Best Music Journalism: July 2015
After a month hiatus, we’re back with Lauren Martin’s picks of the best reads from around the web
The Arches and the Trouble with UK Nightlife (Ray Philp, Resident Advisor)
After years of uncertainty, police shutdowns and legal battles between the Glasgow City Council and Police Scotland, The Arches closed its doors for the last time to a flurry of shock and anger. While the UK club scene has been felt to be under attack from local authorities and police forces more pointedly in recent years (particularly in London, where a recent campaign to save super club fabric garnered mass support), Ray Philp’s well-researched and timely report on The Arches’ gradual downfall is a sobering read. With such a sustained and studied attack on a cultural institution which used clubbing revenues to fund an award-winning, decades-long arts space, the future of non-corporate inner cities spaces is wading into muddy waters.
The Lost Girls (Jason Cherkis, Huffington Post)
With recent biopics about Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse grabbing headlines, digging up the realities of the past to a wider audience brings up necessary and uncomfortable discussions of how we see and treat “stars.” In this harrowing account, the story of Californian teen girl-band the Runaways is re-told, this time through the horrific rape of band member Jackie Krome by band manager and notorious ’70s music industry figure, Kim Fowley: a rape which Krome says that the rest of the band watched, and did nothing to stop. Through trauma, illness, guilt and grief for childhoods lost, Cherkis weaves a story that exposes the cruelty of an industry that exploited youth to its darkest depths.
Rain is Sizzling Bacon, Cars are Lions Roaring: the Art of Sound in Movies (Jordan Kisner, Guardian)
“To be excellent, a sound editor needs not just a sharp, trained ear, but also a gift for imagining what a sound could do, what someone else might hear.” This is what Jordan Kisner posits in this profile of Skip Lievsay, one of Hollywood’s most respected sound designers. Film fans often talk about the official soundtracks to their favourite films, and how central they are to the experience and memory of them, but the mood, narrative and aesthetic impressions of a film weigh heavy on those who spend their lives in editing rooms, trying to imagine what strangers in theatres the world over may feel about sound. Centering the article on time he spent with Lievsay during the making of forthcoming Miles Davis biopic, Miles Ahead, it’s an engrossing look into an oft-overlooked world within the film industry.
Tyga - The Gold Album: 18th Dynasty review (Meaghan Garvey, Pitchfork)
More often than not, reviews are the last stop in the album campaign schedule: scrolled through, scowled at and aggregated onto Metacritic; for labels, publicists and artists to retweet with either happy or pissed-off emoji accordingly. But reviews can be much more: insightful, considered and, most rarely, fair. Meaghan Garvey’s review of Yeezy-affiliated rapper Tyga’s second album, The Gold Album: 18th Dynasty, oozes personality and humour, as she gradually takes Tyga apart with due insight into current rap and hip hop culture. And if the nickname “M. Night Strugglerap” doesn’t make it into an End of Year list, I’ll listen to The Gold Album: 18th Dynasty in full myself.
I interviewed Mark Kozelek. He called me a “bitch” on stage (Laura Snapes, Guardian)
Stories of everything from underhand gender bias to full-blown sexual violence seem to permeate nearly every music culture, but one saving grace of living online is that these stories can spread far and wide. After being publicly insulted by Sun Kil Moon frontman Mark Kozelek during one of his recent concerts, music writer Laura Snapes took power into her own hands and called out Kozelek for his misogyny – and traced a series of behaviours that, Snapes argues, throws up a weary reality of how some men enact and disguise abuse: “He can use sexually violent language to reduce female critics to the status of groupies, knowing that while male musicians’ misogynist acts are examined for nuance and defended as traits of ‘difficult’ artists, women and those who call them out are treated as hysterics who don’t understand art.”
Perspective: DJ Sprinkles (Terre Thaemlitz, CRACK)
The legislative chokehold that saw the New York City club scene suffer in the 1990s under Mayor Gulliani is a story well known to US dance music fans, but it’s far from an isolated case. Dating back to 1948, the Fūzoku Eigyō Torishimari Hō (Entertainment Business Control Law) was originally designed to regulate Japan’s bars, clubs and casinos, but a 1984 amendment expanded the law to the point of rendering late nights in Japan like a Footloose special edition of Groundhog Day. American DJ, producer and cultural critic Terre Thaemlitz, a long-time resident of Japan, says the Law is about enforcing a “morality code” on a country that often finds itself caught between adherence to tradition and being able to adapt to rapid globalisation – and recent wins from the music and entertainment world that seem to lessen the chokehold shouldn’t be celebrated so soon.
Follow the Leaders (Thomas Golianopoulos, Grantland)
In this insightful account of how hip hop culture forces rather than lets you grow old, Golianopoulos pushes rap icons Rakim and Big Daddy Kane into a refreshingly honest yet sympathetic light. They were icons that defined a moment, and arguably have struggled to wriggle free since. Big Daddy Kane seems lucid in his analysis of himself: “I think that the weak point of [1993’s Looks Like a Job For…] album was really me,” Kane says. “Had I listened to the radio and saw how much the game had changed… My style really sounded aged. It sounded old.” How these men cope with growing old, though, is a great read in itself.
How Hip-Hop Is Becoming the Oldies (Alex French, New York Times)
Speaking of “golden oldies,” this one looks at hip hop from a different angle. After suffering from years of underwhelming listener numbers and a lack of clear musical direction, the Indianapolis radio station WRWM (launched as Indy’s i94) decided to swerve the daytime playlists of local pop, rock and country music stations in Indiana, and focus on an unlikely all-rounder: old-school hip hop. The success of the station since the switch raises interesting questions about how once-radical sounds and cultures age alongside their audiences, and how they're then marketed back to the same audiences as nostalgia.
The Endless Fall of Suge Knight (Matt Diehl, Rolling Stone)
The recent images of Marion “Suge” Knight in an orange suit and handcuffs in a courtroom shocked many. How did the man who founded the Black Kapital and Death Row labels, and executive produced and signed some of the biggest rap records in history, end up being accused of a fatal hit-and-run, slapped with an original bail of $2 million and faced with the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison? While the case is on-going, this detailed history from various sources paints a picture of a man whose genius for business and music was perhaps matched only by his own ruthlessness.
Digital Underground: Who Will Make Sure The Internet's Vast Musical Archive Doesn't Disappear? (Ann Powers, NPR)
When you signed up for a MySpace account in the 2000s, you were likely unaware of the platform that came before it – sort of. Imeem was a music streaming and sharing website that used Flash-based media to expose users to music from around the world that previously would have only been heard by avid crate-digging and scene insiders. After MySpace bought imeen in 2009, the company did more that assimilate its structure into its own – the music it posted, the material within the structure, was lost. The story of imeem is one that shows our insecurities of preserving the past and how we share information, and Ann Powers’ fascinating examination of what the fate of imeem and the exhaustive expansion of music online means for the process of archiving – if it’s even possible at all. Speaking to librarians, scholars and sound preservationists, Powers goes deep on a subject that, with the rise of billion-dollar music streaming platforms such as Spotify, seems especially timely.
