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#071: No, Dionne, I Was Not Aware Of That
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#071: No, Dionne, I Was Not Aware Of That

Todd L. Burns
Nov 16, 2020
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#071: No, Dionne, I Was Not Aware Of That
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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.

Today in the newsletter: Interviews with Jockey Slut co-founder Johnno Burgess; freelance writer Shannon Nico Shreibak; Jan Reetze, the author of a new book about Krautrock; and American Gamelan and the Ethnomusicological Imagination author Elizabeth A. Clendinning. Plus! Some reading recs, a couple of YouTubes, the usual. But first…

Uh… brb

Twitter avatar for @_DionneWarwickDionne Warwick @_DionneWarwick
Did you know that the artist can see the names of the playlists you’re adding their songs to on Spotify? 👀

November 14th 2020

283 Retweets1,482 Likes

Reading List

  • Liz Pelly on Spotify’s podcast strategy

  • Jeffrey Arlo Brown goes deep on a mysterious classical music label

  • The first articles from Oxford American’s annual music issue are out

  • Jonathan Bernstein tells the story of the Black Country Music Association [h/t Laura Stavropoulos]

  • Kim Kelly on how heavy metal is grappling with white supremacy

  • Ellie Flynn and Annabel Ross reported on a pattern of alleged sexual assault by Detroit techno pioneer Derrick May

  • Ashawnta Jackson highlights the surprising story of how guitars were once an instrument mostly played by women

  • Randall Roberts has recently published a few articles on music preservation

  • The first articles from the Global GROOVE electronic music journalism project are now available

  • Christopher Phillips profiles early rock critic Jon Landau

Q&A: Johnno Burgess

Johnno Burgess is a co-founder of the dance music magazine Jockey Slut. Inspired by the irreverent style of Smash Hits and a love of dance music, Jockey Slut captured the ‘90s electronic music scene in all of its ridiculous glory. (There’s a great piece about the magazine’s history in VICE from 2015.) Recently, Jockey Slut has reappeared—for the first time since it closed in 2004—for a tribute to the late Andrew Weatherall. In this excerpt from our interview, Johnno explains the idea behind the original incarnation of the magazine.

The name was originally going to be a t-shirt—a ‘DJ Slut’ (Disc-Jockey Slut) was a name Paul came up with to describe the mainly male trainspotters that would hang around a DJ booth attempting to see the records the DJ was playing. We liked the Manic Street Preachers who would use slogans like ‘Culture Slut’ and ‘Media Slut’ so that influenced it too. We started the magazine because we wanted to work on something after Polytechnic together and often talked about starting a fanzine when we were chilling out after a club (usually the Hacienda which closed at 2am). We also thought there was a gap in the market as club magazines like Mixmag and DJ Mag were very much about clubs or DJ technology and we wanted to write more about the personalities in techno like Andrew Weatherall or the Chemical Brothers. 

Read the full interview with Johnno.

A Cause Worth Supporting

From Johnno Burgess:

I’d like to highlight Mind, which we also gave 10% to last year when we sold some Jockey Slut t-shirts. The nation’s collective mental health is going to take a lot of healing after this (and next) year.

Check out all of the causes highlighted by the folks I’ve interviewed.

Jon Caramanica Is Half The Reason For The New New York Times Twitter

Twitter avatar for @mehpatrolcganz @mehpatrol
Spellchecking @joncaramanica stories is always an adventure
nyti.ms/3lpYC8J
Image

August 28th 2020

68 Likes

A great Twitter account, if you haven’t seen it.

Podcasts!

  • New podcasts: LGBT+ heavy metal podcast Hell Bent For Metal, Natalie Weiner and Jonny Auping’s Rebawatchables, Dummy’s The 10 Best, Matthew Perpetua’s Fluxpod, and Frank Gallagher’s Soundman Confidential

  • Jon Silpayamanant explains slave orchestras on The Classical Gabfest

  • The latest Time to Say Goodbye features Oliver Wang on the history of Filipino DJ culture in the Bay Area

  • Rhiannon Giddens talks about “Tom Dooley” on the latest episode of Murder Ballads

  • Billy Coleman discusses his book Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788-1865 on New Books in Music

Q&A: Shannon Nico Shreibak

Shannon Nico Shreibak is a Chicago-based freelance writer and the creator of the wonderful newsletter SOC Soundsystem, which takes monthly deep dives into situations where music and sound were wielded as a weapon. So far, she’s covered the Waco siege and the EDM x MK-Ultra conspiracy. This month is all about Satanism. In this excerpt from our interview, Shannon describes how her approach to her work has changed over the past few years.

When I first began music writing, I was itching to grab as many bylines as possible, which served as a detriment to the quality of work and the breadth of topics I was covering. As the years have passed by, I’ve absolved to write quality over quantity. I’ve also grown the confidence to address topics that require a great deal of research and care, like my piece on modern gagaku—I would have scared myself out of that pitch a year ago.

What's one tip that you'd give a music journalist starting out right now?

Find a few “goal” publications that align with your point-of-view or taste and focus on ingratiating yourself in their freelance pool. When I first started freelancing, I cast far too wide of a net and my pitches perished. 

Read the full interview with Shannon.

A Cause Worth Supporting

From Shannon Nico Shreibak:

While the touring economy is nonexistent, Tour Health Initiative has shifted its resources to addressing the mental health ramifications of COVID-19 throughout the music industry. It’s imperative to use this downtime to address how we can better support the health of our colleagues and peers once life returns to a semblance of normalcy, and this is a step in the right direction.

Check out all of the causes highlighted by the folks I’ve interviewed.

Stuff You Gotta Watch

Stuff You Gotta Watch celebrates music journalism in video form. This week’s column is by freelance writer Jesse Locke.

Emerging during the golden age of hip-hop, Souls of Mischief had a uniquely jazzy, fast-flowing sound packed with internal rhymes and infectious energy. The group’s members A-Plus, Opio, Phesto, and Tajai might not be household names, but the four-piece offshoot of the Hieroglyphics crew were legendary enough to inspire a 2013 full-length documentary called Til Infinity: The Souls of Mischief about the making of their immortal debut album.

Still from Til Infinity: The Souls of Mischief

Thanks to a connection with Del tha Funkee Homosapien’s cousin Ice Cube (then performing with a group called C.I.A.), Souls of Mischief headed from Oakland to Los Angeles to record their first songs as young teenagers. Their demo tape made an immediate impression on both West and East Coast peers, no doubt in part to a creative flip of the Taxi theme. A major label bidding war ended with them signing to Jive, but eventually the group went independent with their own label, utilizing the then-nascent internet to sell their music.

Til Infinity was originally released to celebrate the album’s 20th anniversary, and it’s now been expanded with an additional hour of bonus material. Director Shomari Smith brings a clever structure to the film with its track-by-track format allowing every member of the Hieroglyphics (and some of the biggest names in rap) to share stories about their favorite cuts. Decades later, this is still how we chill from ‘93 til.

Q&A: Jan Reetze

Jan Reetze is author of the new book, Times & Sounds. It’s all about Krautrock, a subject that Jan is intimately familiar with. He grew up in Germany, and has been writing professionally since 1987. Times & Sounds, however, is his first book in English, and is specifically geared to Krautrock fans outside of Germany. In this excerpt from our interview, Jan explains what the book is about and why he was uniquely positioned to write it.

In order to understand the Krautrock era and its impact, I thought it might be interesting for readers to delve deeper into the history of German rock music. You get the story of the mechanisms of post-war Germany’s music industry and the diverse musical styles we had and their mutual influences and connections. 

All this is combined in a sort of cross cutting with the political and sociological key events of the respective decades—the economic miracle, Sixty-Eight, student riots, New German Film, Baader-Meinhof, the hippie movement, the alternative scene, the movement against nuclear power—all this stuff the Germans went through between the 1950s and the early 1990s. You will read about German early Jazz and Swing orchestras, schlager, the first rock'n'roll bands around Hamburg's Star-Club, agitprop and left-wing protest songs, the avant-garde compositions of Stockhausen and his presumed disciples of Krautrock, the electronic bands, and finally the Neue Deutsche Welle. All this stuff is interconnected, and the musicians needed to fit in several genres to survive. Times & Sounds is what the title says: a journalistic diary tracing Germany's dynamic culture from the late 40s to the early 90s.

Read the full interview with Jan.

YouTubin’

  • Maureen Mahon discussed her new book Black Diamond Queens with Ann Powers

  • Grady Smith recapped the CMA Awards

  • BJ Rubin’s public access show is back for its fourth season

  • Matthew Ingram did an interview about his book Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness for New Thinking Allowed

  • Last Words explores the divide between mainstream and underground metal

Bits, Bobs

  • PopCon 2021 is accepting submissions

  • New newsletters: Dylan Green, Robin James, and Ian Gormley

  • Former Village Voice music editor Chuck Eddy has started a blog

  • Classical Music has launched a new website and ceased its print publication

  • Stanley Crouch’s funeral took place late last month

  • Sound and Fiction festival has two panels in the next week

  • FACT has relaunched its print magazine

  • Phil Freeman thinks you should consider not publishing a year-end list

  • Hua Hsu is making a zine

New Catalog Looks Great Though!

Twitter avatar for @dee_bee_hImmanuel Content @dee_bee_h
look, I’ve been to the Duke UP offices and it’s just one guy writing all those books, he’s hooked up to a giant machine and he screams in anguish but they force him to keep popping out manuscripts called like Biointensities of the New Imperium, he unfortunately cannot read at all

October 5th 2020

177 Retweets1,661 Likes

Q&A: Elizabeth A. Clendinning

Elizabeth A. Clendinning is Associate Professor of Music at Wake Forest University. Her first book American Gamelan and the Ethnomusicological Imagination has just been published by University of Illinois Press. It “takes a critical look at American collegiate world music ensemble education through the lens of transnational Balinese gamelan communities.” In this excerpt from our interview, Elizabeth describes the scope and premise of the book.

Gamelan (Indonesian percussion orchestras) and American academic institutions have maintained a close association for more than sixty years. Gamelan has served as one of the oldest and most prevalent examples of a “world music ensemble”—an ensemble with a niche place in the music curriculum, today frequently touted as a positive example of cultural diversity. In this book, I examine what it means to devote one’s life to world music ensemble education. 

I weave together stories of Indonesian and American practitioners, colleagues, and friends to demonstrate the impact of academic world music ensembles on the local and transnational performing arts communities and examine how individual performers and educators use them to create stable and rewarding artistic communities. Ultimately, I argue for the importance of cross-cultural ensemble education, particularly at a time when people around the world express more enthusiasm about raising walls to keep others out rather than building bridges to invite them in.

Read the full interview with Elizabeth.

Academic Stuff

  • The new issue of Music and the Moving Image is devoted to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

  • Shared Narratives, “a conference supporting work by performing arts researchers of colour,” takes place this week

  • There's a new issue of Popular Music History

  • Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture is looking for a new editor-in-chief; questions about the application should be sent to WAMjournal@gmail.com

  • Registration for Music, Mediation, and Disability: Representation and Access is now open

Calls For Papers

  • Narrating Musicology: The History of Musicology is open to proposals for its 2021 edition

  • Music Research Forum is currently accepting scholarly articles

  • A special edition of Popular Music History on the impact of COVID is being planned; send abstracts or queries to catherine.strong@rmit.edu.au or shane.homan@monash.edu

  • Notes is doing a special issue on race and music libraries; email co-editors jonathan.sauceda@rutgers.edu and avery.boddie@unlv.edu with questions

  • Music and the Moving Image Conference is accepting submissions for its 2021 edition

  • The editors of Sonic Engagement: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Community Engaged Audio Practice are seeking chapter contributions

Finally, Just Remember…

Hey, Thanks For This Newsletter! How Can I Support This Thing?

Here are three easy ways you can support the newsletter:

  • Forward it to a friend

  • Buy me a coffee

  • Become an ongoing supporter of the newsletter (what Substack calls a “paid subscriber”)

What sort of perks are there for ongoing supporters?

Insider Extra - An additional e-mail from me each week, usually featuring job listings, freelance calls, and more

How To Pitch Database - Access to a database with contact information and pitching info for hundreds of publications

Reading Recommendations - Access to a resource page collecting great pieces of music journalism, sourced from great music journalists

Advice - Access to a resource page devoted to collecting advice from journalists and editors on how to excel at music journalism

Interviews - Access to the hundreds of interviews that have appeared in the newsletter, with writers and editors from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, and more

The Closing Credits

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…

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