Music Journalist Recommendations
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If you’re here, you probably already know this, but just in case: my name is Todd L. Burns, and I did a newsletter called Music Journalism Insider. You can check out its archives here: https://www.musicjournalisminsider.com/ The newsletter ran from 2019 to 2023.
As part of the newsletter, I asked every person I interviewed about their favorite piece of music journalism—or something that inspires them. Below is a collection of those recommendations, plus a few that I’ve collected from writers on Twitter and elsewhere.
Michael Tisserand, KRAZY: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White
Michael Tisserand’s KRAZY: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White, is about the Krazy Kat comic strip and its creator and is so well-researched and written that I’d recommend it to anyone interested in art, commerce, and race in America. It was a big influence on my preparation for You’re with Stupid as a work on an artist beloved by enthusiasts but obscure to the greater culture.
This is one of my favorite Instagram accounts. It’s basically just a meme page but honestly, this is where I think the idea of criticism and news is headed. I don’t think people will be reading these long, thoughtful essays or even short news items. People’s worldviews seem increasingly derived from just memes.
John Seabrook, “The Song Machine”
I am a big fan of the New Yorker magazine. This piece, which became a book, is well-written as is mostly the case with the magazine’s pieces and it explains how the music we love gets made. It can be a little dispiriting to learn that a lot of what we think comes from the heavens is really from something like an industrial farm. But, hey, it is not journalism’s goal to perpetuate a myth. Going behind the scenes like Seabrook did is particularly great for journalists at every level. Of course, it is easier for him given the might of his magazine, yet it is something to aspire to.
Rebecca Nicholson, “Cher: 'Women have always been sex objects and always will be'”
Edwin Pouncey, “Blood on the Frets”
There are two pieces I want to mention: one a piece of fantastic writing about music that makes me c
are about something I didn't think I liked, the other is one of my favourite articles on one of my favourite artists.
Rebecca Nicholson's interview with Cher in The Guardian: I wouldn't count myself as a Cher fan, but this article makes me one. It's a masterclass in how to organise your anecdotes—she saves the Dali sex toy anecdote till right at the end! Plus the way she activates it with that little shout over to Susan, it's perfect.
Edwin Pouncey's interview with John Fahey from 1998: A rare occasion when The Wire splashed out on sending someone across the Atlantic. Edwin's introduction sets up the piece perfectly, so that we're all asking why we're here in this greasy, grubby lair. I can smell that room, every time.
I really loved that Ian Leslie blog about 64 ways to appreciate Paul McCartney which got circulated on social media around Christmas time. It was brilliantly written and quite moving at points, and the thing that amazed me was how extensive it was—which you don’t find with many blogs these days. Because if you write a blog you’re not being paid, so you don’t want to put your best stuff out there… and yet it did the rounds and everyone was talking about it, so hats off.
Alex Morris, “Inside Halsey’s Troubled Past, Chaotic Present”
Rachel Syme, “The Shape-Shifter”
This Lady Gaga profile is a masterful, exemplary piece of writing. My favourite features are the ones that hit beats outside of the music—I love when music writing resembles a big blockbuster celebrity profile, even if the artist is totally unknown. It makes the story so vivid.
The first reading my students do is this article, which examines the soundscape of the Mall of America. I assign this to my students to show them the diverse ways in which we can listen to music, and how musical meaning can be derived from listening in context.
Kira Thurman and Emily Pollock, “When Classical Music Was an Alibi”
Gabrielle Cornish, “When Ukrainian Music Wasn’t Under Threat, It Thrived”
I have been impressed with the recent work of two former students at the Eastman School of Music, Kira Thurman (“When Classical Music Was an Alibi” with Emily Pollock) and Gabrielle Cornish (“When Ukrainian Music Wasn’t Under Threat, It Thrived”). Both use wide-ranging expertise of music in specific cultural contexts to throw light on issues of the present. Their work shows that rigorous musicological scholarship and public engagement on newsworthy issues are not mutually exclusive pursuits.
Matt Anniss, Join the Future
Ian McDonald, Revolution In The Head
In terms of music books, the first one that blew my mind was Ian McDonald’s Revolution In The Head, which I read as a teenager in the 1990s. I can’t think of another book that so smartly combines music criticism, social history, and musicology. The level of detail is also remarkable. Plus the way he dismissed some of the Fabs’ weaker efforts—something a lot of Beatles scholars don’t seem to do—was refreshing. That may not be the best piece of music journalism I’ve ever encountered, but it probably had the most impact on me at a time when I was beginning to dream of writing books about music myself.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, “The Final Comeback of Axl Rose”
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “The Final Comeback of Axl Rose” is some of the best music writing I’ve ever read (next to John Darnielle’s 33 1/3 installment, of course). Sullivan strikes this fine balance between humor, reverence, pity, and ridicule that works so well when considering Axl Rose’s career trajectory and who he is. Sullivan addresses some of the ugliest aspects of Axl’s personality by highlighting the cultural vacuum of small-town America (where Axl is from), but he never directly says that’s what he’s doing. Instead, there are juxtaposed sections about his own life, and you have to make the connection.
Miranda Reinert, “on tiktok + content creation being framed as journalism”
The best piece I’ve seen about Tik Tok’s intersection with music criticism came from Miranda Reinert, whose newsletter is excellent. Can’t recommend it enough.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”
In this piece, they argue the entertainment industry is a source of domination in society. I enjoy having students read it because they closely identify with their argument and the state of the entertainment in the 1940s. Not much has changed today.
The “Ocean” YouTube channel. Great tutorials on how to make your own music. Helped me a lot and generally just seems like a chill guy!
Aliya S. King, “The Legend Of The Biggie Belt”
On the 23rd anniversary of Biggie Smalls' death, LEVEL published a feature by journalist Aliyah S. King about a belt Biggie wore during a photo shoot for The Source Magazine. The inanimate object became a rite of passage for certain editors at the company who landed inside an office where the belt was stored. Each editor who came through those doors were told the same story behind the "Biggie belt" and kept it a secret, only to share it with their successor when they moved on to another part of their career. The story moved me because it shined a light on the many untold stories within music, specifically hip-hop. To give a voice or personality to a lifeless object and how it connected a series of journalists was captivating to read.
Almost everything in KICKS magazine was revelatory to me, and the way Billy Miller and Miriam Linna researched, interviewed and shared their passion for obscure figures like Esquirita and Hasil Adkins and then actually IRL put out their records and changed their careers/place in history was the best thing I have ever encountered in music zine obsessiveness. It is my absolute favorite, but I don't think any of those are available to seek out.
Similarly, when Mike Stax turned the pages of his 60s garage rock magazine Ugly Things over to telling the story of the Misfits, tracking down early band members and getting stories out of them that no one knew, I was profoundly impressed by the content, but also with how he ignored the limitations of the genre his readers expected and did something important and compelling. I also do not think that is easily found.
So, the currently accessible piece of writing that made me genuinely loyal to a contemporary music writer is Amanda Petrusich's Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records. This colorful, sympathetic portrait of eccentric record collectors who come to feel as important and creative and mysterious as the semi-unknown blues and country artists on pretty much-lost 1920s shellac was so good I now read anything she writes, even if I am wildly uninterested in the artist.
Nardwuar, “Nardwuar vs. Odd Future”
Aida Baghernejad
Ed Gillett, “The Many Faces Of Housekeeping: How Wealth & Privilege Are Distorting Underground Music”
This piece lives rent-free in my head. One of the best pieces of music journalism I’ve read in ages.
Andrea Domanick, “Me, My Mom, and Paul McCartney: From the Iron Curtain to the California Desert”
I’m biased as she’s a dear friend of mine, but Andrea Domanick’s piece on seeing Paul McCartney with her mom and the many tangents of that story is just spectacular. In it, Andrea does something I think can be super useful when writing about an artist with as much mythological baggage as McCartney, which is to approach the subject through the lens of your own connection to them. Obviously, this approach can be tepid/tacky when done poorly, but Andrea is an elegant, thoughtful writer and the story she tells here is not just deeply personal but also singular and riveting. It’s a piece I go back to a few times a year. She even got an email from Sir Paul’s publicist telling her he loved it.
Lauren Martin, “Kemistry & Storm – the tragic story of the drum'n'bass originals”
Bhanuj Kappal, “Facing the Music: How Only Much Louder failed the women in its ranks”
David Fricke, “Patti Smith: Family Life, Recent Loss, and New Album ‘Gone Again’”
Unfortunately I am not a fan of contemporary music journalism, so I have to go back a number of years. But I remember a David Fricke interview with Patti Smith in Rolling Stone back in the day. Brilliant piece where the interviewer and the subject really knew and understood each other. Also I remember Bill Flanagan, a great writer, asking Bob Dylan, "If you see a three-legged dog in a wheelbarrow, do you paint it or write a song about it?" Best question I ever saw. Still jealous of that today.
Melody Maker in the mid- to late ‘80s
The music journalism that really inspired me was much of what appeared in Melody Maker in the mid to late ‘80s, specifically from people such as Simon Reynolds and David Stubbs—even though these guys were only a few years older than me at the time, they wrote with a wit, authority and fire that was thrilling to read. You simply had to seek out the bands they were eulogising and theorising about. They showed you could write both passionately and intelligently about rock music without fear of being damned as “pretentious.” As Reynolds says himself in this overview of his time at Melody Maker, “If you were into this sort of rock criticism, it was a massive rush to read, almost as intoxicating as the music itself.”
Will Hermes, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever
Will Hermes’s 2011 book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever, which I made the mistake of re-reading while writing my book Hearts on Fire: it’s so fucking good and incredibly intimidating. (I also nicked the subtitle.) He miraculously tells a chronological story about CBGB’s, the birth of hip-hop, Studio 54, Fania Records, Springsteen, Anthony Braxton, Philip Glass and more—even Kiss!—weaving all those narratives together seamlessly, with just the appropriate dollop of memoir in the mix (I usually hate memoir mixed with historical non-fiction). On top of inspiring the reader to run out and listen to a bunch of music they may not have known or linked together, he paints a vivid portrait of the city itself at a crucial moment in its history. Like I said, an unbelievably daunting achievement. Yes, I’m jealous.
Jia Tolentino, “Perfume Genius's New Album, ‘No Shape,’ Is Full of Sunlight”
This review is something I think about all the time, and it helped make me want to be a music writer. Her description of the album is elegant and truly lovely.
Rosh’s Letter to RA (and the rest of the UK music press)
I recommend Rosh’s Letter to RA (and the rest of the UK music press). It’s inspiring for many reasons, first and foremost the sheer amount of work he put into it. Really in-depth, highly affecting research and analysis, quotes, hundreds of citations. The amount of emotional and physical labour that went into it is highly commendable. He dissects the ignorance and snobbery towards some of London’s Black working class events with grace and determination, without ever overcooking it.
It’s a piece that needs to be read several times over because of the subtexts that lie within it and the length, too. It’s the kind of writing that will really trigger the reader—no matter what your background—simply because the facts that he presents are highly emotive and, frankly, quite embarrassing to the music press he focuses on. His suggested solutions, too, pose some big questions and require radical critical thought.
If anyone can read the whole thing and honestly sit there and still want to continue perpetuating the status quo, then you have some serious work to do. This letter is essential to provoking all of us to pull our socks up and start doing the work that needs to be done to counteract the barriers to entry that have been in existence for far too long. And it really is work, because it takes commitment, action and self-awareness on a whole other level. So, please, anyone who reads it, take time with it, let it sink in, re-read it, take the points in, absorb them, let them ruminate, then think about how to take positive action and elevate the voices that have been suppressed because of the way our business works.
Laura Snapes, “Body of work: why Billie Eilish is right to stand her ground against shaming”
Laura Snapes, “New rules: the destruction of the female pop role model”
Apart from the Quick Crossword and the recipes, music articles by Laura Snapes are increasingly the only reason to ever open The Guardian. She possesses that rare combination of being able to write both well and about something, combining an often inspiring turn of phrase with a real sense of urgency and purpose. Almost any of her recent features would work as examples, but she's at her best when she's really able to let rip—like in this op-ed about Billie Eilish or this essay about the changing nature of the female role model in pop music. There are few sharper guides to the thorny problematics of gender in contemporary pop.
Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun
It's out of print but if you can stomach a PDF scan, Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than the Sun is one of the yardsticks I use to see how my music writing is going (his colleague Mark Fisher's writing is another). Time is malleable in Eshun's hands; the past, present and future of his topic become an interwoven human story. He also pulls off the most-attempted but also hardest thing in music writing, something that we don't need much of anymore now that we can hear everything we want without buying it first: he describes how music sounds with vitality and dynamism, devoid of cliches, and in doing so actually communicates the thrill of encountering sounds that move and change us.
Owen Jander, "Beethoven's 'Orpheus in Hades': The 'Andante con
moto' of the Fourth Piano Concerto"
There is a classic article by Owen Jander: “Beethoven’s ‘Orpheus in Hades’: The ‘Andante con moto’ of the Fourth Piano Concerto,” published in Nineteenth-Century Music, 1985). I don’t know of a more adroit mix of analysis, historical context, composer biography, etc. It has since been made into a wonderful book, but this article stands beautifully on its own.
Kiese Laymon, “Da Art of Storytellin' (A Prequel)”
I love how writer Kiese Laymon connects his grandmama, a Southern “stank,” and OutKast in deep and very personal ways. Laymon writes, “When André said, “The South got something to say and that’s all I got to say,” at the Source Awards in 1995, I heard him saying that we were no longer going to artistically follow New York. Not because the artists of New York were wack, but because disregarding our particular stank in favor of a stink that didn’t love or respect us was like taking a broken elevator down into artistic and spiritual death.” Laymon connected to OutKast beyond the music and writes to tell us about it. The power of creative people like André, Big Boi, and Kiese to make all those connections is magic, right before our eyes and ears.
Abigail Covington, “That Kind of Money”
I’m still blown away by Abigail Covington’s deeply-considered profile of the North Carolina wedding band Liquid Pleasure. The story touches on race, class, economics, genre, and musical history in such a fascinating way. The first time I read it, I couldn’t believe I had never read a thoughtful profile of a wedding band before.
Hanif Abdurraqib, “Carly Rae Jepsen and the Kingdom of Desire”
This essay (and truly all of the pieces in his fabulous essay collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us) does what great pop culture/music criticism should do, in my opinion. Not only is it a gripping read on Jepsen's euphoric music, but it's a meditation on joy grounded very much in Willis-Abdurraqib's personal experience as a black man. It's a concert review as memoir as cultural criticism, balancing each so perfectly that you're left with a clear, grounded sense of how music moves in and through spaces and bodies.
Alex Ross, “The Past and the Future of the Earth’s Oldest Trees”
Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic and author of the great book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, but I want to recommend this article he wrote about trees because it shows his writing skills in high relief by removing his extensive musical knowledge from the equation. Take this sentence about pine trees and try to improve upon it: “Bristlecones rise from the bones of their ancestors—a city within a cemetery.” Impossible. I think people forget that music writing is writing that happens to be about music—that is, the writing comes first—so I love when music critics show they can really write by taking on different subjects.
“Do Black Lives Matter to the Music Biz in 2020?”
I really like this series Rock and Roll Globe did called “Do Black Lives Matter to the Music Biz in 2020?” It’s a very topical and in-depth dive into the realities and possibilities facing the industry today, and its intersection of political/social relevance and entertainment reflects the best of what music journalism can and should be. It’s eye-opening, interesting, and very necessary.
George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring
It remains as fresh today as it was more than 120 years ago: insightful and hilarious, reverent and irreverent all at the same time.
Janet Levy, “Covert and Casual Values in Recent Writings About Music”
Levy exposes how a great deal of writing about music rests on values that go unstated and unexamined: economy of means (thematic, timbral), complexity (counterpoint), maturity (the “late works” phenomenon), novelty (as opposed to convention).
Kiese Laymon, “Da Art of Storytellin’ (A Prequel)”
It is impossible for me to give an absolute answer to this question, but one of my very favorite pieces is “Da Art of Storytellin’ (A Prequel),” from our Georgia music issue, in which Kiese Laymon writes beautifully about how OutKast inspired him as an artist. It’s a masterpiece and an Oxford American classic.
Zachary Lipez, Abundant Living
Zachary Lipez's newsletter Abundant Living, which is mostly about punk and punk-adjacent concerns, has been a lot of fun. I've been missing the way '90s zine writers could be personal and funny and ferociously passionate all at once, and he does all of that. The one on Danzig slaps especially hard.
Cherie Hu, Water & Music newsletter
For my money, Cherie is one of the smartest journalists covering the intersection between music business and technology in recent years.
Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist
Another personal favourite is Austin Kleon: he's not a music journalist but I feel like anyone interested in the practice of making music—and writing about music—will get something out of his book Steal Like An Artist. It’s a short, pleasurable read, visually engaging, and full of great ideas. When I find myself in a creative rut, it usually helps get me unstuck.
Katie Bain, “Inside Justin Bieber’s New World: Therapy, Date Nights and Delivering ‘Justice’”
The first sentence is “Justin Bieber wanted to drive himself.” It’s so simple, yet it speaks multitudes. I’m not a huge Bieber fan, but I think about this article every time I write a profile.
Steven Hyden’s Break Stuff [podcast and prose]
Steven Hyden’s Break Stuff demonstrates a few things: It pinpoints a pivotal moment in music history that’s long enough ago to justify a double-decade anniversary piece but is relevant enough to today’s pop cultural interests to get a lot of engagement (see: Gen Z’ers wearing UFO pants and other era-specific fashions); it utilizes various kinds of media (podcast and prose); and above all, it just tells a really, really great story.
This is a groundbreaking essay that simultaneously takes to task the misogyny of the punk scene (she dissects the Sex Pistols’ “Bodies” here) and identifies what’s radical and usuable about punk for feminists (i.e. its sound, it’s revolutionary affective release). It’s a primer for how marginalized publics can find ways of drawing out and redeploying liberatory elements of art that not only does not have you in mind but, in some cases, hates you altogether.
Olivia Giovetti, “Notes on Birdsong”
Mark Singer, “Ricky Jay's Magical Secrets”
Tom Hibbert, Who The Hell
Sylvia Paterson, I’m Not With the Band
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
The inspiring book Teaching to Transgress by the late bell hooks is an incredible and insightful must have for all educators. It has a social justice orientation – hooks insists that education should involve a humanising process that leads to self-actualisation for all involved. Hip Hop pedagogy and other forms of culturally responsive and critical pedagogies lend themselves to this understanding of education.
Cat Jones, Hot Blooded
Patterson Hood, “The South's Heritage Is So Much More Than A Flag”
“Best” is a hard thing for me to delineate. Year after year, month after month, week after week, it seems like I find an article that's "the best thing I've ever read." It might not properly be music journalism, but Patterson Hood's New York Times essay—published in the wake of 2015's Charleston church mass shooting and subsequent debate about the Confederate flag—sticks with me like few other pieces. Part of the essay's impact comes from the events that inspired it, which presaged our current socio-political climate in ways we couldn't have guessed. Reading it today is still as heart-wrenching as it is inspiring.
Francesca Royster, Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era
I teach the introduction to Francesca Royster’s Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era in as many classes as possible. The ways that Royster moves between close listening, theorizing, and historicizing was the model for my dissertation and subsequent book project. I like to assign it to students to illustrate the power of interlinking these three methods from the beginning of class onward. It’s also a great read about queerness and Blackness that’s written in a way that’s accessible to people who are not academics—which makes it perfect for teaching in a classroom.
David Cavanagh, The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize
The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize by David Cavanagh is a brilliantly brutal account of Creation Records, in totally forensic detail. Alan McGee, who founded Creation, called it "the accountant's tale”, which he meant as an insult but is actually a really great insight as to why the book is so good. Cavanagh had an accountant’s eye for detail but the book is also totally gripping. If I could write something as good, I would faint.
Professor Peter Hesbacher Academic Chart Articles
Jimmy Webb, The Cake and the Rain
Don’t know that these qualify as journalism, but any of the ten or so articles Prof. Hesbacher published in the mid 1970s present a remarkable look at the world of chart and playlist construction and some of the chicanery involved. The other remarkable piece to me is Jimmy Webb’s book The Cake and the Rain. Here is a guy who had fantastic success by the age of 25, but at that point was dismissed by the industry as more of a ‘60s Vegas lounge lizard than the new genre of ‘70s singer-songwriter. How he recovered from near self-destruction to have a remarkable second career is somewhat miraculous and a good story.
Rob Sheffield, Dreaming The Beatles
Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl
Paul Thompson, “Kanye West vs. Fame”
I recommend reading Paul Thompson’s 2018 article Kanye West vs. Fame for Vice. I’d already been thinking about Kanye in a different light and not many Donda reviews interested me because of how effective this large observation was from a few years ago. From zeroing in on his quest for creative freedom in capitalism and the frustrations that took on to the pivot he ended up making, trying to change his image into a corporate friendly one. It makes me think of the arc of Kanye’s life, how his priorities have changed over the years and how his 2018 correlates to his present. All of this and also Paul Thompson is an incredible writer.
Peter Cooper, Johnny’s Cash & Charley’s Pride: Lasting Legends and Untold Adventures in Country Music
The late Peter Cooper was one of my favorite music writers, and I have a quote from him taped to the wall next to my desk. It’s from his 2017 book Johnny’s Cash & Charley’s Pride: Lasting Legends and Untold Adventures in Country Music, and here’s what it says:
“As a music writer—and I would suggest this is true of the vast majority of writers—I am here to say that objectivity is the mortal enemy. Now, for sure, you need a good bullshit detector, and you shouldn’t rant, and you shouldn’t cheerlead. But objectivity is dispassionate. And we’re in the passion business. We’re trying to make people feel something different than what they felt before they read our words. The only way I’ve found to do this is to feel something before I write my words, and to feel something while I’m writing.”
Jennifer Lena, Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music
This book is excellent because it provides students with the sense of music genres and their life cycles. It helps students to connect and understand the life cycle of a journal of music. Understanding music in this framework facilitates ease of discussion with my students.
Shirley Halperin & Jeremy Helligar, “The Big Payback: How Pharrell Williams Is Breaking the Chains of the Music Industry’s Troubled Past”
I thought this piece was an excellent look at the different ways racism and anti-blackness are so pervasive in the music industry, and many of them were things I didn’t know or hadn’t thought about before, like the terminology in the contracts or that record labels had white artists record versions of songs that were either written or already recorded by black artists. I also thought that it did an excellent job of breaking down the connections between racism, capitalism and colonialism and discussed industry-specific things in a way that made it accessible for people who might not be familiar.
Anwen Crawford, “The Monarch of Middlebrow”
Anwen Crawford’s 2009 article on Nick Cave is really stunning. Coming from Australia, Cave is an absolute sacred cow in the arts community, and it was such a relief to have Crawford point out the conservative and conventional elements in his work.
Abe Beame, “A Definitive Ranking of All the Original 5-Mic Albums in The Source”
This piece from Passion of the Weiss in September of 2020 I love in spite of myself. First of all, it’s a listicle, which is a form that is very difficult to do well. Second, it’s a ranking of rankings, which should’ve turned me away immediately. There’s something special about the sense of historical context and humor that Beame approaches his writing with, and this is some of his best.
Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (2nd Edition)
It is an exceptional book that I recommend highly, especially to our first year students, for its broad views on the nature of music as a human practice and how it interrelates with the social and cultural dimensions.
Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front
Marcus imbues this masterful history of the Riot Grrrl movement with her own passion and personal experience with the subject, and the urgency for a more inclusive and expansive music scene comes through loudly. Indie rock culture has come a long way since the early ‘90s but still has a long way to go. This account offers a valuable playbook for doing so.
Robin Moore and Walter Aaron Clark (eds.), Musics of Latin America
In addition to history courses for music majors and graduate seminars, I teach large survey courses on Music of Spain and Latin American Classical Heritage. These regularly enroll about 300 students each. There is no textbook for the former, but I make readings available from various sources. For Latin America I assign readings from a textbook I co-edited: Musics of Latin America. Ed. Robin Moore and Walter Clark. New York: Norton, 2012. It covers traditional, popular, and classical musics. Though it is immodest of me to say so, I believe that it is still the best such textbook, as it brings together a great team of leading scholars, each an expert in a particular geographic region or style period.
Jonathan Cott, “Yoko Ono and her Sixteen-Track Voice”
Chris Blackwell, The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond
Griel Marcus, More Real Life Rock: The Wilderness Years, 2014–2021
Lenny Kaye, Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll
Right now, I’m reading Chris Blackwell’s memoir The Islander, and it’s a terrific account of his career, and I’m dipping in and out of Greil Marcus’ new collection of Real Life Rock columns. Lenny Kaye’s Lightning Striking isn’t only a great idea for a rock book—tracing the history of the music through the scenes in different cities—but it’s so vividly written, and touches on so many vital areas in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, that I’d call it indispensable for anyone who wants to see how music journalism is done.
Keegan Bradford, Friendship International series
Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
Parul Sehgal, “Reviewing the Book Review”
While it might seem like an odd choice, I loved this reception history of the New York Times Book Review by Parul Sehgal. As music journalists, this article offers an important lesson on why we not only need to diversify the canon, but also the voices contributing to it.
William Gibbons, “Little Harmonic Labyrinths”
William Gibbons, Unlimited Replays
Doreen St. Felix, “Beyonce’s Triumphant Homecoming at Coachella”
Sarah Clemmens Waltz, “In Defense of Moonlight”
I am a huge fan of EarlyMusicSources.com, a website that contains extremely entertaining, enriching videos about early music history and performance practice. It’s curated by the fabulous harpsichordist Elam Rotem. I use these videos often in my teaching, and I always learn something new from them!
In terms of teaching the art of academic music scholarship, one article that I share again and again with my students is Sarah Clemmens Waltz, “In Defense of Moonlight.” It’s fascinating, clear, engaging, beautifully written—music research and writing at its best!
Amanda Petrusich, “The Emotionally Haunted Electronic Music of Oneohtrix Point Never”
J.G. Ballard, Low-Flying Aircraft
It’s not a piece of journalism but a book where music plays a role: J.G. Ballard’s Low-Flying Aircraft—a vision of the future, from the past, that reveals a lot about our present through what it gets right in the wrong way.
Joi Gilliam, "Fye-Veaux"
It's a piece of music journalism by the artist Joi about her career. It's rare that we have the opportunity to learn about an artists' journey through their own eyes. I love the absence of a ghostwriter and the presence of a woman who has the language to name her contribution to the music world.
Hanif Adburraqib, A Little Devil in America
Recently I read Hanif Adburraqib’s book A Little Devil in America. I love the flow of his prose, the movement from one idea to the next, from one subject to the next. I’m still trying to figure out the mechanics of his writing, the way music becomes both an extension of and point of entry into American history, all while he maintains this specific and relatable point of view.
My wife introduced me a few months ago to a podcast called Switched on Pop by musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding. As an ethnomusicologist and musician, I found most of the episodes I have heard relevant, refreshing, and thorough. I see they have released a book with an eponymous name with Oxford University Press. I cannot wait to read it.
Gerrick D. Kennedy, “The Light of Los Angeles”
Andrew Martone, “‘Ain't No Way’ by Aretha Franklin: Undercover LGBT Anthem?”
I am a huge fan of the close listening and researching that Andrew Martone has been doing on Aretha Franklin’s body of work. His piece on “Ain’t No Way” is an incredible example of that—he brings history, culture, identity and the music together and leaves us to listen to the music differently.
Gerrick D. Kennedy, “The Light of Los Angeles”
Gerrick Kennedy is one of my favorite music journalists, and I deeply enjoyed his oral history of Nipsey Hussle’s life, death, and legacy. Kennedy spent time with myriad people in Hussle’s life, including his partner, father, brother, and close friends, and that requires building a trust that gives them confidence that he could carry out this story. That confidence shined through this piece; it is honest, transparent, and full of love, which is a testament to Kennedy’s bare bones journalistic skill and to the subject himself.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One”
Trymaine Lee, “How America's Vast Racial Wealth Gap Grew: By Plunder”
Wesley Morris, “Why Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?”
Anne Helen Peterson, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”
Right now a lot of my teaching responsibilities involve general education courses, where I feel that my job is to plant proverbial seeds, to help students become a little bit more critically aware about the social reality of the U.S. and its culture, even if they’re biology majors, for example. For that reason, I typically always assign something from the 1619 Project, which is very helpful and accessible for my purposes. Usually Nikole Hannah-Jones’ opening essay, or Trymaine Lee on the wealth gap, or Wesley Morris on the history of Black music, depending on the course. For these same reasons, I also often assign Anne Helen Peterson’s essay, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” I’ve found that this resonates with my Gen Z students, particularly as they go through a COVID-19 recession, which is for them arguably what 2008 was for my generation.
Not Another Music History Cliché!
Craig Jenkins, "Taylor Swift’s Reputation Fixates on Big Enemies and
Craig Jenkins is one of our best living music critics — I always want to read his thoughts on an album or about stan culture. He has so many hits, but I regularly go back and read his review of Taylor Swift’s reputation, which makes me think about different things each time I read, especially as time passes and public and personal opinions inevitably shift. He tends to open with sweeping yet concrete statements about the world or about a person and then builds out the context, album details, and path to the finish so artfully you’d don’t realize how much ground he’s covered until it’s over. And this line pops into my head often: “What to get for the woman who has everything? The dignity of her nemeses.”
Roland Barthes, “The Romantic Song”
Drew Daniel, “Gasping but Somehow Still Alive: The Persistence of Meat is Murder”
Wesley Morris, “Why Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?”
Wesley Morris is brilliant and adept at writing about music and race. His
interpretation of the American music industry will fundamentally change the way you see
(and hear) the relationship between music and race.
I think that reading extensively outside of music journalism is the best way to seek inspiration. You don’t need to read any Lester Bangs. Bar some notable exceptions, he wasn’t that good. And he was never good without being deeply problematic. The world doesn’t need more people trying to ape his smug, continually offensive flow (although admittedly, we do need more people with his liquid, lysergic sense of connectivity). Instead have something light to tickle the brain and read some contemporary authors; Olga Tokarczuk, Eimear McBride, Ben Marcus, Steve Aylett, Adelle Stripe, David Keenan, Tariq Goddard, Joy White and think clinically about their novel approach to writing and what you can learn from them rather than going to the same old tired music crit sources and, essentially, being tempted to rip them off.
Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
Emma Madden, “How Music Fell in Love With Shitposting”
This is both a thoughtful and hilarious piece that explores the intersection of music, pop culture, and meme culture, and is an example of how non-traditional music writing can be very impactful.
Rob Sheffield, “We Are Living Through the Worst Eighties Reboot”
This piece is about the ways that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reintroduced certain Cold War anxieties and how pop music and culture writ large is starting to reflect that. Really fascinating stuff! At one point he says “music was fixated on the question of human life after the apocalypse - what would it look like?” in reference to artistic production in the Cold War period. That is such an interesting orientation to take towards historical moments and periods, “what is the music fixated on?” I’m already planning to ask my students that question in the future.
Philip Larkin, Introduction to All What Jazz
The English poet Philip Larkin was also a jazz reviewer and he wrote an Introduction to his collected reviews, a book called All What Jazz. I came across it in 1985 when I wasn’t a big fan of Larkin or indeed of jazz. Nor did I like the right-wing, middle-class paper he wrote those reviews for. But I was moved by the empathy that he showed for his readers: “Sometimes I imagine them, sullen fleshy inarticulate men, living in detached houses among the golf courses of Outer London… men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet. These I have tried to remind of the excitement of jazz, and tell where it may still be found.”
I dealt with a very different audience, but Larkin’s lines reminded me that readers have their own, real lives to deal with, and a music writer’s highest calling is to re-connect them with excitement and the joy.
David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers
Greg Tate, “Brother from Another Planet”
I will give you two pieces of writing, which go in different directions, but make an interesting comparison.
The first is David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello’s extended 1990 essay, Signifying Rappers. Foster Wallace was equivalent to a kind of literary Kurt Cobain of the 1990s. He was a talented and sensitive person who took his own life in his mid-forties. Foster Wallace was a creative writer known for his skills with “postmodern” literature, but beyond the surface of what he wrote, there was soul. Signifying Rappers is his take on hip-hop culture. When a white writer positively addresses such a subject, questions of colonization and racial appropriation spring to mind. While Signifying Rappers is an observational piece of writing, those questions hover in the background, and Foster Wallace insightfully plays upon them. He knows what readers are thinking, and that gives him his creative premise.
The second piece of writing is Greg Tate’s 2016 piece for MTV News consecrating David Bowie, “Brother from Another Planet.” What is interesting here is reading a Black journalist and spokesperson for the African American community celebrate an artist whose innovations almost go beyond race. According to Tate, “Bowie remains that rarity — a white rock artist whose appropriations of Black kulcha never felt like a rip-off but more like a sharing of radical and bumptious ideations between like-minded freaks.” What interests me here is why and how some artists are allowed into the pantheon, while others are dismissed. Elsewhere I’ve heard Tate saying that Joni Mitchell was another white artist beloved of Black audiences. With race, the question that confronts us all is how to celebrate inclusivity and dialogue without losing sight of social injustice. That is not a question for me to answer, but I think that the places of dialogue are the ones from which interesting developments have come, and will come again.
Kevin Kehrberg & Jeffrey A. Keith, “Somebody Died, Babe: A Musical Cover-Up of Racism, Violence, & Greed”
Every music writer should read this awe-inspiring Bitter Southerner feature about the origins of the folk song "Swannanoa Tunnel." To me, it's a reminder that it's just as essential to apply our critical faculties to aesthetic discourses of the past as to the discourses of today and tomorrow. You never know what falsehoods have been left to fester.
A few months ago the PEER Lab at the UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music was interviewed by the publication I Care if You Listen, which focuses on contemporary classical music with an emphasis on those underrepresented in the Western canon. Their music criticism engages in stimulating questions around equity and within music. I highly recommend their work, ranging from interviews to annotated playlists and advocacy for music makers.
Caity Weaver, “Justin Bieber Would Like to Reintroduce Himself”
Jason Isbell, “John Prine Taught Me to Stay Vulnerable”
David Samuels, “Language, meaning, modernity, and doowop”
I teach a variety of classes to students at different levels, so there’s no one text that I assign. In addition, many of the classes I teach are about anthropology in general and not about music. However, in my introduction to linguistic anthropology, which I’ve taught many times, I always like to lecture about one article that illustrates how music and language work together. “Language, meaning, modernity, and doowop” by David Samuels from 2004 show how critics of doowop during its heyday in the 1950s implicitly relied on Western language ideologies to justify what amounts to classist and racist evaluations.
What I like about the article is that it provides a good example of how to think about music’s many meanings beyond its semantic or dictionary definable content. Doowop’s lyrics are very simple but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t interesting, powerful, or beautiful. Through listening to doowop and learning about Samuels’ argument students gain an understanding that music—and by extension, other kinds of expressive forms—are important even if they do not include much referential content.
Jeff Weiss, “Tyler, The Evader”
Ralph Ellison, “Living With Music”
June Jordan, His Own Where
I would pick a text that is not “music journalism” per se, but writing about music nevertheless: Ralph Ellison’s essay ‘Living with Music’ from Shadow and Act. I think it will resonate with all music heads as reassurance that this is a life worth living and that tuning into beats, bars and their effect on our consciousness is vital, important and serious as (y)our life!
Also, June Jordan’s only published novel: His Own Where. Written entirely in Black English, it is a love story which was written—as Jordan tells us—as ‘a way of familiarising kids with activist principles of urban redesign or, in other words, activist habits of response to environment […] for the promotion of flexible and pacific communal street life’. So, using a novel to sensitise us to a different politics of (urban) social life sounds so inspiring to me—as a reminder of how rarely we draw on culture to improve our politics; not as/for the administration of the state, but as the very life of the polis: the public/civic realm.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Todd in the Shadows, Trainwreckords series
I’ll recommend anything written by Hanif Abdurraqib forever. His way of looking at music and the world, at music’s place in the world, never ceases to amaze me. If you can pick up any of his books, do. In the meantime, here he is on Nina Simone and Carly Rae Jepsen.
I also really enjoy Todd in the Shadows’s Trainwreckords series. The videos are really thorough rundowns of very vulnerable moments in otherwise powerful artists’ lives.
Dean Van Nguyen, “How a Group of Journalists Turned Hip-Hop Into a Literary Movement”
Sasha Geffen, Glitter Up The Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary
We highly recommend this book. Sasha Geffen so brilliantly examines how musicians use lyrics, performance and appearance to transcend gender norms across the decades.
Marcus Teague, “My Week With Metallica”
Dave Tompkins, How To Wreck A Nice Beach
Clarissa Brooks, Najma Sharif, and Wanna Thompson, “From 'A Seat At The Table' To 'Ctrl': 10 Albums By Black Women That Defined The 2010s”
Laura Snapes, “Body of work: why Billie Eilish is right to stand her ground against shaming”
Lester Bangs on The Clash
In late 1977, the NME had the genuinely great idea of bringing a supreme American journalist over to the UK to try and make sense of this most British of punk rock groups and Bangs rose to the challenge. His on-the-road account ended up being spread over three issues that December (I have just realized that I printed the first issue of my own zine at school in the midst of it!) and for me, it elevated music journalism from hucksterism (not that I would have used that word at the time) to an inspirational art form.
Lester got The Clash, The Clash got him, and best of all, Bangs was able to put it into words that even this 13-year old could understand. I find it ironic, interesting and well worth immortalizing that while the UK had music press coming out of its ears, it still took a Yank writer to make me see the possibilities. (The three articles in question take up 36 pages of the Bangs anthology Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.)
Kory Grow, “‘That Evil Kind of Feeling’: The Inside Story of Black Sabbath’s Iconic Cover Art”
Anomaly Index, “Unsolved Mysteries: Conglomerate Records”
This piece by Anomaly Index on the mysterious Conglomerate Records is just everything I like about music journalism: the almost devotional research, the really out-there topic, the inspired prose.
Richard Dyer, "In Defence of Disco"
Richard Dyer’s “In Defence of Disco” in Gay Left (1979) is a valuable historical document of the celebration and ambivalence that is possible to hold about dance music culture simultaneously. As for an active music journalist today, I have great respect for (and subscribe to) Gina Arnold’s work.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie”
Kendrick Lamar Meets Rick Rubin and They Have an Epic Conversation
I appreciate what GQ did here curating this conversation between Kendrick and Rick Rubin. Video journalism is obviously of particular interest to me and anything that can feel personal despite the trappings of a camera crew present is something I appreciate. Sometimes the best journalism to me is stepping back and just letting interesting people be interesting.
Emma Madden, “Lana Del Rey and the Allure of Aestheticized Pain”
One of my absolute favourite culture writers at the minute is Emma Madden. Their work is inquisitive and detailed at a time when so much is fawning and surface level, but more importantly their perspective and references are incredibly unique—and those are the best qualities you can have as a culture writer, in my opinion. I really loved this piece they wrote for Jezebel on “Lana Tumblr” and the cultural evolution of how young women in particular exhibit pain online—first through earnest romanticism, and more recently de-aestheticised through irony. It’s a masterclass in building out what could have been an outsider-looking-in type of essay into a beautiful reported piece on a community that the writer is interested in, but ultimately not a part of.
Will Hermes, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever
Robbie Williams with Chris Heath, Feel
Gavin Hills, Bliss To Be Alive
Gerri Hirshey, Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music
Rawiya Kameir, “Moses Sumney Is Ready to Claim His Spotlight”
Sasha Frere-Jones, “Ambient Genius”
I often come back to this piece by Sasha Frere-Jones on Brian Eno, on account of all the paragraphs that make me shudder. If I am stuck, the imagination and sprezzatura here usually compels me to keep going.
Gustavo Lequerica-Calvo, "Que paso con Aurita Castillo?"
Various Academic Journals
Ian Leslie, “The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic”
This New York Times piece is the definitive Weird Al profile, and an amazing piece of journalism, full stop. I absolutely admire the dedication, heart and soul that Sam Anderson put into it over so many months. Not to mention the hundreds of fans in the photo shoot, and the visits to Weird Al’s house...it’s the story I wish I’d written.
Terrance Hayes, To Float in the Space Between
Craig Brown, 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret
Arthur Kempton, Boogaloo
The New York Times, “Hip-Hop’s 50th Anniversary: 50 Rappers Share Their Stories”
Joshua Clover - “Terrorflu”
Clover careens around Boston's Route 128, circumnavigating Donald Rumsfeld, Cornershop, Big Beat, industrial capitalism and "finance capital pop" en route to M.I.A. This piece balances breathless excitement and deep contemplation so casually you forget how difficult it is to pull off. It nails all the inflections and diversions of a passionate bar argument in celebrating M.I.A's unparalleled artistry, and when it seems like things are stretching too far the rubber band snaps back with a sting – just like the M.I.A he celebrates, Clover knows exactly what he's doing. It's an infectious, fun and all-around great feat of criticism.
Fran Lebowitz - “Disco Hints: The New Etiquette”
Lebowitz was a disco enthusiast during the New York scene's halcyon days, and though these references are dated, not to mention more acidic than the subjects probably deserved, any devoted club attendee should be familiar with and giggle through her brief list of complaints. She has the confidence to make sweeping pronouncements without any hedging based solely on personal experience, and her deflation of parts of DJ culture's self-serving tendencies scans as accurate in 2021 as it would have at the time of writing—though I absolutely welcome 16-minute instrumentals now and then.
There's a bit of a Part II here, in which the renowned reporter Vince Aletti interviewed Lebowitz about her relationship with nightlife later in life, underscoring the connection between youth and excitement that seems to drive so much of this participation. It makes me think about the difficulty and necessity of preserving that spark as the years and DJs spin on.
Cory Arcangel - “Scene Report: The North Face”
Sniffy suspicions about the concrete details of live performances and DJ sets in electronic music have been present throughout the genre's entire existence, but the conversation hit a high-frequency pitch with the EDM explosion in America. The question of "What are they actually doing?" became louder as the DJ booths were swallowed by ever-larger stages and the light shows became more blinding. This piece by Arcangel is a good-faith attempt to answer that question, infused with emotional transparency and a sense of joyous participation – all triggered by attending a Steve Angello festival set in Stavanger, Norway.
He delves into the interdependence of "the work" and "the showbiz" in any given artist's career with a credulous intellectual investment in the creative possibilities of both, and the final explanation of Angello as the deliverable product in a just-in-time supply chain is both brilliant to recognize and depressing to consider. It all makes for one of the most approachable and enjoyable pieces of writing about not just EDM or electronic music but performance, authenticity, and artists-as-objects in a capitalist industry.
Bill Flanagan, “The Allman Brothers in ‘The Foot-Shootin’ Party’ (A Tale of the Old South)” (The Rock Musician: 15 Years of the Interviews – The Best of Musician Magazine)
Simon Napier-Bell, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me
Art Pepper, Straight Life
Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue
Ellen Willis, “The Velvet Underground”
Ian Penman, “My God Wears a Durag”
By this late stage, Ian Penman is in a class of his own. His journalism transcends 'music criticism' and this review of Stephanie Phillips' book about Solange Knowles (Why Solange Matters, Faber 2021) provides a greater understanding of what Knowles is up to. It makes you want to blast out Cranes In The Sky at top vol, which is what I often do.
Nebal Maysaud, “It’s Time to Let Classical Music Die”
Tom Ewing, "Imperial"
This piece by Tom Ewing captures a lot of what I love about pop writing: it’s fun, fizzy, and bold in making a huge historical claim that is both silly but also compelling, and that ends up giving you a tool to think differently about music for years to come.
Michael Eric Dyson, JAY-Z: Made in America
I loved Michael Eric Dyson's book on Jay-Z. While I tackled the business side in mine, he really captured Hov's impact on the American experience in ways that perhaps only he could. Highly recommended.
Griel Marcus, Mystery Train
For many years, I have required students in my introductory course on rock music to read Mystery Train by Greil Marcus. Although the essays in it were written specifically for the book, Marcus is a music journalist, and the essays address the general rather than the scholarly reader. The principal reason I require my students to read it is that Marcus is clearly writing about music he loves, loves dearly, in fact, and he reveals it on every page.
Chris Willman, “Peter Cooper, Celebrated Nashville Music Journalist, Singer and Country Hall of Fame Exec, Dies at 52”
This obituary of legendary country music journalist Peter Cooper, which includes the full transcript of a speech he gave at a writers’ conference last year, hit me right in the gut. I never met Peter, but his career has been hugely inspirational to me and I just love the way he talks about writing. “Try for the occasional big hit, but embrace the single to right” is an unforgettable piece of advice, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t know the first thing about baseball.
Theodor Adorno, “Music in the Background”
Nathaniel Mackey, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate
Kyra Gaunt, “The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop”
I teach a module in the third year called Histories of Women in Music. I like them to read Kyra Gaunt’s chapter about double-dutch. I think it’s exciting for women (and everyone) to think about embodied activities that are feminised as being crucial to the origin story of hip-hop.
Dr. Regina Bradley, Chronicling Stankonia
bell hooks, Black Looks
Dr. Regina Bradley’s Chronicling Stankonia and her podcast with Christina Lee, Bottom of the Map are just really stellar. They both take seriously the Black South and the ways that Black people living in and moving through the US South have shaped so much of our culture, from what we see on TV/streaming to what we hear. Both are expertly researched and nuanced and you find out about great artists or insights that can completely shift what you believe you care about. Just really excellent scholarship.
Also: bell hooks’s book Black Looks and literally anything by Stuart Hall. Both of them have such important and nuanced understandings of culture that will greatly impact anyone going into music journalism or any other field of culture. My students are always exposed to bell hooks, literally every time I open my mouth. Reading her and Hall’s work will pay dividends for eternity.
Rob Tannenbaum, “Billy Joel’s Got a Good Job and Hits in His Head”
Jewly Hight, “First Listen: Dolly Parton, ‘Blue Smoke’”
Alyssa Barna, “These are the musicological reasons Taylor Swift’s new album sounds dull”
I like to assign polemic articles that will rile the students up. Students either love or hate Taylor Swift, so an accessible article like this can make for some really interesting discussion.
Laura Barton, “The car, the radio, the night - and rock's most thrilling song”
It’s a piece I commissioned, but it’s just about my favourite ever piece of music writing. It is Laura Barton driving every road mentioned in every version of Jonathan Richman’s “Roadrunner.” I love that kind of approach to music writing, in which the single most important thing about music—how it makes you feel—is central. Well, I like it when it is done well.
Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson, “An Architect of Police Brutality: How Mayor Rudy Giuliani Cemented a Police State”
This piece by Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson details the efforts made by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to target black and brown communities throughout his tenure. Among his efforts was an attack on club culture, primarily music of black origin such as house, techno and rap/hip-hop. Anyone who still believes that music can be separated from politics needs to read it.
William Cheng, Loving Music Till It Hurts
Clarissa Brooks, “Meet Saucy Santana, the Rising Star Taking Over More Than Just TikTok”
I adore this interview with Saucy Santana by Clarissa Brooks. It’s a fascinating look into viral fame and the impact Tiktok plays on the music industry. It’s also just so much fun!
John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Upon this Rock”
I love John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Upon this Rock,” which is a classic GQ piece where he’s sort of ‘embedded’ with a group of teenagers at a Christian rock festival. Obviously it pushes a lot of my buttons as someone who grew up in that world, but Sullivan also just writes really movingly about why and how music matters, how it means, so personally to people.
Jewel Wicker, “Lil Baby’s Big Gains”
Jennifer Gersten, “The Urge To Destroy a Violin”
Jennifer is a collaborator of mine at Which Sinfonia and her ongoing investigation into our relationship with string instruments fascinates me. In this piece, she takes a niche Instagram account and blows it up until it’s a reflection pond that we’re all forced to reckon with.
Dan Charnas, Dilla Time
It’s obsessively detailed without ever being clinical, and dissects the evolution of Dilla’s process on a very granular level while never losing sight of who he was as a person. It reminded me of what music biographies can be.
Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love
Tseliso Monaheng’s YouTube channel
Tseliso Monaheng always describes himself as “Writer. The end” so I’ll respect that but I think he’s much more. His YouTube channel is proof. He is entrenched in various music communities in South Africa, so he often takes his camera(s) along to help the rest of us be a fly on the wall on the processes and performances of musicians who don’t get popular acclaim.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”
Depending on the level of the class, I assign George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language.” The British English from the 1940s can be hard to get through, but the points Orwell makes about willful obfuscation and pretentious-sounding jargon are as valid today as in his era.
Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk
Especially since he died—but often before that—I’ve been recommending Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk. Greg had a genuinely original voice and was a truly great stylist, which is why the book is still a pleasure to take in all these years later. It’s essential reading for anyone interested in music criticism or cultural criticism.
Martha Weinman Lear, “The Bobby Sox Have Wilted, But the Memory Remains Fresh”
Alanna McArdle, “Mumford & Sons Have Replaced Their Trademark Gimmicks With Absolute Nothingness”
Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music
The minute I read Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music I was blown away. What a breathtaking, inspiring piece of research and passion. I’m a sucker for soul music anyway, but the entire book gave me a significantly broader appreciation for the music and the struggles of the 1950’s-1970’s. I think I’ve read it four of five times, it’s just a very enjoyable read that I can never put down and I always circle back to reading again.
Nick Tosches
Michael Eric Dyson, Jay-Z: Made In America
Lizzy Goodman, Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011
Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me
Michael Nelson, “First Impressions Of Earth Turns 10”
Michael Nelson’s incredible anniversary essay on The Strokes’s First Impressions of Earth remains a favorite because of how it exists completely outside of the typical structure of those kinds of nostalgic essays. It’s nearly novella length, but both his tone and the way he builds actual music clips into the writing makes it completely conversational and informal, yet gripping. I don’t even like the album much, but I read this essay twice a year for inspiration.
Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
A favorite, very-smart work from journalism/criticism is Simon Reynolds's 2011 Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. Like in Reynolds's other scholarship (highly recommended), he offers a rich balance of perspectives and thinking, an encyclopedic knowledge of pop history, and a very sharp eye to the intersections of pop and culture. And he's a wonderful writer.
There’s a small zine out of New York called Street Dreams that I adore. I picked up an issue because the cover was this incredible painting of a guy reading Street Dreams surrounded by old rap records. It’s got so much heart and voice—it’s full of interviews, little reviews, the vibe is very amateur/D.I.Y. but the guy who does it takes it very seriously, and I appreciate the energy that goes into it. Some of the interviews are literally just short exchanges he had running into DJs at the record store.
Sam Rosen, “Building the Next Bieber”
Hanif Abdurraqib, “Routine Maintenance”
Fernando A. Flores, Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas
Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff
Richard Taruskin, The Danger of Music and other Anti-Utopian Essays
James Jackson Toth, “Too Much Music: A Failed Experiment In Dedicated Listening”
I love the concept of this article, because the idea feels nearly impossible today, but just over a decade ago, this was the norm. It’s a reminder to treasure the albums that move us, much like you wouldn’t keep walking if a painting in a museum brings you to tears.
108 Mics, “e is A Masterpiece”
Jessica Hopper, The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic
Meaghan Garvey, “Who’s Billie Eilish?”
I don’t hold with that whole “great music journalism is dead” thing. The golden age offered a really narrow, white male view of music and life and from the late 1990’s writers became confined by the restrictions of marketing focus groups. The internet produced really bad, pedestrian hack writing… but it also became an amazing space for some incredibly talented writers. It gave space for female writers to shine. And it’s continued to provide space for a diversity of people and tastes that were excluded from the white male rock rock hegemony of Rolling Stone, NME, etc.
I know she’s not a new writer but I love Jessica Hopper’s work. Her book The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic is essential reading for anyone with a love of popular culture and brilliant writing. I also love Meaghan Garvey’s work and to me this piece about Billie Eilish in FADER has everything I look for. Incisive analysis, sharp descriptive work, empathy and distance, pinpoint observation and questioning and the ability to capture the essence of the cultural phenomenon of the artist.
Katherine McKittrick and Alexander Weheliye, “808s & Heartbreak”
This crosses between academic and extra-academic work, but it's the most important piece of writing I've read in the last few years. It discusses what to do about abusers like Chris Brown or Michael Jackson, and it's one of the few to get it right. It's also very formally innovative, and the formal innovation is part of why and how they get it right.
Rian Milan, “In the Jungle”
Rian Milan’s 2000 Rolling Stone feature, “In the Jungle,” a deeply reported history of the song “Wimoweh”/“The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and how a piece of music might travel for decades, accumulating meanings and legalities and consequences. I’m fascinated by how this story moves at a wide, wild historical scale, and reflects (like science fiction) back on whatever present moment you occupy as a reader.
Here are some insightful recent academic books on the changing media landscape & music...
Eriksson, M., Fleischer, R., Johansson, A., Snickars, P., & Vonderau, P. (2019). Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baym, N.K. (2018). Playing to the crowd: Musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. New York: New York University Press
Meier, L. M. (2017). Popular Music as Promotion: Music and Branding in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity.
R. Nowak & A. Whelan (Eds.). (2016). Networked Music Cultures: Contemporary Approaches, Emerging Issues. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Morris, J. W. (2015). Selling Digital Music: Formatting Culture. Oakland: University of California Press.
And one academic account which is focused on music criticism, specifically: Lindberg, U., Guðmundsson, G., Michelsen, M., & Weisethaunet, H. (2005). Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers & Cool-Headed Cruisers. New York: Peter Lang.
Ann Powers, Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music
If you really want to see what it means to dive deep into music history, please read Ann Powers’ Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music. It’s essentially how the body and sexualization has shaped and is expressed through pop music, but there are other really well-researched morsels of history in there too pertaining to gender and class. Powers tackles everything and anything in pop, rock, jazz, and it was incredibly informative.
Emma Garland, “The Revolutionary Pleasure of Lana Del Rey”
I had never really given Lana Del Rey much thought before 2019, but after reading Emma Garland’s brilliant, downright joyous piece “The Revolutionary Pleasure of Lana Del Rey,” I listened to Norman Fucking Rockwell! immediately. Now it’s my favorite of all of 2019, and really defined my year for me personally in a lot of ways. I have Emma and her international treasure of a brain to thank for that.
Recently, I loved this article by musician Catherine Anne Davies who delves into the ‘tortured artist’ cliche and disputes it entirely (I totally agree with her and we’ve got a section about this in Sound Advice), this article by Laura Snapes on Gen Z songwriting sums up the current pop mood very succinctly, and Tim Ingham’s explanation of why Sony bought AWAL is, as ever, both informative and entertaining.
Naomi André, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement
Chérie Rivers Ndaliko, Necessary Noise: Music, Film, and Charitable Imperialism in the East of Congo
Imani Perry, May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem
Shana Redmond, Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson
I didn’t have to think hard to come up with these examples: they are all deeply researched, beautifully written, compellingly argued books. But this isn’t a random selection of excellent scholarship: I consciously chose four books by Black women. I take to heart the mission of the Cite Black Women movement, which seeks to acknowledge and honor Black women’s intellectual production. I highly recommend all four—please read, recommend, and cite them!
Lynneé Denise, “Beyoncé’s Renaissance and the Case for Misery Resistance”
I really love the review of Beyoncé’s Renaissance that Lynneé Denise published in Oprah Daily. Denise brings her wealth of knowledge to consider the influences and lineages we hear in the album, especially as they relate to dance musics and Black queer musics. She also considers the African diasporic resonances of the album.
Marissa R. Moss, Her Country
Marissa R. Moss’s book Her Country is a must-read on a newer crop of female artists forging their own path in the country music space — often without the support of terrestrial country radio. It’s a fascinating study in how to build an audience that will stick with you as you grow as a creative entity on your own terms.
David Cavanagh, The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for The Prize
It’s been a little while since I’ve read this, but anyone wishing to tell a big narrative story about a scene or an era or a band or a music business figure should read The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for The Prize by David Cavanagh. It’s the story of Creation Records generally and Alan McGee in particular. It covers a lot of ground in British underground music in the 80s before Oasis detonated the label into the mainstream in the mid-90s and it is beautifully written. Cavanagh always wrote without any cliche.
cynocephalus, “Matthew Revert / Vanessa Rossetto’s Everyone Needs A Plan”
I was floored when I first read this review of Matthew Revert & Vanessa Rossetto's Everyone Needs a Plan by Cynocephalus. The key thing is that it's very atypical (read: creative) for an album review—my friend compared the writing to that of Witold Gombrowicz's, which I think is accurate—but it still accomplishes three things that all great album reviews should do: The writing captivates the reader, one comes out of the review feeling like they better understand the album, and one also feels like they better understand the author.
Richard Taruskin, “Books: The Musical Mystique”
It’s getting a bit old now, but I love giving my music research students this Richard Taruskin review of a few classical music books because it fosters such great discussions about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It’s also really helpful in reflecting on class and culture and ideas like “high” and “low” art and how problematic they can be.
Suzanne Cusick, “Music as torture / Music as weapon”
I live in a neighborhood that gets pretty loud during the summer, and I spent a lot of time thinking about music, noise, and agency with regards to sound in urban settings. This led to me spending time with Suzanne Cusick’s excellent essay on music and torture in US foreign policy. Obviously I wasn’t being tortured, but Cusick’s work is always sensitive and fascinating, and in this case it showed what happens if you take something that was obnoxious in one setting and push it to its absolute limit. The paper is more on the scholarship than the journalism end of the spectrum, and it’s a fascinating read.
My friend Riley is a writer at Forbes, and I love all of his articles, especially artist interviews. His article with UMI is super cool. The way he describes UMI, her music, and his observations of being around her, are nothing short of breathtaking. His writing is incredible and I love the artists he covers.
Tristan Kneschke
Michelangelo Matos, Dance Music 101: An Online Reading Course
Michelangelo Matos wrote an incredible piece for Vice where he collected the best essays on the entire lineage of electronic music. It’s in no way exhaustive, but is easily required reading for anyone interested in the subject. It’ll fill in some gaps if readers are only vaguely aware of certain periods or scenes.
Recently I’ve been pretty inspired by the works of Eastern Margins, a collective and label who share stories from the East and Southeast Asia communities and diaspora. They go so deep into these cool little niches so much so that it becomes more about their storytelling ability than about the artist’s popularity, and for me that cuts right to the core of what music journalism is all about.
I also love how they have a perfect balance between their writer’s own experiences and perspectives (which are really important to the narrative they’re constructing) and careful research. I think as writers, it’s easy to forget sometimes that music journalism isn’t just about being a mouthpiece for endless release cycles and regurgitating the information publicists feed through. It’s also about you translating your emotional connection with the work for others, so that they can also experience what you’re feeling, and perhaps become a fan or have their perspective of the music changed because of you. If you’re privileged enough to be considered a music journalist, I think that’s something worth keeping in mind. You have the power to change/inform the audience’s listening experience.
Philip A. Ewell, “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame”
I always recommend that people read Philip A. Ewell's "Music Theory and the White Racial Frame." It is an important article that highlights the numerous ways that academic music theory is influenced by broader issues of white supremacy within classical music.
Laura Snapes, “Big feelings and nowhere to go: how Gen Z reinvented the power ballad”
Jenkmin, “The Revival We Got and the Revival We Need”
TwentyNineScene is over and we have now finally been subsumed by the RAWRing 20s. Regardless of how you feel about this situation (I'd wager that if you're reading this newsletter, your opinion on it ranges from apathetic to abyssal horror), there was some genuinely interesting analysis coming out about the re-contextualization and critical re-evaluation of the scene era. If Drew Kaufman's series for Metal Injection about five essential scene albums was the 101 course and my Bands You Weren't Supposed to Like series was the graduate-level class, then this blog post is the doctoral thesis on the subject.
Written by the same person who runs the extremely esoteric Facebook meme page "Welp, it's 2am and i'm listening to cap'n jazz again," who I believe prefers to remain anonymous, this is a post that delivers incisive critique and aesthetic examination of the burgeoning, then flowering, then dying explosion of punk- and hardcore-derived semi-popular/semi-subterranean music in the early-to-mid aughts. Never before have I seen an essay that can wax poetic about Circa Survive, the death of "Warped Tour MTVmo," and the dearth of creativity inherent in the so-called "emo revival" just as soon as it can seamlessly weave quotes from The Postmodern Condition and citations of Deleuze & Guattari into its analysis. This essay is a master-class in multidisciplinary music journalism.
Tara Joshi, "How Destiny's Child gave me my first taste of
This piece is from 2021, but it’s stuck with me for a number of years. It’s written by Tara Joshi for The Guardian, and works through her childhood obsession with Destiny’s Child. It’s a beautiful coming-of-age story that compellingly works through her fascination with the group from the perspective of a young British Asian living on the Isle of Wight, trying to find her feet and build confidence.
I also want to shout out Tara’s former publication gal-dem, which unfortunately ceased publication last month. It was such a powerful platform, helmed by women and non-binary people of colour, that radically changed the news landscape in the UK. I would recommend checking out their archive, and continuing to support these writers and their work as they move onto pastures new.
OK, this isn’t music journalism, but it’s something that inspired me: record collectors on Instagram. It’s cool to see people’s record collections and helpful for research, too! Jen Lemasters' Instagram was a huge inspiration for me, and it blows my mind daily.
Ellen Willis, “Dylan”
If you only read one piece of criticism, make it this. I have pored over this essay in my copy of Out of the Vinyl Deeps, it is marked up and illegible at this point. It’s inspirational, funny and easy to read, rigorous and unsparing, the blueprint of criticism from the master Ellen Willis on Bob Dylan from 1967.
Liza Lentini
Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
I admire Lester Bangs’ writing and his fiery, contained recklessness. Perhaps what I love most is his dedication to his own voice and its distinguished and beautiful “imperfections.” The collection of his works Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung is a constant source of inspiration for me, and I’d recommend it to any and all creatives for the aforementioned reasons.
Jeff Weiss, “The Assassination of Drakeo the Ruler”
This is one of the best pieces of work I’ve ever read, period. Jeff always manages to write in a way that makes you visually picture what’s going on as you read his words. Drakeo’s murder also heavily impacted the whole hip-hop community, so getting such a detailed eyewitness account from someone who’s followed Drakeo’s life and career so closely was poignant.
Sammy Sussman, "Tainted History"
Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World
Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop
VAN’s report on sexual harassment and assault at Juilliard, “Tainted History,” is excellent. It involved deep, painstaking research, working with survivors, and the clear presentation of facts, and just this week, one of the faculty members named, Robert Beaser, was fired.
In my teaching creative writing practice, I always recommend Matthew Salesses' Craft in the Real World. It exposes the White and male supremacist origins of American writing programs, advocates for an anti-racist and humane approach to teaching writing, and offers new methods for writing teaching and critique. I pair it with Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. These books could both be used to help guide scholarly writing as well.
Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head
Every time I write, I always go back to the book Revolution in the Head, by the late Ian MacDonald. Despite what I said earlier about music books with no input from artists and creators, for my money, this one is how you do it, if you do it that way. Beautifully written, deeply researched and informed, tough but fair, unafraid to court controversy—it would be tough for anyone to top. But it always inspires me to try.
Lily Moayeri, “Tech Is Music to Their Ears”
Another peer of mine (and alumni of this newsletter) who inspires me regularly is Lily Moayeri. She wrote a piece on the underground music network of Iran for the Los Angeles Times which really showed me how culture writing can intertwine with important issues like the current revolution in Iran. Women. Life Freedom.
Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting
I’m currently re-reading Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting with a friend and it’s a brilliant work of arts criticism and aesthetic theory. The entire book is based on the argument that these three aesthetic categories (the zany, the cute, and the interesting) are emblematic of late capitalism and pervasive within our art, media, and commodities. In the past, I’ve found the section on the cute particularly helpful in understanding and writing about works of art as disparate as Kero Kero Bonito and powerviolence. It’s a fairly dense text, but when Ngai discusses a text or work of art, it becomes very clear that she strives to convey a very specific way of looking at it. This drive in her writing is refreshing and that sort of hyper-magnification of and askew glance towards one specific aspect of a work of art is a mode of criticism that can be very rewarding and illuminating to read.
Brent Hayes Edwards and Katherine Whatley, “Ornette at Prince Street’: A Glimpse from the Archives”
Brent Hayes Edwards and Katherine Whatley’s “‘Ornette at Prince Street’: A Glimpse from the Archives” in Point of Departure is a deep dive into the politics and soundscape of Ornette Coleman’s Prince Street loft.
Damien Love wrote a series of pieces on Lou Reed’s late ’70s output and goes long on his blog. Insightful oral history, particularly the one on Street Hassle.
Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice”
Part of Roland Barthes’s “The Grain of the Voice” discusses what he terms “adjectival criticism.” It’s worth considering the overuse of adjectives in music criticism, either deciding to earn each adjective or to acknowledge them as to some extent inherently subjective.
Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps
When I got out of college I had a folder of Ellen Willis pieces from The New Yorker that I Xeroxed from the bound volumes during an independent study project on the history of rock criticism. Those pieces—collected now in Out of the Vinyl Deeps—were a revelation for their clarity and their openness (both to ideas and to the reader), the precision of their conversational language, and the way they asked questions as often as answered them. I used to copy those Xeroxes and hand them out to anyone who’d listen to my spiel, so I say open that collection and read anything in it. I guarantee you’ll want to read more.
Shy Thompson, "The Story of Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar in 9 Albums"
I loved Shy Thompson's “The Story of Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar in 9 Albums.” Here's a genre of music (or at least a sound) that I love, without ever knowing anything about it at all, and in a single article I got a bunch of listening recommendations and a guide to the music's history. Great online music feature.
Hanif Abdurraqib, “Are the Black Keys Still Underdogs?”
Travis Atria, “The Fire from Within – The Conflicted Journey and Spiritual Trials of Marvin Gaye”
Alice Bag, Violence Girl
I really enjoyed this immersive think piece in the New York Times on whether The Black Keys are still underdogs. It was well-written, humorous and managed to dissect a new album while also covering an amorphous scene history.
I also was awed by Wax Poetics Vol. 2’s cover story on Marvin Gaye by Travis Atria. I am floored by his language and depth of knowledge. The article structure was very cool, too.
I also recently finished Alice Bag’s memoir Violence Girl, about growing up Chicana in East LA and semi-inadvertently becoming a leader in the burgeoning punk scene. The whole book was raw and engaging and hilarious. I’m particularly impressed by the narrative structure in this book.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie”
Sullivan takes a topic hardly anyone knows or cares about (the subject of pre-war blues is largely relegated to 78 collectors) and spins a riveting detective yarn that keeps readers on the edge of their seats. Sullivan adroitly tells the complicated history of the Jim Crow South, nimbly breaks down the song structure of 16-bar blues, and deftly inserts himself into the story via a contemporary interview with musicologist Robert McCormick, who, 60-some-odd years ago, conducted an oral history with someone who may have known guitarist L.V. “Elvie” Thomas. It’s a breathtaking piece of work that takes the reader through the writing process itself. It also breathes life into the forgotten story of Thomas and in revealing her past, blows the dust off her music even as it touches on the fragility of music journalism, which is oftentimes fraught with missed connections, dead ends, and false leads.
Elias Leight, “How American R&B Songwriters Found a New Home in K-Pop”
Mosi Reeves, “Kehlani, And R&B's Women Of Color, Struggle To Be Heard In Pop Market”
I’m always invoking what The-Dream said in a great interview with Complex when asked what he thought of the term “alt-R&B,” which is that R&B is always alternative when it comes to the pop landscape. This piece of reporting, How American R&B Songwriters Found a New Home in K-Pop by Elias Leight at Rolling Stone, highlights the total work disparity for Black artists in the US. It’s essential and a great follow-up to Mosi Reeves’s 2017 piece Kehlani, And R&B's Women Of Color, Struggle To Be Heard In Pop Market for NPR Music.
I have been stimulated by the writings of numerous thoughtful music critics and scholars from 1900 onward. Among those who have a special knack for saying fresh and interesting about music yet remaining understandable to the “educated music lover,” I might mention, from an earlier generation or two, Donald Francis Tovey, Ernest Newman, Donald Mitchell, Leonard B. Meyer (who was one of my favorite professors), and Joseph Kerman. Among writers today, I’d name David Cairns, Richard Crawford, Hugh Macdonald, William Weber, Ellen T. Harris, Peter Bloom, James Parakilas, Celia Applegate, William Weber, Nicholas Cook, Mary Hunter, Annegret Fauser, Robert Fink, W. Anthony Sheppard, and Jonathan Bellman. (I’m probably leaving out some of my biggest influences! I should point out that a few of the names above are or were officially professors of European history rather than musicology.) Music critic Alex Ross reads and listens widely, pays close attention, and writes engagingly, as in his latest book Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.
Ellen Willis, “Beginning to See the Light”
Ellen Willis’s essay “Beginning To See The Light” is ostensibly about her evolving critical relationship to punk, but she fits in so much more: aging; feminist revolution; lesbian separatism; the leftist movement; liberation. It’s about how a culture carries the past with it, about the ever-evolving relationship between punk and politics—but it’s also about the feeling music can give us, how it can help us know ourselves and situate ourselves in the world.
Armando Bellmas, What Do I Listen to Today?
I want to shout out Armando Bellmas’s daily newsletter What Do I Listen to Today? It’s a gem of a thing that features a new song from a cool band, musician, or vocalist recommended by Armando. I’ve been introduced to Haitian folk singers and Portuguese pop icons while getting to revisit some of my favorite soul, jazz, or R&B tracks. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to start their day with a sonic boost.
Jolie Kerr, “How to Talk to People, According to Terry Gross”
In my experience, interviewing artists is an art that starts with being prepared so that you can be comfortable and spontaneous, like a jazz player whose fundamentals are so deeply ingrained they can improvise. Terry Gross is a legendary interviewer, so we'd all do well to heed her tips.
Joan Morgan, She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Joan's a wonderful, opinionated storyteller, but what I especially like is how the book also includes testimonials from other witnesses and critics, including the brilliant DJ Lynnee Denise (who is writing a Music Matters book on Big Mama Thornton). So it's not just about Joan and Lauryn Hill; it's a generational, gendered, Black thing. That's a feminist act in itself.
Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism
I loved the film I Called Him Morgan, which provided riveting insight into the complex relationships of every jazz world—including the women that sometimes remain nameless until they don’t. Helen Morgan’s voice in this documentary is privileged in a way that totally changes your view of Morgan’s work and this period of jazz history. Great film.
Because I work at a very conservative university—I make a point of always assigning gender theory and queer theory into my music courses—so students always read a little [Judith] Butler and Angela Y. Davis (Blues Legacies and Black Feminism). They find gender performativity and radical black feminism in connection to the early blues queens really fascinating and it changes their ideas about dominant narratives—even in this era of information everywhere.
Michael Jackson, “Danilo Pérez From Panama With Love”
Michael Jackson’s DownBeat cover story “Danilo Pérez From Panama With Love” (May 2022) is terrific for many reasons. Number one: What would you do if you landed at an overseas festival to find the star-producers were quarantined, unable to perform as planned, and 80% of the scheduled talent due to last minute restrictions couldn’t get into the country? Michael, a lively wordsmith and expert color photographer, provided a bird’s eye view of what he’d dropped into, providing vivid and informative musical, historical, business and locational context, explaining the unexpected problems, delving into performances by young, local musicians he’d never heard before, profiling Pérez and his actively collaborative wife Patricia Zárate Pérez, reaching not-easy celebrity Pérez collaborators Wayne Shorter and architect Frank Gehry for pertinent quotes—and turning it all into a flowing narrative with a strong punch line. Great work.
Dave Tompkins, “In a World of Hz: Nat Moore, the Dolphins, and the history of Miami bass in one hit”
Sometimes I don’t like music journalism, because a lot of journalists just riff on plausible theories and generalizations that aren’t based on much more than their own fantasies. I can tell that their speculating is just stereotypes and lazy thinking or there’s not enough evidence to support it one way or another (or both). But then there’s peak Dave Tompkins—who does everything an academic should not do, and could not do, as a writer, but somehow it hangs together poetically. It makes me think, and it draws intuitive connections about music and the context that makes it. Just exhilarating reading, great stuff.
Ellen Willis, “The Cultural Revolution Saved from Drowning”
I don’t know if I would call it the best piece of music journalism ever, but it is an essential one, in my opinion: Ellen Willis’ Rock, Etc. column in the New Yorker where she talks about going to Woodstock [“The Cultural Revolution Saved from Drowning,” September 1969]. I love how clear-eyed she is, how she admits enjoying herself despite how ill-planned the whole thing is, but she doesn’t buy into the selling of the counterculture by buffoons. Ellen was making up the rules of rock journalism as she went, and I’m just glad our tradition is rooted in that kind of skeptical spirit.
Robert Marovich
Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music
Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, and particularly his “Elvis: Presliad” chapter of essays, built a new wing onto my brain when I first read them in the mid-1980s. It was revelatory that someone could summarize music with such simplicity, power, and insight. Marcus’s observations recalibrated my thinking about the development and evolution of musical styles. In many ways, the book inspired me to continue studying American popular music after college.
Elijah Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll
I love using Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll in any of my classes about American popular music and dance. The title is clickbait for Boomers, of course, but the subtitle—An Alternative History of American Popular Music—is what the book delivers, and in a very readable, informative, and at times provocative way. The "alternative" thrust of Wald's history is that he pays attention to what was actually popular between the 1890s and 1960s, and it turns out a lot of what was popular was stuff that young women wanted to dance to. This makes for a very different "canon" of works, styles, and artists—and subjects!—than those that had been developed by, essentially, non-dancing record nerds.
Fernando Orejuela, Rap and Hip-Hop Culture
Every one of my students has to read at least three chapters of Fernando Orejuela’s Rap and Hip-Hop Culture, because it sets the stage for how I teach music in general. We start from cultural context, thinking about how and why people make the sonic decisions that they do. Rap and Hip-Hop Culture gives us multiple origin stories on what made hip-hop into the global force that it is today: South Bronx, Afro-Diasporic, and musical. This is how I think we should learn and teach music, so all of my students read it at some point.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
It may not sound like the most exciting reading ever but Roland Barthes’ *Mythologies* is essential reading for nearly every class I teach – on music, on popular culture, on social movements, on subcultures. Semiotics is crucial to decoding cultural assumptions and thus unpacking hegemony, whether those be gender, class, race, ability, sexuality, or nationality. To understand the stories that we have been told—and the meanings and power structures baked into those stories—are the basic building blocks for critically thinking about culture.
Dave Simpson, Soft Cell cover feature
One of the roles of really great music journalism is to make you want to hear whatever is being written about. The Soft Cell cover feature in Issue 86 of Electronic Sound (February 2020) is very much cast in that mould. It’s written by The Guardian’s Dave Simpson, one of the best music journalists working today.
It’s an exclusive interview with Marc Almond and Dave Ball upfront of the release of their new album Happiness Not Included in the spring and it covers so much ground. The piece deftly marries talk about the old days with an in-depth look at the inspiration behind the new album. What Dave does so well is make all this immensely readable. When the copy landed on my desk, I read it one go, from start to finish, which is unusual.
Megan Mayhew Bergman, “The Vibrant Life and Quiet Passing of Dottie Dodgion”
Marian McPartland, Marian McPartland's Jazz World: All in Good Time
“The Vibrant Life and Quiet Passing of Dottie Dodgion” isn’t billed as music journalism, but it is a great example of the writer getting out of the way of the artist. Marian McPartland also does this brilliantly in her memoir.
Nebal Maysaud, “It’s Time To Let Classical Music Die”
Opus 26 of TRILLOQUY [the podcast I co-host] featured a conversation with Nebal Maysaud who infamously wrote a piece called “It’s Time To Let Classical Music Die”. I think his sentiments and his message needs to be repeated as often as possible—his feelings are definitely in alignment with the mission of TRILLOQUY.
Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste
I’m a huge fan of Carl Wilson’s book Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste, about Celine Dion and the deeper social structures that create ideas like “taste” in music. At the time he published the first edition, we were both writing on commercial pop music in two fields where that music (and the study of it) was denigrated as not socio-politically important compared to, say, rock. Nowadays, that discourse has changed, but some of the discriminatory ideas are still sticking around. The book is beautifully written (and it’s not an academically oriented book), always engaging, and a wonderful entry point for thinking about how we understand music in our everyday lives.
Ann Powers, “Diary Of A Fugue Year”
One of the best pieces of music criticism I’ve ever read was this recap of the year 2020 by Ann Powers. The best music criticism isn’t just about the music but the world around it, and this essay ties together numerous artistic, cultural and political threads into a portrait of the amazing and crazy year we lived through. It’s so good, I am deeply envious.
Ben Westhoff Interview, Conversations With Tyler
This is a little bit of a departure for me, but as far as great music journalism, Ben Westhoff did an exhaustive breakdown on the history of hip-hop and I will be the the first to say, I'm not a huge conventional American hip-hop consumer — I was always more a fan of the dark trip-hop and turntablism sounds of the UK — but Ben was on Tyler Cowen's podcast to plug his book(s), and hearing him go into his rationales for Biggie vs. Tupac or the key differentiators between eastcoast/westcoast vs Dirty South... it was insanely interesting and gave me a whole new appreciation for the genre.
Greg Sandow, “A Fine Madness”
Greg Sandow, “Rap: The New Scapegoat”
Since I’ve just left my longtime job, I have been going through my own work and that of my husband, Greg Sandow, who has had a remarkable career as an insightful critic about a wide range of musical fields. I think other music journalists might be inspired by the contrast between two pieces: here is Greg writing on Milton Babbitt when he was a regular contributor to the Village Voice in the 1980s, and on rap lyrics and racial division when he was an editor at Entertainment Weekly in the 1990s. These two pieces cover an entire spectrum, from academic composition to social justice. Together, they’re a great reminder of how our voices change from one publication to another, how you can say a lot of important things in different tones of voice and for different readerships without dumbing down, and how far our field of music journalism can take us, if we’re willing to let it.
Carolina Abbott Galvão, “Brazil's black trans musicians: 'When we join forces, we're dangerous!'”
Considering Brazil tops the world ranking of LGBTQIA+ murders, this story in the Guardian about the country’s Black trans musicians is absolutely worth reading.
Bora, “‘I’m Just Living My Dream’: Blackswan’s Fatou on Becoming K-Pop’s First African Idol”
I really love Fatou’s interview with Rolling Stone. She’s a Black K-pop idol and the first African idol, and I just find the interview very raw and inspiring. I love that she was given a spotlight and was able to open up about something I’m sure a lot of people were curious about.
I liked The Message, a podcast series by Bas based on the life of Bobbi Wine. I really love podcasts that are productions and this particular one is well done—it’s thoroughly researched and written, and I love Bas’s narration. I like how it was able to weave politics and life into music which I generally think is important to do.
Ashwin Rodrigues, “How Studio Engineers Keep Making Music While Artists Are Incarcerated”
Excuse what feels like a work-related plug, but I’d recommend this VICE US piece on studio engineers making records “with” incarcerated artists. At the moment, so much music writing seems focused on artist profiles, and on (rightfully) making sense of the local and national state of the live industry. But this is a great, evergreen piece that approaches one of those questions you may have asked yourself, without finding a definitive answer.
Mark Fisher, "Underground Resistance"
I've selected Mark Fisher's 2007 interview in The Wire with Underground Resistance's
Mike Banks because I think it's a fantastic example of the interviewer and interviewee
syncing up perfectly. Banks, a Detroit techno icon, was famously resistant to giving
interviews, and Fisher's dedication in securing the conversation is admirable, as is his
deep research and passion for the music. What results is a discussion on topics
including circumventing capitalism, anonymity, and Marvel comics.
O’Connell Driscoll, “Growing Up Stevie”
Will Ashon, Chamber Music: About The Wu-Tang (In 36 Pieces)
The best music book I have read recently, or perhaps ever, is Will Ashon’s Chamber Music: About The Wu-Tang (In 36 Pieces). It’s about the best hip-hop group, which helps. But I was awestruck at how much insight, detail, knowledge, history and analysis Ashon manages to squeeze into each concise chapter. At one point, Ashon even delves into the different ways each band member breathes between their lines. Most rap critics talk about the rhymes. Ashon goes one (slightly insane) step further and tackles the gaps between the words, and convinces the reader of its importance. Genius.
Carina del Valle Schorske, “The World According to Bad Bunny”
I really like Carina del Valle Schorske’s New York Times cover story on Bad Bunny from 2020, not merely because she was a teaching assistant in my Latin Music and Identity seminar at Columbia but because she does a lot of social and political analysis of why Bad Bunny means what he does. She’s good at getting the “moment” and the “feel” out of music and she had a really nice piece on Longreads about backup dancers. Carina is really more of a creative nonfiction writer who loves music than a “music writer” per se, and her “outsiderness” in that sense really creates some electricity.
Amanda Petrusich, “Phoebe Bridgers's Frank, Anxious Music”
Amanda Petrusich is obviously the GOAT for many reasons but I consistently return to her May 2020 profile of Phoebe Bridgers. This piece has everything but I particularly love the scene-setting. It begins at a benefit for Tibet House U.S. and then moves to lunch at Grand Central Oyster Bar. Both scenarios offer rich glimpses into Bridgers’ character. The latter half takes place over Facetime and Amanda highlights the weirdness of this setup without letting the piece suffer.
Mel Campbell, “That Time I Accidentally Changed Hip Hop History”
I used to be a bookworm but not so much now... but I would point people in the direction of an article by the journalist who made up the fact that Pharrell produced half of the songs on the radio in 2003.
It shows how easy people can be misinformed, and not just in the political world. This journalist has tried to fix her mistake, but the misinformation has snowballed so much that it will never be reconciled. It does give me a pang of pain when I hear this Pharrell stat regurgitated, because I know that if that content was properly researched they would’ve found this article. I was planning a video around this amazing feat and ended up making a video about the opposite.
Dr. Joan Morgan on Ice Cube
Carina del Valle Schorske, “Dancing Through New York in a Summer of Joy and Grief”
Dr. Joan Morgan on Ice Cube for the Village Voice in 1990. I teach this short piece every semester, and it expands students’ minds on how a critic can speak directly to the reader, can incorporate their own lived experience and blindspots and conversations, and can involve reporting that doesn’t read like an academic paper. It’s a truly nuanced and moving meditation, as in it moves through space and time.
More recently, this piece on public dance parties during the pandemic by Carina del Valle Schorske was exceptional. The way this extended lede on loneliness of the body during isolation ends, *chef’s kiss*: “But when I say ‘despojo,’ I don’t always mean to sound so serious. Sometimes I mean that I want very badly to pin somebody to the club wall with my butt.”
Caleb Catlin, “Isaiah Rashad Comes Back From Rock Bottom With a Great New Album”
I love this feature. I think it was expertly written and I enjoyed all of the anecdotes that were utilized to write it. It’s one of my favorite reads of the entire year.
Donnie Kwak, “How Jay-Z’s ‘Vol. 3’ Explained Rap Music in 1999—and Predicted Its Future”
This is one of the best pieces of longform music journalism I’ve read this year. It went into everything from the Shayne fallout, the Diddy and Jlo palaver and the Bad Boy-Death Row rivalry in a way that made sense for my Northern English self. This album came out a few months after I was born but it coloured everything around the album with such richness. I love pieces that provide a springboard for your own independent research.
David Bennun, “Magnificent Cheat: Revisiting Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged In New York”
Let’s hear it for The Quietus in general, which is forever printing stuff other outlets should but wouldn’t. I looked up this piece by my former Melody Maker colleague David Bennun the other week for some reason, a (characteristically) fine piece of writing about what remains my favourite Nirvana album, as well.
Naima Cochrane, Missy Elliott Twitter Thread
My current journalistic hero is Naima Cochrane. She felt that something needed to be there and made it happen, with her Sunday Sermons on Twitter, where she took a subject and went exhaustively into it. Many of these have now been turned into magazine articles, but I think it's really instructive to read this one on Missy Elliot in its original form as a tweet thread to get a sense of how it took form as a living piece of writing. The reason she's great is so simple: she knows a lot, and she tells it concisely but with huge passion.
James Young, Songs They Never Play on the Radio
Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.
Not a piece of music journalism as such but James Young’s book Songs They Never Play on the Radio is a must-read. The story of playing in Nico’s band towards the end of her career (and life, sadly). By turns, tawdry, tragic and hilarious. My favourite music book, along with Viv Albertine’s brilliantly honest autobiography.
Andre Gee, “The Reckless Rise of Rap’s Internet Detectives”
Music Video Time, “The History of ‘Dog Police’ by Dog Police, from Basement Tape to Cult Classic”
This article by Andre Gee intersects two of my personal interests, 1) music, and 2) the shoddy casework of Det. Internet Mob.
I would also recommend a new-ish YouTuber I’ve just come across, “Music Video Time,” who documents the history of famous/infamous music videos, especially this piece he did on the cult classic “Dog Police.”
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s
Ilya Kaminsky, “We lived happily during the war,” from Deaf Republic
Both readings point to the realities of change, and how what is perceived as change is
just one component. Lorde questions whether we can really use “the Master’s tools” to
change society and achieve equity, while Kaminsky points to how we manage to live and
revise reality during times of chaos. I like these pieces because they are short, powerful,
and give the reader food for thought.
The Economist, “What Spotify data show about the decline of English”
You included this piece in an issue recently and it really stuck with me. I have a very analytic mind so I appreciate these things, but I also understand how much tedious work can go into these things. And for every article you see like these, there were probably 10 or 20 that didn't make it out of the data entry phase, which makes this article and other similar ones very special to me.
Nicholas Niarchos, “When Burkina Faso Vibrated with a New Culture”
An excellent piece of music history. It blends the personal narrative with the euphoria and the politics of governing a newly independent state as it traces shifts in technology that account for shifts in musical taste. Niarchos mirrors the decline of the orchestra against the decline of black and white photography, and a postcolonial imaging of the self that remains (dis)coloured by colonialism.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie”
Percival Everett, “The Appropriation of Cultures”
“The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie” is a piece I love. It’s an encapsulation of the whole lost world of the country blues, the little-known contributions of women artists to it, and subsequent blues fandoms and collecting crazes, in a piece that transcends its form and moves into the realm of digital humanities.
An assignment I give to every class is the short story “The Appropriation of Cultures” by novelist Percival Everett. It’s funny, moving, utopian, and understated, and it really makes students think about race, class, and the iconography that demonstrates those things. There’s a wonderful recording of a live reading by Ruben Santiago-Hudson that you can find on YouTube.
Ann Powers, “Her Kind Of Blue: Joni Mitchell's Masterpiece At 50”
Ann Powers’ 50th anniversary commemoration of Joni Mitchell’s Blue is everything you could want from music criticism, really. She places Mitchell in a fresh context, positioning Blue as her response to her jazz influences, particularly Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue: an inspired idea that she makes a compelling case for. She did new interviews, she devoted time to Mitchell’s music, to her public and critical image, to her perception of herself as an artist. And it was just written so well; it changed what I heard in the record, when I put it on afterward, and I’ve been listening to that album since I was a kid.
Bernard Gendron, “Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs”
This provides a great response to Adorno’s critiques of the mass production of popular music and has a good conceit: Adorno compares the production of songs to the production of cars; Gendron provides his response by looking at a doo-wop group who were named after a car.
Jeremy Atherton, Gay Bar - Why We Went Out
Jeremy Atherton’s Gay Bar - Why We Went Out is a brilliantly original book I’m reading at the moment and really vibing off in terms of energy. I’ve just got the new Disco Pogo magazine and really loving it. It’s a beautiful thing and doesn’t disappoint. Like so many folk, I loved Jockey Slut so it’s ace that this is out.
Brandon Ousley
Chris Williams, How Stevie Wonder Overcame a Near Death Experience to Make ‘Fulfillingness’ First Finale’
Being the music geek I am, I enjoy great deep dives like Chris Williams’ exhaustive oral history on the making of Stevie Wonder’s classic 1974 album, Fulfillingness’ First Finale with one of Wonder’s former collaborators, Robert Margouleff and engineer Peter Chakikin. I often think about the lack of context that is used when writers are given or pitching assignments about Black music. The origin stories behind music we hold near and dear to us deserves proper justice and so many are lost because several of our legends have passed away so soon. The scope of Black music is so rich and wide, but those who are paying homage to its legacy are getting the cold shoulder. Hopefully a tide will turn very soon.
Paul Zollo, Conversations with Tom Petty
I love Paul Zollo's Conversations with Tom Petty. I'm a huge Petty fan, which certainly helps, but the depth of the interviews is fascinating. Even if you're not a Petty fan, Zollo is great about drawing out larger ideas that go beyond, 'What were you thinking with this bridge?' It's a master class on songwriting from a fantastic songwriter, but also a master class on how to make an interview deep but not dull. Zollo never gets lost in the weeds.
David Remnick, “Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker”
Jeremy Erwin, The Heat Warps
Jesse Jarnow, Grateful Dead tweets
Nathan Rabin, The Weird According To Al
Natalie Wiener, 1959 Project
Rob Mitchum, Phish Essays
I first re-read David Remnick's masterful profile of Leonard Cohen as research for my book. Turns out, it wasn't really useful for my purposes (I think I cite it once in passing). But it's just so damn good I've read it several more times since.
If I can add a second recommendation—it seems unfair to just shout out David Remnick, who hardly needs my signal-boost—it would be to any journalist-slash-fans undertaking obsessive deep dives on an artist or era via newsletters, social media, or old school blogs. Jeremy Erwin is looking at Miles Davis' work session by session. Jesse Jarnow writes about every single Grateful Dead show from 1970 and 1980 on Twitter (even the ones that weren't recorded!). Nathan Rabin wrote a blog—now a book—about every Weird Al song. Natalie Wiener's 1959 Project about jazz from that year has wrapped, but is archived online. Rob Mitchum has a Phish newsletter I love even though I don't actually like Phish. I love these projects even if I don't care about the artist in question. They have the feel of the early wild-west days of blogging and if you start one, I want to know about it.
Baradwaj Rangan, “Songs of the Soul”
Anthony Fantano
April Clare Welsh
André Vital Pardue
I think almost any review by Anthony Fantano, April Welsh, or André Vital Pardue is prime music journalism.
Fantano is witty and very knowledgeable about a range of popular genres, especially related to the US. He produces so much content and almost all of it spot on. It’s impressive.
April Clare Welsh writes cogently about a range of genres as well in a clear, unpretentious manner that is super refreshing.
Finally, André’s Top 100 albums of 2021 is an excellent piece of music journalism. His range is as impressive as Fantano but he expresses himself more in written form. I admit that I am biased here, since he is my son. BUT, the kid is a sharp critic with his own brand of humor. What can I say, his reviews are TRUTH. Everyone should read his stuff.
Jessica Hopper, Night Moves
Jessica Hopper is a foundational influence for me . Her memoir Night Moves focuses on her time DJing in Chicago in the mid-aughts before she got big—it's a love letter to a scene and a nice reminder that we're all a bunch of punks deep down.
Terrorizer Magazine
Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
Pat Gilbert, Passion Is a Fashion: The Real Story of the Clash
Ellie Kovach, "Bands You Weren’t Supposed to Like, Case Study #10:
Ellie Kovach’s Bands You Weren’t Supposed to Like is a must-read for anyone who’s into the stuff from my book. It’s a 10-part blog series where Ellie unpacks the legacies of the big aughts emo bands alongside artists who picked up the torch in the 2010s, like Lil Peep and Bring Me the Horizon. It’s well-researched and authoritative, but also personal and opinionated… Once I stumbled upon it, I had to limit myself to one entry per sitting, or else I wouldn’t have gotten any work done.
Ryan Leas, LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Recently I read Ryan Leas’ book on LCD Soundsystem’s album Sound of Silver, I thought that was pretty interesting. Leas is much more of a journalist than I am, so there’s a fair amount of biographical and historical detail in there, but there’s also good notes on LCD Soundsystem’s topics of nostalgia, aging, music in the internet age, and the process of gentrification in New York City.
Jace Clayton, “Cairo: Something New”
I vividly remember reading Jace Clayton’s exploration of the Egyptian Mahraganat (festival) music scene in a 2012 issue of The Fader and being blown away by what was going on in Cairo youth culture, and how passionately and sympathetically Jace profiled it. He really gave these young beatmakers and MCs the respect they deserved, and it made me spend a lot of time searching through Egyptian websites to try and download songs from the artists mentioned in the feature. We’re talking about Folkloric shaabi (of the people) rhythms reprogrammed on FL Studio, but paired with crunk synthesiser lines and furious auto-tuned vocals. The sound of Egypt’s ancient past colliding with a not-so-distant future. The music sounded incredible, and it still does.
Hannah Rose Ewens, Fangirls
This was tough but I’m going to go with Hannah Rose Ewans’ utterly brilliant, Fangirls. I reference this one a lot with my students at BIMM London and feel a real affinity with Hannah’s unashamed appreciation of pop and the celebration of all the enthusiastic teen nerds (as I was) who make it their religion. As rock critic Jessica Hopper says, “Replace the word 'fangirl' with 'expert' and see what happens.”
Laura Snapes, “Taylor Swift: ‘I was literally about to break’”
I really loved The Guardian's interview with Taylor Swift. I can't say I was a fan of Swift or that I'm a fan now, but my main issue was I really didn't understand her. The interview got closer to who Swift is than I've seen before and contextualised some of the confusion I had about her as an artist. It's a great example of holding an artist to account with some difficult questions and using the time to reexamine previous coverage to contextualise the past.
Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life
While I eat through music biographies and memoirs at a voracious clip, I always come back to Michael Azerrad’s indispensable history of ‘80s underground rock, Our Band Could Be Your Life. It’s a truly stunning work of reporting and analysis, delivered with some of rock journalism’s most intelligent prose. I will always aspire to be as good as Michael.
Maria Eriksson, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, Pelle Snickars, and Patrick Vonderau, Spotify Teardown
Everyone should take a look at the book Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of
Streaming Music by Maria Eriksson. It came out a few years ago now, but if anyone is
really interested in understanding streaming and Spotify, I think this is pretty essential.
It’s an in-depth, academic study of Spotify, its history, and its consequences, and it has
been pretty helpful for my work, especially my last couple of articles.
Natalie Baker, “Changing Tides: The Evolution of Women Musicians in Mainstream Coverage”
Fabi Reyna, “7 Guitarists That Prove Black Women Were Pioneers In Music History”
I’m not sure how I came across She Shreds, but I really enjoy the work being done there and I often assign histories they have published. Natalie Baker’s piece, “Changing Tides: The Evolution of Women Musicians in Mainstream Coverage,” provides a viewpoint that is often missing from the historical narrative. Similarly, Fabi Reyna’s article, “7 Guitarists That Prove Black Women Were Pioneers In Music History,” shines a spotlight on these musicians who typically get overlooked in music history.
If you are interested in Krautrock, there's a TV series in six parts, entitled Kraut und Rüben (which is of course a pun on the term Krautrock, meaning something like "criss-cross"). It's from 2006, made by Stefan Morawietz for WDR TV Cologne. The six episodes contain music tracks as well as numerous interviews with main players from the Krautrock scene. Most of the interviews are from the archives of German TV stations, made in the 70s/80s/90s. It's of course in German, but I know there was a subtitled version on YouTube. If it's still there, it's worth watching!
David Anthony, “Talking With Anika Pyle About Death, Grief, and Her New Album”
Interviews aren't always what I consider really impactful music journalism, but I've read this one several times and leave it thinking about something different every time. Their discussion about creativity and changing over time and life and death has really stuck with me.
Richard Meltzer, “Vinyl Reckoning”
I’ve read it countless times and, to me, it’s the finest thing Meltzer has ever written. It’s scathing, human and hilarious and is what every writer who is worth a fuck should shoot for before they leave this earth.
David Anthony, The Shape of Punk series
Whenever I’m feeling stuck or frustrated with a piece, I always lean back on the shape of punk series that David Anthony put together in 2018. Anything I write is at least aiming to be as resourceful as any of those articles. It strikes the right balance of informative while still being approachable to people not well versed in punk history.
Mat Dryhurst, “Protocols”
Anyone who's followed my writing (or my social media) over the past year or two has likely noticed my repeated championing of Mat Dryhurst, an academic / writer / theorist who's devoted a lot of energy to dissecting economic and cultural trends within the music industry, particularly in relation to platform capitalism and the rise of streaming. I know that sounds like a bunch of intellectual jargon, but his work is honestly rather approachable and will likely ring true to anyone who's been involved in independent music culture over the past decade.
Of all the work Mat has done, the first thing that really resonated with me was this talk he gave at the 2019 edition of the CTM festival in Berlin. I wasn't there in person, but Mat posted the transcript online (just FYI, the talk is also available in video and audio formats). Entitled “Protocols,” it touches on a lot of different topics, but it really got me thinking about what terms like "independent" and "underground"—words that arguably defined huge portions of my personal and professional life—really mean at this point, and what steps need to be taken to prevent us all from being sucked into the vortex of the commercial mainstream.
Ralph Ellison, Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings
It blew my mind to learn that one of America’s greatest writers ever wanted to be a trumpet star, and was also a hi-fi geek. He was no fan of the modern era of jazz, which at his time meant bebop, but these essays are a window into a formative era of American music. Bonus points if you cop the companion CD.
Margo Jefferson, On Michael Jackson
I think Margo Jefferson’s On Michael Jackson counts as a major contribution to our understanding of the form and its many complications. It cuts through the noise with scathingly calm wisdom.
Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever
I worship at the temple of Ben Ratliff and his 2016 book Every Song Ever is my holy text. Instead of organizing our listening around genre—a bogus industry construct built on racism and money—this book encourages us to think about music based on its qualities. There are chapters on slowness and repetition and closeness and muchness and more. I think Ratliff is the ultimate and this book continues to change my listening life.
Plastic Crimewave, My Kind of Sound
I’m a huge fan of Steve Krakow AKA Plastic Crimewave’s Chicago Reader column The Secret History of Chicago Music, collected as My Kind of Sound. With each brief illustrated profile, Krakow shows how one person’s music can drastically change in style (and fame) over the course of a lifetime and how a single city can incorporate and influence every kind of music imaginable.
Kira Thurman, “Singing Against the Grain: Playing Beethoven in the #BlackLivesMatter era”
Kira Thurman's piece on Beethoven and Black Lives Matter is really great. I love it when academics weave together their research interests and personal narratives to makes points that only they, as both experts and as people, can make, and this is a wonderful example of that, as well as a beautiful piece of writing.
Amanda Petrusich, “Sweet Bitter Blues”
Amanda Petrusich, “The Long-Gone Sound of Amédé Ardoin”
Amanda Petrusich, “The Strokes’ Eerily Prescient ‘The New Abnormal’”
I love to read the work of Amanda Petrusich in the New Yorker, and in the Oxford American, and other publications. She has an easily accessible style, unpretentious, yet digs very deeply and honestly into a range of topics. Her article “Sweet Bitter Blues” (bad headline, I think), for the Oxford American, about blues in Japan, is masterful. So is her essay about obscure Cajun musician Amede Ardoin which came out in the winter issue of the 2012 Oxford American. My mother had just died, and I was staying alone in her Florida apartment for the first time. I had to keep all the lights on; reading Amanda's essay, I thought I saw ghosts. More recently, Amanda reviewed a Strokes album in the New Yorker. I copied the text to a Word doc and made comments on almost every line, to show my students how to build an almost perfect record review.
Liz Day, Emily Steel, Rachel Abrams and Samantha Stark, “Britney Spears Felt Trapped. Her Business Manager Benefited”
I chose this because I think Britney’s conservatorship is one of the most important and shocking stories of exploitation in entertainment history. This article did not break the story, but I think it did a great job of going deeper and revealing how respected people in the music business benefited from her tragedy. Many in the music industry want to talk about the sexy stuff: celebrity beefs, exclusive events, cool new songs, but following the money is where things can get even more interesting. I like to think detailed stories like this can hopefully make the industry a better, safer place.
Ade Adeniji, “The Unsung Hook Singers of ‘90s Rap Classics Speak”
Jessica McKinney, “Why Aren’t Women Getting More Guest Features on Rap Albums?”
Complex’s Jessica McKinney asking a damn good question. She could have really brought the hammer down on a lot of companies and people. But Jessica was measured and thoughtful, which I think was even more damning in the end.
Richard Villegas, Songmess
There is no better reference point to what's happening in the Latin American independent music scene than Songmess. Produced and hosted by Richard Villegas, the show offers a living portrait of the sounds coming out of the continent. Showcasing artists from across the complex spectrum of Latin music, it features pop-leaning acts, obscure underground stalwarts, revered practitioners of traditional music, and even the occasional quasi-mainstream luminary. The podcast has lately been dedicating long series to specific countries: Puerto Rico, Ecuador, and Colombia, each using dozens of episodes to paint a thrilling picture of the country’s music scenes. Produced in a strictly DIY fashion, more conversational than fastidiously journalistic, riotous and capable of contagious enthusiasm, Songmess is always true to its motto: “A bilingual podcast serving the freshest Latin American indie music with a side of mess.”
George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads
Chapter 3 of George Lipsitz's Dangerous Crossroads is key to my thinking about hip hop and postcoloniality, so that's always assigned -- he's Tricia Rose's teacher, and I think an amazing scholar. Increasingly I assign Chapter 1 of Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism for an overview of how race works in our capitalist world. Fred Moten, Justin Burton, Regina Bradley, Sylvia Wynter, Elliott Powell, Saidiya Hartmann, James G McNally, and Jayna Brown are among the folks I'm digging right now.
Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler
Lynell George’s book on Octavia Butler, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler was just a tremendous book. I picked it up because I’m such a fan of George’s music writing and I didn’t know enough about Octavia Butler. I think it resonated so strongly with me because Butler, like Patti Smith, is someone who just believed in doing the work and didn’t glorify it or worship it, she just did it. I learned so much about life and creativity from that book.
Joan Didion, “At the Dam”
When I taught a class in arts criticism at Princeton some years back, I had everyone read some classics of music journalism, such as the acerbic classical reviews of Eduard Hanslick and Virgil Thomson and the great freewheeling rock essays of Ellen Willis and Greil Marcus. But I also asked them to read Joan Didion’s “At the Dam,” her ode to the Hoover Dam. It is a spectacular lesson in making a seemingly dull subject riveting.
Micco Caporale, “The life and death of Rancho Huevos”
I really loved this Micco Caporale piece, which is a good reminder that music journalism isn’t just about artists—it’s about venues, studios, shaping the culture; much, much more. Documenting local music history, celebrating artists that are influential to a particular scene but don’t become household names, spaces and faces that are gone too soon—it’s so important to understanding a city, community, what have you. It’s what I love reading and obsessing over.
Peter Guralnick, Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing
William Robin, “Colin Kaepernick and the Radical Uses of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’”
Robin places Kaepernick’s now well-known actions in a long history of political protest, patriotism, and racism, all entwined with a song—a national anthem with deep roots (and deeply disturbing original lyrics) steeped in slavery and black bondage. Robin is a beautiful writer, and uses his smooth, engaging style to relate a complex, multilayered story in fewer than ten paragraphs. The reader will learn the history and context of a song they think they already know well; appreciate how music works to promote political positions, define national identity, and even normalize brutality and racism; and better understand what Kaepernick stands for when he takes a knee.
Ian Cohen, “The Forgotten Pop-Punk Records of Summer”
Ian Cohen is of course one of the most influential voices in emo journalism, and one of my favorite pieces he's written is this one about The Wonder Years, A Great Big Pile of Leaves, and Owel for Grantland in 2013, a good five years before Pitchfork—where Ian was regularly writing at the time—ever touched The Wonder Years. Ian wrote about The Wonder Years' 2013 album The Greatest Generation—a pure POP punk album in the Warped Tour sense of the term—with the same type of analysis and respect that's regularly reserved for indie and art rock and (even still today) rarely given to pop punk. I think this piece was pivotal in opening people's minds to The Wonder Years and to pop punk in general, and it was absolutely a big influence on my writing.
Shawn Setaro, “What's With the Sped-Up Rap Remix Boom?”
Shawn Setaro, “Why Are Rappers and Rap Producers Selling Their Catalogs?”
Shawn Setaro, “Why Are So Many Rap Concerts Getting Canceled?”
Laura Barton, “A Duel with Van Morrison”
Laura Barton’s profile of Van Morrison (for The Guardian) is just cutting—funny, vivid, and, at moments, awkwardly painful to read. I think one of my favorite elements is how she balances her fandom (she doesn’t shy from that subjectivity!) with such expertise on her curmudgeonly, at times straight up mean, subject. It’s a great example of how a successful modern profile can read.
Harmony Holiday, "Afro-masochism"
I find a lot to marvel at in Harmony Holiday’s writing, especially the more free-wheeling stuff published on her Substack. She wrote about “The Root” by D’Angelo and on some days that’s my favorite song of his. There’s this section that I’ve texted to multiple friends, that felt so clarifying when I first read it that it immediately made me play the song. Now when I think about the song I think about her writing.
“I love this song because it marvels at the hold love and desire can have on a man’s spirit, and honors feminine magnetism, yet without a crusade to reclaim a mired love, there are no ultimatums. It doesn’t want its object back, or chase anyone. It wants the vantage it has, that of having lost your very foundation even as you carry it with you as desire. So much music that thinks itself romantic and soulful is actually flimsy and banal for fitting so predictably into the revenge-seeking or forgiveness-seeking binary.”
That’s as sharp as a knife. And it keeps going from there.
Jayson Greene, “Death Is Real: Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum Copes With Unspeakable Tragedy”
Nick Tosches, “The Devil in George Jones”
My favourite writer is Nick Tosches, and one of his pieces I’d recommend is “The Devil In George Jones,” published in Texas Monthly, July 1994. It’s also in The Nick Tosches Reader anthology, which is where I first saw it, and it might be the most insightful and thorough profile of an artist in any genre I’ve ever read. Along with providing a detailed overview of Jones’ career, Nick shows incredible empathy in describing the many contradictions in Jones’ personality. Anyone who’s enjoyed the George & Tammy mini-series should definitely read it.
Sunik Kim, Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red
Simon Reynolds, “The Rise of Conceptronica”
A lot of electronic musicians roasted Simon Reynolds for his “The Rise of Conceptronica” essay on social media, but he contextualized an important, macrocosmic development within the genre with his usual perspicacity. He's always excelled at analyzing the big picture with regard to movements and explaining in memorable detail why you should pay—or not pay—attention. Here, he pinpoints a trend among highbrow electronic-music producers who favor multimedia approaches and who apply ornate conceptual frameworks around their music that resemble statements you'd see in a museum or gallery.
He writes, “Conceptronica isn’t a genre as such, but more like a mode of artistic operation—and audience reception—that cuts across the landscape of hip music, from high-definition digital abstraction to styles like vaporwave and hauntology. Concept-driven projects offer a way for artists to compete in an attention economy that is over-supplied while reflecting their enthusiasm for a vast array of ideas.” And he then goes on to contrast this trend with the sort of IDM that flourished in the '90s and '00s. It's a masterly overview of subterranean cultural activity that also turns you on to a lot of fascinating musicians.
Shawn Setaro
Dan Charnas, Dilla Time
Dan Charnas' book Dilla Time about the producer James "J Dilla" Yancey has been incredibly inspiring to me. The reporting is stellar, in terms of the amount of people Dan interviewed and the information he got from them. But also, it's a book that makes music theory accessible, and explains in clear language exactly why J Dilla was important, and specifically what his innovations were.
Matthew Barton, “So Rare: The Last Days of Jimmy Dorsey”
My latest favorite is this gripping account of the end of the big band era that is so exactingly told it could be turned into a movie.
Linda Shaver-Gleason, Not Another Music History Cliche
The world lost the excellent Linda Shaver-Gleason in 2020—she was assassinated by cancer (that’s how she wanted to be memorialized). Her blog Not Another Music History Cliche should be required reading for all music students and scholars. The ways in which she debunked common music history myths in an accessible way should be a model for all music scholars’ writing. Academic scholarship doesn’t need to be opaque, and Linda proved that.
David Turner, Penny Fractions
David Turner’s Penny Fractions newsletter is a must-subscribe to get the ins and outs of the streaming business. I also do think there’s some really great music criticism and short docs on YouTube if you know where to look—while a lot of it might be "basic" or more geared towards a general audience, it's a platform worth exploring.
Trash Theory, “The Dreampop Enigma of Cocteau Twins & LORELEI | New British Canon”
Nerdwriter1, “ELEMENT: How Kendrick Lamar Collaborates”
This video on Cocteau Twins and “Lorelai” is a solid introduction to a very enigmatic band, and this analysis of Kendrick Lamar’s “ELEMENT.” visual from a few years ago convinced me to give contemporary music videos a chance, and that they’re worth preserving in some fashion. I also love the Sideways channel and wish some version of it existed for popular music, not just film scores. I guess Vox Earworm is the closest equivalent.
Paul Thompson, “‘In My Mind I Was Already Gone’: The Endless End of Outkast”
Ann Powers, “Billie Eilish Is The Weird Achiever Of The Year”
Cat Zhang, “How Belarusian Post-Punks Molchat Doma Became a TikTok Meme”
Anything Ann Powers writes is a masterclass in music journalism, but I especially loved her end of 2019/end of the decade piece on Billie Eilish (and of course, so much more than Billie Eilish.) She seamlessly weaves connections in pop culture phenomena together in a way that makes me feel like I can see the world a bit clearer, which is something only good criticism can do.
As for a more contemporary example, I recently really enjoyed Cat Zhang’s exploration into Belarus post-punk band Molchat Doma’s TikTok fame—she doesn’t simple identify the trend, she spends considerable time unpacking the hauntological and socialist symbology behind the proliferation of a song that otherwise would’ve only existed in underground tape culture obscurity. It’s surprising, and wonderful, and I wish all music journalism was given the same time and consideration.
I regularly enjoy the writings on Africa Is A Country where the Ten Cities contributor Marissa Moorman is part of the editorial board. This online magazine mixes sharp political analysis with cultural writings about the African continent like no other at the moment.
Tricia Rose, “All Aboard the Night Train: Flow, Layering, and Rupture in Postindustrial New York”
I often assign a chapter from Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, "All Aboard the Night Train: Flow, Layering, and Rupture in Postindustrial New York.” I really admire her historical contextualization of the emergence of hip-hop culture in the South Bronx in the late 1970s. She brings the social, political, economic, and racial to bear on the development of all aspects of hip-hop: graffiti, breakdancing, MCing, and DJing.
Marcus J. Moore, “On ‘Ism,’ Junius Paul Distills the Sound of Chicago.”
Marcus J. Moore's recent piece on Junius Paul is a gem. It's got everything I love in an artist profile—history and community (the Chicago jazz and soul scenes are near and dear to my heart), a narrative that doesn't get in the way of its subject, a sense of joy and passion about making music, an ease. Marcus is one of the best jazz writers I've ever read, able to break down what's going on musically without getting academic, without relying on jargon. And that Junius Paul album shot up to the top of my personal end-of-year list immediately; it carries forward the spiritual jazz tradition in a really beautiful and contemporary way.
Marc Myers, Why Jazz Happened
Why Jazz Happened by Marc Myers is the book every music journalist should read to understand not the history of that genre of music but the evolution of physical formats of music and the switch from singles to album-length consumption. Having this basic history of how we got to where we are now is vital to analyze and critique current popular music. The format you’re listening on influenced how the album was made and its contents, so factoring that into your analysis is relevant.
Ellen Willis, “Beginning to See the Light”
Ellen Willis's "Beginning to See the Light." I actually read it for the first time on the day that Kanye West released Yeezus, which felt heaven-sent given how controversial and pointedly nasty some parts of that record were. She writes of the Sex Pistols' song, "Bodies":
"It was an outrageous song, yet I could not simply dismiss it with outrage. The extremity of its disgust forced me to admit that I was no stranger to such feelings—though unlike Johnny Rotten I recognized that the disgust, not the body, was the enemy. And there lay the paradox: music that boldly and aggressively laid out what the singer wanted, loved, hated—as good rock and roll did—challenged me to do the same, and so, even when the content was antiwoman, antisexual, in a sense antihuman, the form encouraged my struggle for liberation. Similarly, timid music made me feel timid, whatever its ostensible politics."
It's an essay about how she finds more value in this supposedly offensive music than in "women's" music that is supposed to cater to her values. I was 24 and hadn't read anything that subversive before, even though I think I'd been suppressing some of those feelings—I had clung to this Nora Ephron quote about another female critic, from 1975: "Her heart is in the right place; why knock her when there are so many truly evil books around? This is what’s known in the women’s movement as sisterhood, and it is good politics, I suppose, but it doesn’t make for good criticism. Or honesty. Or the truth." But it didn't feel like something I could try to say myself until I read Willis on that day.
Chris Heath, Pet Shop Boys, Literally
This is just my absolute favourite music-adjacent writing ever. We can but dream of that level of access, or another act like the Pet Shop Boys ever coming along. The ending is a chef’s kiss of a hit on Piers Morgan, too.
Caity Weaver, “Justin Bieber Would Like to Reintroduce Himself”
My favorite interview is Caity Weaver’s GQ cover story on Justin Bieber. It’s so funny and breathtakingly written. I refer to it often. Incredible details and turns of phrase. Really makes you feel like you’re along for the ride.
Oh gosh—I can think of so many, but I think Jonathan Bernstein's piece on the Black Country Music Association was so well done—and, relatedly, Andrea Williams' August piece on its co-founder, Frankie Staton. I learned so much from both pieces. If those stories interest you, keep going and check out Dr. Jada Watson's and Amanda Marie Martinez' research.
Wadada Leo Smith, “(M1) American Music”
I always ask the students in my classes to read Wadada Leo Smith’s article “(M1) American Music.” Written in 1974 and published in The Black Perspective in Music, a journal founded by the renowned scholar Eileen Southern, Smith’s article examines two distinctively American musical forms, creative music and experimental concert music. Smith explores the histories of the two forms and argues that the two forms should unite in order to form a new music that would represent all of America.
Whitney Balliett, “Room To Live In”
Jennifer Lucy Allan, The Foghorn's Lament
White Rabbit Books publishes exceptional music books that feel like something new. A genuine expansion of the fields of music journalism and scholarship. I bet they’re whole list is interesting, but I have recently read Jennifer Lucy Allan’s book The Foghorn’s Lament: The Disappearing Music of the Coast. It starts off as a history of a single sound: the alluring roar of the foghorn. But Allan connects this sound with a history of experimental music and ambient music, ranging from Italian futurism to R. Murray Schafer and Sunn O))).
The Infinite Monkey Theorem Experiment
This Pudding piece on the Infinite Monkey Theorem (stay with me) has it all. The Infinite Monkey Theorem states that a monkey pressing keys at random on a typewriter for infinite time will eventually come up with the text of Shakespeare’s plays just by chance. The Pudding’s version is a live experiment that sees how long it takes to come up with a variety of songs just by chance and compares observed times to the expected time (computed using our friend, math). I love this because it teaches a statistical concept by grounding it in pop culture references. Genius!
Bryan Magee, Wagner and Philosophy
Isabella van Elferen, “Ludomusicology and the New Drastic”
Simon Frith, “Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music”
I return time and time again to Bryan Magee’s Wagner and Philosophy. It’s not a short text, but it’s fantastically written, and is very easy to read. I’ve never read anything that explains philosophical concepts so well. And it’s intertwined with Wagner’s music, cultural history, art theory and everything else. It’s a masterpiece of accessible music writing.
Other classics:
I also enjoy Isabella van Elferen’s “Ludomusicology and the New Drastic.” I don’t agree with every word, but it’s provocative in the best way, and it challenges inherited understanding of what musical texts and performances are/can be.
Nearly every student of mine will have read the “Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music” by Simon Frith. It provides an overview of how ingrained music is in our lives. But keep asking when you read it: “Doesn’t this also apply to classical music, too?”
Brittany Spanos, “Janelle Monáe Frees Herself”
I love all of Brittany Spanos’s cover stories for Rolling Stone, but I find myself returning to her profile of Janelle Monae. I go back and read it every few months. Brittany’s style of music journalism is so appealing to me; she creates the space for an artist to tell their own story on their terms, then shapes it into these beautifully intimate articles that make you feel like you know both the subject and the writer. She takes you there.
Nardwuar, “Nardwuar vs. Tyler, The Creator”
Nobody inspires me more than Nardwuar, that man is a literal genius. Yes, he’s a bit kooky but I appreciate the lengths of research he does for interviews and the way he presents. He’s always funny, engaging, on the ball, and regardless of what happens he always ensures it’s interesting to watch.
Briahna Joy Gray, “The Question of Cultural Appropriation”
I teach “The Question of Cultural Appropriation” by Briahna Joy Gray in a number of my introductory music classes. I think it is a very approachable, clear-headed piece of journalism that quickly dispels with common (mis)conceptions of cultural ownership and can bring even the most reactionary types to think seriously about systemic racism and cultural exploitation.
Jennifer Mota’s Remezcla column Si Tú Quiere Dembow
Jennifer Mota is a tremendously talented writer/journalist who kicked off 2020 with a new Remezcla column called Si Tú Quiere Dembow. The monthly series covers a distinctly Dominican brand of música urbana that hasn't gotten anywhere near the shine in English-language publications as reggaetón or Latin trap. I trust her fully to tell the stories of this music and these artists right, and I'm excited to learn from her writing and research.
Bhanuj Kappal, “What makes Prabh Deep Indian rap’s next big thing”
Kenneth Lobo, “Kraftwerk in India”
Bhanuj Kappal's profile on rapper Prabh Deep for GQ considers almost everything you need to when you write about a breakout artist.
And this rewind story by Kenneth Lobo on the time Kraftwerk came to India for Red Bull Music Academy—because it uncovered something I had no idea took place, in totally vivid detail, almost transporting you to the scene.
Our Culture Resounds, Our Future Reveals: A Legacy of Filipino American Performing Arts in California, edited by Eleanor Lipat-Chesler and Mary Talusan
This book I co-edited is the first to really explore the different cultural forms that Filipino Americans engage in to explore and share their culture in the US. It’s the book I wanted to read as a graduate student but it didn’t exist at the time. So, we put it together!
Willy Staley, “‘High Maintenance’ and the New TV Fantasy of New York”
I really enjoyed this piece about the way New York is used as a backdrop in this "golden age" of TV. I think most music crit (and reporting!) tends to follow album and press cycles. The reason this piece works so well is because it is nearly completely away from all that.
J. Benney, Y. Bhekhirst – The Unofficial Website
I love this website. It is basically a bit of investigative journalism about a reasonably obscure outsider musician, Y Bhekhirst, who was responsible for dropping off this weird 7" single and demo cassette at some local record stores in the mid-80s. Unlike Jandek, who spawned many articles and even a documentary—and has since become less of a mystery—Bhekhirst is a bona fide outsider music mystery that remains enigmatic to this day. This website is a nice bit of rabbit hole digging that aims to answer the "who, and why" of a strange audio relic through ample internet sleuthing.
Mike Faloon, The Other Night at Quinn’s
My good friend, Mike Faloon, the co-editor of the great baseball zine Zisk, wrote a book on free jazz, The Other Night at Quinn’s. It’s a genre-blurring approach to creative non-fiction, all the while never forgetting what the topic is and who the focus is on. Mike has such an ear for explaining the sounds of music. It’s enviable. I considered it such a great piece of music journalism that Gorsky Press, our book arm at Razorcake, published it.
Kory Grow and Jason Newman, “Marilyn Manson: The Monster Hiding in Plain Sight”
Brittany Spanos, “The Year of Cardi B”
It's been three years since Brittany Spanos wrote her Cardi B cover story for Rolling Stone and I can't stop thinking about the lede. I don't think I've ever read a better sentence than "Cardi B is butt-naked in the doorway of her hotel bathroom, yelling about her vagina." The whole interview is a masterclass on how to profile an artist.
Samantha Ege and Douglas Shadle, “As Her Music Is Reconsidered, a Composer Turns 135. Again”
Lisa Robinson, Nobody Ever Asked Me About The Girls
Nobody Ever Asked Me About The Girls by Lisa Robinson should be required reading material for any music journalist. I love how she highlights these big moments in iconic careers and delves into little details that I always remember. It perfectly shows how we talk about women in music differently and why we need to change that.
Jane Austen’s novels
I’ve learned from all kinds of writers. Late on in life I came to Jane Austen’s novels. I suppose I’d been put off by the television adaptations but when I came to read them I realised they are exercises in intensive listening (or not listening). You don’t get much description. The tension and the unfolding of narrative tends to happen through conversation, mishearing, reflections on conversation and silences. If you’re writing about sound, listening, or music then there are valuable lessons to be learned from her.
Anonymous, “I was silenced when I spoke out about the abuse I faced in underground music circles”
Stephanie Phillips, “‘Nothing's Changed’: Sexual Misconduct Is Driving People Out of Music”
gal-dem and Vice's Open Secrets series is essential and their work exposing the abuses toward BIPOC women in the music industry is so needed. Stephanie Phillips' feature on the rates on which women of colour are being driven from the music industry and an anonymous writer who bravely spoke out about their own experiences of being silenced in music circles are particular highlights. Now, more than ever, we should use our platform to expose abuses in the industry—work like this inspires me because it shows that we can do it, and there are amazing journalists out there who are committed to creating change.
Ed Caesar, “The Epic Hunt for a Lost World War II Aircraft Carrier”
I am a magazine fanatic, and subscribe to many publications in my tiny effort to keep print alive. My favorites (cliché as it may be) are the New Yorker, Esquire, and NY Times Magazine, and I used to love Vanity Fair, but less so these days. They have the money to support longform journalism; a writer, unless independently wealthy, can’t spend months or more on a story, fly to meet sources and do dozens of interviews for .20 a word.
I cried at the end of this piece and tweeted at the author. The storytelling, the humanity. This is the sort of journalism and storytelling that inspires me to be a better writer, to look for stories that are older or “unresolved.” I’m not a history buff, but I love getting history though the story of human beings and individuals.
Mark Lewisohn, Tune In
Part one of Mark Lewisohn’s planned multi-volume Beatles biography, Tune In, has amazing detail on their early career, going until the end of 1962. The standard edition is very long at more than 900 pages, but the more limited extended edition, which is in two hardback books and almost double the size, is really necessary if you’re a Beatles fanatic, as I am. This is the kind of length and breadth sometimes given in book form to major political figures and social movements, but seldom to mere popular musicians, although they’re as (and some could argue more) important. Even with the length and exhaustive detail, the writing is always highly readable, insightful, and entertaining.
Spencer Kornhaber, “Country Music Can No Longer Hide Its Problems”
Spencer Kornhaber’s piece “Country Music Can No Longer Hide Its Problems” highlights that the country music industry has long promoted the music of white men at the expense of erasing its multi-cultural influences, including the ways that black music making has been fundamental in shaping the sonic and performative practices of country music. The author publicizes Mickey Guyton’s poignant song “Black Like Me” and other black country musicians’ support of the Black Lives Matter movement and personal encounters with systemic racism. I do believe it is time for country music to examine and change its industry practices (such as limiting the radio airplay of female country artists) that have silenced and limited the creative space for women, people of color, and queer and trans artists.
Charles Ives, “Some ‘Quarter-Tone’ Impressions”
Charles Ives, “Postface to 114 Songs”
This video by/with/around Terre Thaemlitz is a fascinating representation of what great audiovisual music journalism looks like. Not sure we will see more of this around as it is def not easy in economical and logistic aspects to produce, but to negate the title (which is “Give Up On Hopes And Dreams“): I still hope and dream! Hats off to Resident Advisor for this—and of course to Terre Thaemlitz and Mark Fell and all the others involved in this awesome piece of video.
NPR’s Turning The Tables series
Karen Tongson, “Whiteness and Promises”
NPR Music’s Turning the Tables series is such transformative feminist music criticism. I assign parts of it in my Gender, Music, and Popular Culture undergrad seminar. I also plan to use it as a model for mixed-method storytelling for +8%, a semester-long project for students to articulate the merits of eligible, female-identified musicians who have not been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame through essays or creative projects.
In addition to Turning the Tables, Karen Tongson’s “Whiteness and Promises” has appeared on multiple syllabi. She does such a good job of weaving autoethnography with queer theory, post-colonial theory, and post-structural feminism to analyze Karen Carpenter’s façade of idealized white American femininity in relation to her own experiences as a butch Filipino American immigrant kid forever linked to her namesake. Tongson is such an exquisite, thoughtful, rigorous scholar. I strive to follow her example.
Ben Dandridge-Lemco, “Surviving the Last Days of San Francisco Rap”
Before Joe Talbot’s gorgeous film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Ben wrote this perfect piece about the last rappers in Frisco. And yes, it’s “Frisco.”
Eric Harvey, “Who Got the Camera?”
Eric shows us that N.W.A. arose, not coincidentally, at a moment when popular perceptions of “reality” entertainment were in flux. Hands down, the best thing I’ve read about LA rap’s early days.
Sam Sweet, “The Roller Rink Origins of N.W.A.”
Sam makes the case that this is the perspective on black teen culture in 1980s Los Angeles that we’ve been missing. He gets it.
Andrew Nosnitsky, “Hall of Fame: Classic Material”
Let’s stop referring to “golden eras” and “classic albums.”
Suzy Exposito, “Bad Bunny in Captivity”
Suzy Exposito's cover story with Bad Bunny. That story perfectly encompasses how Latin music is now pop music with Bad Bunny as the ambassador. It's a historic moment too, with Suzy as the first Latina writer to write a cover story for Rolling Stone, Bad Bunny as the first urbano artist to cover the magazine, and it's available on the website in English and Spanish.
Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than The Sun
I want to recommend a text of anti-UK (white male) music journalism that should and I am sure has inspired many people who write about sound and music, Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun, from 1999, and so not contemporary but indefinitively for a future present. It gets you to sense, physically and forcefully, the violence of aesthetic criticism of art and of music, by performing in words what journalism and writing does not engage in and thus oppresses, leaves out, pretends not to be there, in order to write clearly and intelligibly what we think should be there.
Eric Salzman’s sleevenotes to The Nude Paper Sermon
Lance Scott Walker
Kiana Fitzgerald, “Why Solange's 'When I Get Home' Feels So Much Like Texas”
There are so many good candidates, but one that comes to mind for me is Kiana Fitzgerald’s “Why Solange's 'When I Get Home' Feels So Much Like Texas,” published in Complex back in 2019. I love the context she gives every song, for one, but she also takes apart the lyrics and connects the concept of the record to the visual album that accompanied it, explaining the references in a way that resonates for people who may already know and still sets the scene for somebody who is new to Solange and/or Houston hip-hop. It’s a perfect balance of personal history—relating the Black cowboys in the visual piece to her own great grandfather’s farm—and music history that reads as fresh now as it did when the album came out.
David Toop’s sleevenotes to the ‘90s Brian Eno ambient box set
David Toop’s sleevenotes to the Eno ambient box set, released in the early 1990s, united listening, aesthetics, ideas and history in a way I didn’t know possible and showed the art of what was possible with music writing. Music writing should never just be writing about music.
Jeremy D. Larson, “The Woes of Being Addicted to Streaming”
I recently read this by Jeremy D. Larson and have been thinking about it a lot. Not that I necessarily consider myself addicted to streaming, but I think it really helped me verbalize this emotional distance I’ve been feeling, too, around the music and artists I listen to. Anyway, it has spurred me to build a personal music library.
Sasha Geffen, How Pop Music Broke the Gender Binary
I love this excerpt in the Paris Review from Sasha Geffen's excellent book, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Gender Binary. I return to it frequently and I'm so grateful for Geffen's brilliance and insight. Their writing just glows off the page and I love the rhythm of their voice.
Val Wilmer, “Like A Cosmic Newspaper”
This is an extract from Val Wilmer’s “As Serious As Your Life.” It is essential reading for any journalist that wants to do the work. And if you don’t want to do the work, you should ask yourself a few pointed questions before writing about music that contains histories of oppression, especially if you don’t share those histories in your lived experience. Wilmer is an English woman who was writing about Great Black American music, AKA free jazz, in the 1970s and the questions she raises and the answers she intuits still have a lot for us today.
She lived it, she went deep and she dug deep. There are wonderful asides (‘Sun Ra, who is something of a mysogynist’) that could only be conveyed when writing about something as it was happening, present continuous, before it’s been frozen into a certain archetypal, reverent and often inaccurate history. She’s great and I’d love any recommends in return from Insider readers. I’m easy to find on the internet.
Candace McDuffie, "‘Get Off My Areola!’ Why Body-Shaming Janelle,
KeKe and Tracee Is a Sad Attempt To Humble Black Women"
David Byrne, “I Hate World Music”
I wrote a piece with (unknowingly) almost the same title about 12 years later. It’s a great piece because it talks about the music industry and how it affects what music the public hears and consumes.
Francis Davis, “Unironic”
One of the best (and most easily accessible) pieces I came across while I was researching my biography of the American guitarist Bill Frisell is a near 4,000-word feature for The Atlantic by the great American music and arts writer/essayist Francis Davis.
Titled “Unironic”, the feature is part profile/character study; part overview of Frisell’s work up to 2002, the date the article was published; and part rumination on the meaning of jazz and its relationship to other American forms, country music in particular. Davis is at once an incisive critic and sympathetic champion, and the piece is supremely eloquent, erudite, thoughtful and perceptive.
“Frisell's music seems haunted and disquieted, more Edward Hopper than Grant Wood or Norman Rockwell,” Davis writes towards the beginning of the piece, “evocative not just of rivers and prairies and small-town parades but of lost highways, dead-end streets, and heartbreak hotels.” As a prose stylist and deep thinker, few can match him.
Jacob Kopcienski, “5 Questions to Brian Harnetty”
John Jeremiah Sullivan, "That Chop on the Upbeat"
“That Chop on the Upbeat” by John Jeremiah Sullivan in the November 2013 issue of Oxford American. Here Sullivan traces the origins of ska to pianist Roscoe Gordon, who peppered songs with his “Tourettic yawps” and kept on his piano “a rooster named Butch who drank whiskey from a glass.” Detailed, informative and fun, it’s the kind of article that inspired me to make a playlist of the songs mentioned.
Danyel Smith, “When Whitney Hit the High Note”
I would recommend “When Whitney Hit the High Note” by Danyel Smith. I really love the lead paragraphs of this piece and how Smith sets the scene for the era when Whitey Houston sang her signature rendition of the National Anthem. If writers need inspiration when writing anniversary pieces, this is a great model to follow.
Various
More than features in 2020, I've been really pleased with so many of the books that have been released—Steven Hyden's book on Kid A was a blast, Jeff Tweedy's How To Write One Song and Lawrence Azerrad and Spencer Tweedy's Mirror Sound were both really fascinating artists'-perspective reads, and I'm especially excited to pick up Sarah Smarsh's She Come By It Natural book which looks at the ways women's contributions to social progress have been overlooked through the lens of Dolly Parton.
Doreen St. Felix, “The Prosperity Gospel of Rihanna”
This story hit all of the points for me and was one the first essays I fell in love with as an adult. The way she contextualized one of Rih's big comeback singles stood out to me and made me want to go a bit deeper in my writing.
Joe Coscarelli, Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story
Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story by Joe Coscarelli is such a great, well-reported look at the rise of Quality Control. Atlanta reporters are deeply protective—territorial, even—when non-locals write about the city and I can't lie, I wish more of us had the opportunity to write books about our homes. Still, Rap Capital is just a fun, compelling, informative read through and through. It really highlights the fact that Joe is both well-sourced and a great writer.
Mina Tavaokli, “Morrissey: I Am Not a Dog On a Chain”
I’d highly recommend reading Mina Tavaokli’s piece for Pitchfork on Morrissey. I came across the piece after Mina took part in a Q&A feature with this very newsletter and I was taken back by her concise, yet highly descriptive and imaginative writing style. I still often look back at the article for inspiration with my own writing.
Spencer Kornhaber, “Kanye West, The Life of Pablo and The Terror of Monogamy”
Spencer Kornhaber’s article “Kanye West, The Life of Pablo and The Terror of Monogamy” for The Atlantic is a piece that absolutely floored me when I first read it, and still does—a truly stellar example of how you can write an album review that brings in so much context to really explain the world in which the record sits. I love pieces that manage to comment on society while talking about music, and this article definitely does.
Meaghan Garvey, “Introducing Valee, the G.O.O.D. Music-Approved Rapper With an Elegant Trap Sound”
The 2018 Pitchfork piece by Meghan Garvey on Chicago rapper Valee is still one of my absolute favorite pieces of music journalism. You come away from it understanding how he sounds, how he is and exactly why you should listen to him. It's beautifully written and you get a sense of the writer, even as she doesn't make herself part of the piece. Just wonderful. The top sets up a Q&A, but only after you get to know him. And the questions in that part aren't lazy questions.
Sean Fennessey, “Deconstructing Harry”
Whenever I’m getting ready to write a long liner notes piece, or work on a podcast season, I re-read Sean Fennessey’s history of Harry Nilsson on Grantland, because it makes clear to a general audience how important Nilsson was, and crams in so many little details about his life without getting bogged down in them. You learn everything you could possibly learn about an artist in a compact form, and that article lead me to buy literally every Nilsson album on vinyl within a month, because it made me into a fan in its 3000-ish words.
Griel Marcus, In the Fascist Bathroom
Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff
There are two books that I return to constantly. One is In The Fascist Bathroom by the American critic Greil Marcus, which is a book of writings about punk that was published in 1992, prior to the explosion of Green Day and The Offspring a couple of years later. His definition of punk is also refreshingly pliable, so there are chapters on Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and Cyndi Lauper. It’s a fabulous read.
I also really like the book The Dark Stuff by the English journalist Nick Kent. Again, this was published in the ‘90s, but it’s remained by my side because of the evocative way he writes about artists such as the Stones, The Pogues, Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello (again), and so many more. It’s a terrific read.
Loren Kajikawa, “Leaders of the New School? Music Departments, Hip-Hop, and the Challenge of Significant Difference”
Matthew D. Morrison, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse”
Most recently, I’ve had my students read Loren Kajikawa’s “Leaders of the New School? Music Departments, Hip-Hop, and the Challenge of Significant Difference,” which is part of a forum I co-edited for Twentieth Century Music. I think it’s a really important piece that forces academics in music departments to really question the role that popular music is playing in our programs. Similarly, for those interested in musicology’s relationship with popular music, race, and exclusion, I would recommend Matthew D. Morrison’s 2019 article, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse.”
David Marchese, “In Conversation: Trent Reznor”
David Marchese is such a top-notch interviewer. In the past, when I’ve felt stumped about how to approach an upcoming artist interview or what types of threads I should be looking to pull on, I’ve revisited his work for inspiration. His Trent Reznor interview from the Add Violence cycle is a favorite.
Leslie Jamison, “Confessions of an Unredeemed Fan”
I, like a lot of us, have been thinking about fandom more and more and how the way fandom plays out over social media has come to be toxic, particularly with stan culture. Amy Winehouse lived and died before that was a big discussion, and her life has been a cautionary tale about the music industry, of course, but so much of the peripheral stuff around it. This piece worked for me because it covered so much ground—fandom, celebrity, voyeurism, addiction, capitalism. It was critical yet personal, about Amy but also about everyone. I'm also just a fan of Leslie Jamison's writing in general and appreciated what she brought to the topic.
Written by The New Yorker’s first pop-music critic, Ellen Willis, this story was published on March 15, 1969, with the headline “Changes.” Reading this piece today, on October 4, was especially moving and poignant as it is the date Joplin died in 1970. She has always been one of my favorite vocalists for the inimitable rawness and soulfulness of her voice—she was simply phenomenal. This piece by Willis is thoughtfully written, yet respectfully critical in its analysis of Joplin's performance and artistry. This is the caliber of writing I’d love to see more of in today’s music journalism.