Reader (Proposals due December 12)
- Call for Papers: Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination (Proposals due November 29)
- Grant opportunity: The Association for Recorded Sound Collections (Applications due February 28, 2022)
- Sound Heritage in Ethnomusicology: Approaches and Perspectives is taking place this week
The Closing Credits
Thanks for reading! In case you’ve missed them, I’ve published a number of special features 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, including the latest one with Danyel Smith, here.
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Trivia Time Answer
Bob Dylan and Kanye West won the Pazz & Jop poll four times each.
A Final Note
Thanks for reading! 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…