Best Music Journalism: August 2014
We’re music nerds at Red Bull Music Academy, but we’re also music journalism nerds, which is why we’ve decided to put together a monthly round-up of some of the best pieces we come across. This month: Brazilian record collectors, (not) Nas, and more.
The Brazilian Bus Magnate Who’s Buying Up All the World’s Vinyl Records (Monte Reel, New York Times)
The fascinating tale of 62 year-old Zero Freitas, of São Paulo, who’s gone to therapy to eradicate his collecting habit. (Unsuccessfully, thus far.) Reel follows Freitas on various record runs, where he buys upwards of 10,000 LPs at a time, and sits in with the boodle documenting and organizing this collection into Emporium Musical, a kind of library of music that Freitas wants to open. He estimates he’s got “several million albums” and that the cataloguers will be able to finish their work in 20 years – if Freitas stops buying now.
Nas Is Not Your Old Droog (Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker)
Some excellent detective work by The New Yorker to uncover a mild-mannered hip-hop conspiracy theory: Who is Your Old Droog? It’s about how a cadre of Internet rap nerds had an easier time convincing themselves (and the rap nerds who read them) that Nasir Jones made a secret album, than believing that a new MC from Coney Island could master Nas’ flow while feeling himself conceptually. Good EP, and a good back-story.
The Winners and Losers of the Summer of Ass (Carl Wilson, SPIN)
A dictionary hyperlink adorns the very first sentence of the arch poptimist’s inaugural column as senior critic for Spin, an essay on how this summer’s American Top 40 “raised higher the freak flag planted in pop music's posterior.” Appropriately, the link is to an adjective meaning “having shapely buttocks,” an adjective I’ve never previously ogled, though I look for words like that wherever I go. Anyhow, this is the studiously witty straight-poop of how pop moved from Iggy Azalea to “Anaconda,” and Wilson deserves to be bookmarked if you don’t believe in guilty musical pleasures.
The Soundtrack to My Late Blooming Sexual Awakening: A Round Table (Hairpin)
Context-specific memoirs-cum-music critical insights about sounds that, by turns, enrage and soothe the hormones of teenage girls, starring four very funny women reliving puberty in an open dialogue. This is, of course, the conversation every boy under the age of fourteen is dying to hear – until he does. For the adult analysts, it’s a great reminder of music’s unseen power as a feeder of gangly physical stimulation and adolescent emotional insight, be it via Usher, Neutral Milk Hotel or Pure Moods, Vol. 1.
Where is Pop’s Response to Ferguson? (Jason Lipschutz, Billboard)
The shooting of 18 year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri has galvanized the widest-reaching and most intense conversation on “Race and America” in recent memory. Yet one loudmouth group is seemingly not getting involved. Billboard’s Lipshutz has an intriguing essay as to why the modern pop world does not want to address an issue that’s been knocking on its front door for years.
Honorable Mention
Charles M. Young: A Rolling Stone Colleague Remembers (David Felton, Rolling Stone)
On August 18th, a most underappreciated rock-critical mind left this mortal coil. Rolling Stone’s obituary includes links to the catalog of his great work for the magazine, including Young’s 1977 profile of the Sex Pistols.
How to Talk to a Female Composer (Alex Ambose, WQXR)
New York’s classical music radio station website offers a guide to appropriate questions and inappropriate presumptions natural to interviewing women artists. (Note: this is satire.)
A Decade of Space Disco (Chal Ravens, FACT)
FACT goes to Oya Festival in Oslo, and discovers the origins of the renowned scene there aren’t quite what most imagine.
Images: NYT - Sebastián Liste/Noor; Billboard - Joe Raedle/Getty Images
