Best Music Journalism: February 2014

Sit on the Floor (Nico Muhly, nicomuhly.com)

More often than not, I find musicians writing about music (at least the halfway serious ones) offer the most interesting and compelling insights. That’s very much true here, as classical composer Nico Muhly talks about staging his first opera. Much of the chatter around Two Boys has focused on Muhly’s young age and “the future of opera.” It’s something that Muhly doesn’t have a lot of time for.

“It was not designed to solve a made-up crisis in classical music, it was not designed to attract more young people into the opera house (as if young people are moths, drawn towards a patio light). It was not designed to make any statements about the future of the genre... It was just, I had hoped, a good show.” For more Muhly music writing, check him out on Beyoncé at The Talkhouse – a website that features musicians writing about music they love.

How the Beatles Went Viral (Steve Greenberg, Billboard)

The 50th anniversary of the Beatles arriving in America was the subject of a huge amount of features this month. For a band that has been covered exhaustively, I was impressed with the angles that various publications used to approach it. The New York Times had a short personal essay by the grandson of Ed Sullivan. Even aircargonews.com got in the act with a collection of memories from the Pan Am team that literally ferried the Beatles from the UK to the US.

For me, though, Steve Greenberg’s Billboard piece was the most satisfying. I grew up at a time when the Beatles were a foregone conclusion. Greenberg argues that was hardly the case in the months leading up to their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. A lot of lucky breaks went into making the Beatles a viral sensation, and this exhaustive account reveals just how unlikely it was.

A Phony Article Epitomizes Hip-Hop's Struggling Underclass (Kris Ex, NPR)

I still haven’t listened to a note of Shirt’s music. But I’m talking about him, which is assuredly what he was after when he faked a Jon Caramanica New York Times article about himself earlier this month. The stunt has spawned a few things here and there, but Kris Ex’s feature for NPR wishes there was even more: “The idea that gimmicks may not sell records but they will get people talking is nothing new. This time, though, because of our abbreviated attention spans and compressed hype cycles, Shirt's big splash came and went.”

Like its title suggests, Ex takes Shirt’s fake article as a jumping-off point for a state-of-the-genre essay that discusses how the internet has irrevocably transformed the artists, audience, media and music. In the piece, he describes how there are few new superstars in the rap world. When I caught up with him via email this week, I asked him if this was a good thing or a bad thing. “I would not be mad at an ecosystem made of midlevel rappers,” he wrote. “A$AP may not be as big as Jay Z and Eminem, but he has a respectable fan base. I don’t think there should be many HUGE stars in hip-hop (or in pop culture in general) any more than I think it’s normal that people were selling millions of records in one week at the top of the millennium. That wasn’t healthy or sustainable. Even a loose understanding of genetics would tell you why. In that sense, struggle rappers are necessary and inevitable.”

That Chop on the Upbeat (John Jeremiah Sullivan, Oxford American)

We featured Oxford American last month in this column, but seeing as how their music issue only comes once a year, I’m guessing (but not hoping) that this will be the last time we’ll plug it in these pages in 2014. This one is worth it, though. John Jeremiah Sullivan is one of the best writers around. He occasionally touches on music: This GQ piece on the “final comeback of Axl Rose” in 2006 is particularly memorable. So were the pieces in Pulphead, a collection of essays, that focused on John Fahey and Bunny Wailer.

In this piece Sullivan explores the origins of the title phrase, and eventually arrives at the wonderful possibility that ska may indeed come from Tennessee. Oxford American’s music issue focused its sight on the state this year, and when I asked Sullivan about the feature’s origins he wrote “that's the fun of the music issues, for me. Because the subject keeps coming around every year, there's motivation to keep re-imagining what ‘Southern music’ means.”

An Alternate History of Sexuality in Club Culture (Luis-Manuel Garcia, Resident Advisor)

I used to be an editor at Resident Advisor and know Garcia personally, so I may be a bit biased on this one. Nonetheless, this piece seems too important to not highlight. Pitched as a series of short profiles of different cities and eras, Garcia reminds us of the LGBT origins of so much electronic music. For those who are steeped in the genre, the premise of the feature isn’t all that novel: This aspect is almost always mentioned. But it’s usually in passing, so it’s wonderful to have these stories that you always hear about pulled together in one place.

I asked Garcia which scene was the most underexposed story to him, and he highlighted the birthplace of techno. “Nearly every other history of post-disco dance music starts with Detroit techno’s ‘first wave’ artists and forgets that they were mentored by an earlier generation of predominantly gay DJs and promoters. Telling this story wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Carleton Gholz, who has spent years collecting oral histories and researching the post-Motown musical landscape of Detroit.”

Honorable Mention

Who Is Steven Reisman? Meet Hip-Hop VIPs' Favorite Lawyer, the Man With the $2 Bills (Foster Kamer, Complex)
Tracking down the man who seems to always randomly show up in your favorite rapper’s Instagram feed.

Kanye West's The College Dropout: An Oral History (Erika Ramirez, Billboard)
An epic piece celebrating the 10th anniversary of a hip hop classic.

Image credits: Two Boys - Richard Hubert Smith; That Chop - Nathanael Roney