Last Month NOW 24.7
I am in the last place you went looking for me.
Last Month NOW is a sequenced playlist of 30 tracks that I spent the prior month listening to, talking about and/or obsessing over. It’s not The Best Songs necessarily, but it’s not not that. It’s also a list of the albums I liked from the previous month. And probably some other things. I always mean for it to stay on an actual month-by-month schedule but that kind of never works out. So here’s another one! Scroll way down!
But first! I’ve recently concluded a three-year run as Managing Editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies and would like to take a couple thousand words to talk about the journal, my colleagues there, and some of my favorite work we published while I was on board.
Some Thoughts My Three Years As Managing Editor Of The Journal Of Popular Music Studies
In fall 2021, I saw an ad I’d seen before. The Journal of Popular Music Studies’ editorial board (editors Robin James, Eric Weisbard, book reviews editor David Suisman, and managing editor Esther Morgan-Ellis) was winding down their current terms, and the new staff (Kaleb Goldschmitt and Elliott Powell) were seeking a new managing editor.1 I instantly applied because 1) I’d been pals with Kaleb for about a decade at that point, and had become Twitter-friendly with Elliott and thought they’d be great to work with, and 2) after my book had been published, I needed something immediate to occupy my scholarly brain and 3) I knew I’d be good at the job. I soon learned that my music/media homie Alyx Vesey was heading up the book reviews section, and it felt too perfect.
I’m really glad they hired me. And now that my three-year term has come to an end with the publication of issue 36.4 (which includes a remarkable, annotated “collective listening project” organized and conducted by the wonderful Sara Marcus that was a joy to help bring to life), please allow me a bit of reflection.
I can’t talk enough about how great it was to work weekly with Kaleb and Elliott for the past three years. Far from dreading a weekly 10 a.m. Zoom meeting, I actually looked forward to discussing that week’s new submissions and forthcoming issues still in development—and spill the occasional tea, discuss our occasional health maladies and other bullshit, and crack a lot of jokes. And hoo boy, did I learn a ton from both of them along the way—the mere process of discussing works-in-progress, framed by our interpretation of JPMS’ coverage ambit, was an education in itself (Elliott will agree that Kaleb is an encyclopedia of pop scholarship. I was often taken aback by how quickly they would reply to a “who else is working on this stuff” question with an annotated bibliography, off the dome).
I often tell my students that while I love my my chosen vocation (scholarship) it doesn’t often permit me to celebrate big conclusions, because the ideas I’m working through can drag out forever (this, I tell them, is also because of creative procrastination, which is why many humanities grad students have very well-tended gardens and very purgatorial dissertations). The deadline-specific work of a managing editor, however, gave me far-more-frequent dopamine rushes of “done!”, and the spreadsheet-specific organizational labor that is necessary to do the job well taps directly into my particular brand of mild neurodivergence. This particular form of academic work provided a perfect balance, offsetting the pleasurable but agonizingly slow process of researching and writing something.
Anyway. In late 2021, Kaleb, Elliott, and I inherited 3 nearly full issues of articles already in the pipeline thanks to our predecessors, and so those first few issues of Volume 34 are more Eric and Robin’s work than ours. Coincidentally enough, the first new article that I ushered through peer review to publication came from my Ph.D. colleague, one-time co-panelist and friend, Landon Palmer, whose “From Freedom Dreams to Boomer Nostalgia: Licensing the Cinematic Meanings of Motown” illuminates how Motown’s famously crossover-friendly music—known to many Boomers and snarky Xers as Big Chill yuppie fare—was deployed in two Black films (Nothing But A Man and Cooley High) to “portray Motown as part of everyday Black life in ways that were not available to filmmakers amid the company’s post-Big Chill licensing strategies.”
In that same issue is Ambre Dromgoole’s “‘I’m Gonna Dedicate This One to Miss Franklin’: Afro-Protestant Performance Pedagogies and Rethinking the Black Woman’s Spiritual Voice,” which carefully draws revealing genealogical connections between Franklin and her gospel inheritors Jennifer Hudson and Fantasia Barrino through the lens of “theatrical education in Black sonic creation.” (not for nothing but Dr. Dromgoole was an absolute joy to work with in edits—she was so psyched to get the piece out, and I was incredibly amped to help her do it).
I knew I’d picked the right job.
Here are some of my other favorites from Volume 34:
Joanna Love, “‘Let’s Get Loud’: Sounding Subversive Bodies at the Super Bowl”
Patrick Burke, “Trouble Every Day: White Allyship and the ‘Sunset Strip Riots,’ 1966”
Erin E. Bauer, “The Absence of Texas-Mexican Musics at the South by Southwest Festival”
Mark R. Villegas, “‘Gangsta Chi’: RZA’s Hip Hop Orientalism and Geeky Codeswitching”
De Angela L. Duff, Zachary Hoskins, Kamilah Cummings, and Robert Loss, “#1plus1plus1is3: Transcripts from a Virtual Symposium on Iconic Prince Albums”
Dan Charnas, et al, “Dilla Time: Dan Charnas, Kelley L. Carter, and Robert Glasper in Conversation about the Life and Afterlife of Hip-Hop Producer J Dilla”
About those last two pieces: they’re drawn from JPMS’ non-peer-reviewed Field Notes section, which is there for music scholars and critics to offer quicker comment on current issue, take a more essayistic or journalistic approach to music discourse, or, like this one, transcribe a symposium. I didn’t get to work much with the outgoing Field Notes folks Sara Marcus, Roshanak Kheshti, and John Vilanova (who commissioned the above), but I loved working with Jonathan Leal and Kavita Kulkarni, who held down the section for most of my time there. They co-curated a section titled “Checking in On Popular Music and Digitality” for my penultimate issue, and it was a blast to bring to the public (it’s free!).
Occasionally, Field Notes editors commission scholars to respond to other scholars—a remarkably generative practice I wish was far more prevalent in academic letters. My very first issue featured a great response from Kate Grover to Miles Grier’s essay “Said the Hooker to the Thief: Some Way Out of Rockism,” which had initially run in 2013 (when JPMS was part of Wiley). Every single music critic has to at least acknowledge the topic since Kelefa Sanneh’s epochal 2004 essay “The Rap Against Rockism,” whether by “taking a side” or simply trying to understand what the hell it means. Grover agrees: “rockism is a junk drawer of social and cultural beliefs. It’s somehow all at once a critical mode, a historical framework, and a sneaky, incessant ideology.” Grover mentions some examples she uses to teach the concept/debate to her students; this is my personal favorite example:
A couple years later, the JPMS dialogue switched—or narrowed—from rock to indie rock, when we published a response from Robin James herself to a 2012 JPMS piece by Keith Harris, “Did New York Kill Indie Rock?”. In his initial piece, Harris casts a wary eye on the Brooklyn-centric ideal of “indie rock,” noting the national network of campus-adjacent oddballs who once defined “college rock” with characteristic precision: “The land-grant university was the ideal gathering place for provincial out-of-state misfits too smart to stay in their hometowns but unwilling or unready to migrate to the big city.”
In her response, James—whose book about the ideal of non-corporate cultural independence is terrific—explains that indie’s virtual gentrification from the scene to the stream over the past decade-plus has drained it of cultural capital while rendering it all-the-more susceptible to being “rediscovered” by young guns like the Breeders-approved Olivia Rodrigo, and the parents of Rodrigo’s biggest fans, for whom indie now counts as “Dad Rock.” “It’s possible to read Harris’s article as an account of the privatization of the “scene” into a brand,” James writes.
Then, in Harris’s response to James’ response, he reconsiders his original piece in light of his current work as music critic and co-owner of the excellent, erm, Twin Cities-based indie publication Racket. He notes that “New York” and “Brooklyn” served as a synecdoche in his piece for “cool music scene” at the expense of dispersed micro-scenes (I noted to myself here how “Brooklyn” echoes “Silicon Valley” here, a coinage that ideologically situates the tech industry in the aca-hippie climes of northern California, instead of the global and exploited networks of labor that make the gadgets and apps go).
Here are some other goodies from my final season (Volume 36):
Ryan Blakeley, “‘The Part of the Music Industry That God Forgot’: Streaming and the B2B Background Music Industry”
George Grinnell, “No Future in Retrospect: On Punk Memoirs”
L Holland, “‘I am something that you’ll never understand’: Prince’s Camille as Trans* Caricature”
Ajitpaul Mangat, “Pitchfork, Race, Collaboration, and the Making of ‘Indie Rap’”
Ruth Opara, “Gender Wealth Gap in the USA’s Afrobeats Scene: The Case of Tiwa Savage and Burna Boy”
Javier Rivera, “Dignity of the Abject: The Anticipatory Aesthetics of Arca’s KicK iii”
Julia Simon, “Black Life Insurance and the Blues”
Amanda Martinez, “Review: Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions, by Francesca T. Royster”
That last one? That came about from the work of book reviews editor Alyx Vesey, with help from associate editor Antonia Randolph. Alyx consistently amazed me with her organization, communication, and productivity. When she took over, we were publishing three reviews per issue. By the time she stepped down a couple months ago, JPMS was cranking out five per issue, with enough on-deck content to run five per issue for the next four issues, or all of 2025—I told my successors that they could easily bump up to seven per issue to help clear out the dozen-plus edited pieces that Alyx is bequeathing the next staff. And that’s not even getting into her editorial judgment—she was commissioning editor and the first line editor for each review!—and her gift for placing the right book with the right reviewer. Here are some of my favorite book reviews from Alyx’s tenure:
Antonia Randolph on Why Bushwick Bill Matters, by Charles L. Hughes
Paxton Haven on Pop Masculinities: The Politics of Gender in the Twenty-First Century Popular Music, by Kai Arne Hansen
Felicia Angeja Viator on Who Got the Camera?: A History of Rap and Reality, by Eric Harvey ;-)
Eric Lott on “Turn Me Loose White Man” Or: Appropriating Culture: How to Listen to American Music, 1900-1960, by Allen Lowe
Michele Friedner and Ailsa Lipscombe on Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment, by Jonathan Sterne
Lucy March on Virtual Music: Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era, by Shara Rambarran
Christine Capetola on The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice, by Marcus Boon
Lauron J. Kehrer on Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City, by Shanté Paradigm Smalls
Sean Latham on Hard Rain: Bob Dylan, Oral Cultures, and the Meaning of History, by Alessandro Portelli
Langston Collin Wilkins on DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution, by Lance Scott Walker
Andy Kelleher Stuhl on Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry, by Kyle Barnett
Amy Skjerseth on Hearing Sexism: Gender in the Sound of Popular Music. A Feminist Approach, by LJ Müller
Out of chronological order, because that’s how I roll, here’s a list of my favorites from 2023’s Volume 35—including 35.4, which is a very amazing and very free special issue about pop music and podcasting:
Dan DiPiero, “‘I Wanna Be That Cool’: Soccer Mommy’s Big Feelings”
Simone Pereira de Sá, Juliana Freire Gutmann, and Simone Evangelista, “Musical Performances in Digital Audiovisualities: A Case Study of the Brazilian Singer Pepita”
Lauron J. Kehrer, “‘Sissy Style’: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in New Orleans Bounce Dance”
Morgan Bimm, Kate Galloway, Amy Skjerseth, “Special Issue: ‘Recast, Podcast, Broadcast’”
To conclude: a quick public welcome to the stellar new JPMS editorial staff: Alisha Lola Jones, Ben Tausig, and my successor, Matthew Jones are running the peer-reviewed show, while Antonia Randolph slides in effortlessly to helm the book reviews section, ably assisted by Katie Hollenbach. In Field Notes, Jonathan and Kavita are joined by Leah Kardos.
And Now Some New Music To Listen To While You Read Every Article I Linked Above
BONUS NEW FEATURE: A YouTube version of the below playlist!
Peel Dream Magazine, “Lie In the Gutter”
Fievel is Glauque, “As Above So Below”
Nala Sinephro, “Continuum 1”
Seefeel, “Multifolds”
Belong, “Jealousy”
Heartworms, “Jacked”
Geordie Greep, “Holy Holy”
Sunset Rubdown, “Candles”
John Cale, “Davies and Wales”
Father John Misty, “I Guess Time Makes Fools of Us All”
Fousheé, “still around”
Ginger Root, “There Was a Time”
Pearl and the Oysters, “Side Quest”
Kit Sebastian, “Göç / Me”
Claude Fontaine, “Laissez-moi L’Aimer”
Barbara Pravi, “Exister”
Addict Ameba f. ELASI, “Cicale”
Nourine, “Paris باريس”
Nidia & Valentina, “Mata”
Doechii, “NISSAN ALTIMA”
Benny the Butcher f. Busta Rhymes, “Jesus Arms”
Sophie Hunter, “Cha Cha”
Previous Industries, “Dominick’s”
‘89 the Brainchild f. Papo2oo4, GVVAAN, Kohai & Big Shoota, “Guestlist @ Mi Sabor”
FKA Twigs, “Eusexua”
Jlin, “Summon”
Liv.e, “It Doesn’t Matter”
Dua Saleh, “want”
Molina f. ML Buch, “Organs”
Kim Deal, “Crystal Breath”
SOME GOOD ALBUMS RELEASED OVER THE PAST FEW MONTHS:
070 Shake Petrichor (Def Jam)
Anna Butterss Mighty Vertebrate (International Anthem)
Belong Realistic IX (kranky)
Dua Saleh I SHOULD CALL THEM (Ghostly)
Field Music Limits of Language (Memphis Industries)
Fievel is Glauque Rong Weicknes (Fat Possum)
Geordie Greep The New Sound (Rough Trade)
Office Culture Enough (Ruination Record Co.)
Peel Dream Magazine Rose Main Reading Room (Topshelf)
Rogê Curyman II (Diamond West)
Tyler, The Creator CHROMAKOPIA (Columbia)
For those who don’t know the lingo, a managing editor is kind of the nuts-and-bolts editor of a publication; for JPMS, I served as a liaison between the primary editors (Kaleb and Elliott) and our contributing authors, peer reviewers, copy-editors, and UC Press; and compiled, prepared, and spot-checked each issue for publication.
It was a blast, Eric!!