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Best Music Journalism: September 2014

We’re music nerds at Red Bull Music Academy, but we’re also music journalism nerds. Continuing on from Jason Gross’ collection of his favorite music journalism of 2013, we’ve decided to put together a monthly round-up of some of the best pieces we come across. This month: Dâm-Funk Interviews George Clinton, the online underground, and more.

Dâm Funk Interviews George Clinton: It’s a Beautiful Stink! (LA Record)
\nMutual admiration society Q&As are a notorious crap-shoot, but every once in a while you’ll get a querist so up on a topic, that the information flow is more like a flood. So it goes here, when LA’s funk veteran chops it up with the once and future pilot of the original Mothership. Anecdotes feature Junie Morrison, Roger Troutman, Frank Zappa, Electrifying Mojo, “bubblegum gangstaz,” UFO sightings and Ishmael Reed, amongst a cast of a million funkateers.

The Online Underground: A New Kind of Punk? (Adam Harper, Resident Advisor)
\nThis piece is as much of a cultural exploration as an outline of the creative synapses, media plans and distribution methods employed by beyond-current Internet-centric musicians. They’re all united by DIY amateurism and sound appropriation, so aesthetic beauty and outmoded professionalism is damned here (just like they were at post-punk’s height, Harper argues), making the essay a meticulous sketch of one generational divide as well. Get busy being born, or get the fuck out of the way.

A Brief Taxonomy of the Fuccboi (RIP) (Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Jezebel)
\nNot music journalism, per se (fashion journalism, if you wanna get finicky), but so informed by modern hip hop’s style mores, that in Shep’s hands, the creative mediums feed each other as naturally on-page as they do on the street. This short history of the “fuccboi” archetype is also a study of the Harlem clothing brand Hood By Air, which means that it has great insight into the evolution of a culturally inclusive corner of New York’s rap scene.

A Little Bit Softer Now, A Little Bit Softer Now… (William Weir, Slate)
\nSubtitled, “The sad, gradual decline of the fade-out in pop music,” this is actually a short history of that technique, from Holst’s “The Planets” to Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” (which is, according to Weir, the only track with a fade to chart in the American Top 10 since 2011). The piece also descends into the philosophical implications of this loss, especially when a professor at Ohio State University’s School of Music and Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences equates the fade with “a gesture towards the ‘infinite.’” Not surprising that the disappearance of this idyll has coincided with the rise of the zeroes and ones championed elsewhere.

Work It (Max Pearl, The New Inquiry)
\nThe Yoga Raves™ revolution is upon us, God help us. Or, if She won’t heed our call, can we please find an essayist willing to go into the belly of this New Age beast and satirize it knowledgably from within? Enter young Max Pearl, ready to rise up (early) into the world of “white-collar health nuts” throwing “morning sober parties.” At first, funning on these new meditation rituals of “the haute creative classes of Brooklyns around the globe” is a straight LOLz read; but somewhere in the midst comes a great realization that the combination of objectified body and focused mind is part of a long-standing tradition in the spiritual places where disco and house music have long been playing. The faux-artisans may have mixed up their motivations, but their goals are exceedingly familiar.

“Anaconda,” “Pacific State,” “Sueño Latino,” and the Story of a Sample That Keeps Coming Back (Philip Sherburne, Pitchfork: The Pitch)
\nA loon is a bird. And Philip’s tale of just how the synthetic version of that bird’s call has wormed its way into the warm bellies of tracks for the last 25 years, is an excellent bit of sonic detective work.
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Honorable Mention

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Guitar Drag (Greil Marcus, Oxford American)
\nAn excerpt from the West Coast Dean’s latest book-length song-listicle-cum-opus explores the Christian Marclay soundtrack inspired by a 1998 re-iteration of America’s original sin, and continues Marcus’ construction of a new “land of the free” iconography.

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Hearpitch.org
\nPitch calls itself a “documentary radio show about music,” though it’s probably fairer to call it a podcast of radio segments about music looking for a home. Regardless, the topics explored on Pitch are a study in Best Music Journalism stories, from “The Clearmountain Pause” (hat tip: Jennifer Egan) to the forgotten story of how R.E.M.’s Out of Time aided voter-registration. Subscribe in iTunes here.

By Piotr Orlov on October 3, 2014

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