The Press Box - How to be a Music Critic With The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

Bryan and David break down the recent NFL/NBA Insider controversy and touch on recent news involving Adam Schefter sharing an unpublished story with a source (0:40). Later, Bryan is joined by music critic Kelefa Sanneh to discuss how he got his start, what it’s like discovering and writing music criticism for a new genre, and what we can learn from subgenres in his new book, ‘Major Labels’ (19:06). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Kelefa Sanneh Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Listen up all you New York fans. Veteran New York Sports Talk host, John Dostromski gives his unique take on all the big stories in the Big Apple and beyond, including guest conversations, gambling picks, and reactions from you, the listener. Check out New York, New York with John Dostromsky on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, media consumers. Welcome to the Press Box Friday edition. Actually, Thursday afternoon edition. Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer, Erica Cervantes here. We are going to bring on the New Yorker's Kalefa Senate. in just a second. But David, we got to talk about the week from hell

for the sports media figure known as the NFL or NBA insider. All right. Let's do this. Can I set this up as an instant think piece? Yeah, please. Okay, here goes. Here goes the net graph. It's not just that a couple of insiders had bad or weird moments this week.

it's that those moments go right to the heart of suspicions people have about the job. Is that work as a nut graph? Yeah, I think so. Okay. So let's lay this out. An insider, if you don't know, put scoops out there. Those scoops are mainly transactions. Players heard, a player's going to sign, players going to be drafted, et cetera.

Complaint number one about insiders is that the job, becomes entertainment more than journalism. It becomes so transaction-based, and one might say transactional, that it almost becomes post-journal. Yes. Which brings us to the case of Adam Schefter. Huge story this week was the emails between former Raiders coach John Gruden and Washington football team executive Bruce Allen that came to light.

The Wall Street Journal got an email in which Gruden used a race. trope. The New York Times got emails that had Gruden using homophobic and misogynistic language. Gruden resigned from the Raiders. Okay. Then Nathan Fenno and Sam Farmer at the LA Times got their hands on another email from July 2011 in which Adam Schaefter of ESPN was reporting a story about the NFL lockout. Fenno and Farmer write ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schaefter sent Bruce Allen the draft of an unpublished story that was published later the same day. Quote, please let me know if you see anything

that should be added, changed, tweaked, Schefter wrote, thanks, Mr. Editor, for that and the trust. Plan to file this to ESPN about 6am. Wow. Just wow. I mean, listen, there's the skeptical side of me that says,

that wonders how much just the Mr. Editor, how much fuel that Mr. Editor added to the fire, right? It doesn't really affect the journalistic, the ethical transgression here, but it certainly, I think, affected the reaction to this news, right? But yeah, you don't do this. I mean, different reporters have different styles and different rules and different outlets, obviously,

due to on how you fact-check quotes with sources and how you fact-check pertinent facts when sometimes the only person you can really check it against is the person who you're writing about. And if you're not writing a flattering piece, and that can be sometimes a really difficult task, just a fact-check, right? People have different rules about how to go about doing it.

One thing that I think we can all agree on is that you don't send an entire piece to the subject or the source and say, is there anything in this whole thing you want to change? Right? I would say the far end of like people that you and I know do this in an appropriate way is I'm going to send every quote and maybe the sentences that frame the quote to my source or to my or to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you. to the source to make sure they know they see it and can prove, you can say this is indeed what I meant, right? That'd be like the far end of the waiting pool to say, here's the entire article. Let me know if you want me to change anything at all is just wild.

Yes. I think, you know, maybe and maybe not, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't ever use the word of prove right of anything. I would say that, you know, I am going to dispute anything or you want to. Exactly. Want to argue with me? want to do that kind of thing? Sure. Adam Schaefter worked at the Rocky Mountain News in the Denver Post.

Adam Schaefter knows this, that you do not put a draft of a story, send a draft of a story to a subject. It's just, he knows that. I mean, that's so obvious because, like, what do we have as journalists other than control over the product, over our story? And as soon as you outsource that, you outsource that. or appear to outsource it to other people, you don't have anything anymore.

That's it. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not your story anymore. And the thing is it, they're supposed to be our stories, not somebody else's stories. Yeah, I mean, you said it at the top. Even the best reading of this shows the perils of insiderdom. And there's a sort of, one can imagine a sort of transactional, transaction creep that leads you to this point, right?

That you're just sort of like, and none of this is okay, but that like the little favors that you exchange, that you give me this news and I will maybe make some other things news that I wouldn't otherwise cared about or something. I will tweet a thing, et cetera, et cetera. Like somehow that leads down this slippery slope to you give me, you tell me what story you want me to write and I will write it. That's a, this is not, it's not journalism.

You know, this isn't like a minor quibble in the field. What you're doing, people joke all the time about an article being like a press release from the source, right? There is no distinction between a piece and a press release if the source gets to approve it wholesale. That's right. That's right. I think that's exactly right. And, you know, by the way, there's the actually what's happened. And then there's a sense among readers that you're not leveling with me, that you're, that you're setting out to write something that isn't for me, the reader in the audience, but it's for somebody else.

Or it's so heavily influenced by somebody else, that you're just, I'm not getting the full story. And again, that's just deadly for everybody's reputation. And maybe this is what you mean, but it's, it's deadly to everybody's, everybody, the reputation of everybody who writes about full. football in this case, right? I mean, there's going to be a perception from the readership that everybody is as compromised as Adam Schaefter in this case is. And that, so he's, it's not just his own reputation. He's going to be fine. Adam Schaefter will be fine. The perception of the transactional nature of the entire football media complex is what's really going to take, really be damaged by this. You know, the first time I saw this whole dynamic play out was actually not in sports. I was telling

this to somebody today. It was in politics when Mike Allen was writing the newsletter for Politico. But it was exactly the same kind of thing because Mike Allen was saying, I know everything. I'm the ultimate insider of politics and I'm going to get more scoops and more scoops and more scoops and I'm going to keep going and going and you reach the level where even if you're the best reporter in the world, there's just no more news. You're just not going to be able to turn up the number of nuggets that your hungry Twitter audience wants. So eventually, you start doing things that aren't news. You start going, you start going past news to something like, hey, here's a transaction that's going to happen in 10 minutes anyway. And then you even go past

that. I mean, I just, I was looking, I remembered this today when we're looking up Adam Schaefter, September 14th, this is an Adam Schaefter tweet, an announcement will be made during half time of Thursday night's Giants Washington football team game that will involve the future of the hard knocks series per a league official. The announcement turned out to be that there was going to be more hard knocks and in-season hard knocks.

This is not news, this tweet. This is a tease for an announcement from the NFL. If you had, if you wanted to go ahead and report what the announcement was, even that's kind of like on the edge of being actual quote unquote news. But this is not news. No. As 899 retweets, by the way.

I mean, that's just, it's just one of those things where I just feel like there's a point where it's just like in order to be the insider, this position that has been created by television that, by the way, has been lapped up by everybody on Twitter, including the two of us, you start having to do things, you start having to report things that aren't news anymore. You have to stop being a journalist in order to satisfy the condition. of being an insider, if that makes sense. Is there, I'm not even sure how to frame this. Is there a way in which being an insider

is necessarily distinct from being a journalist? Like, would there be another version of the world where that's just an information broker and they exist outside of the journalistic world and to make it journalism, you have to filter it through an extra right? Do you understand what I'm saying? Like nobody's going to confuse one of the,

the sports betting talking heads that are now on, you know, sports channels as a, as journalists. Not, some of them are, but, you know, but some of them certainly are not. I just, I wonder if there's a kind of a, a different world that they should be inhabiting instead of presenting them as journalists. I don't, probably not. Here's what would happen, though. If you went to any of these people, any of the people who are the major newsbreakers across every sport, they would absolutely just go crazy if you suggested they weren't a journalist. They absolutely, they will, they will not see that title at all. They have no interest in doing that. They will, how dare you say that? And by the way,

a lot of what they do do, you know, we shouldn't, we shouldn't, we should, we should, we should, we should note this. Adam Schaefter report stories that make Roger Goodell mad, right? It's not, It's not that there's no newsbreaking going on. Like I said, I just think you reach a point to satisfy the demands of the job where it starts to become stuff that's, first of all, you just look at it and go, what is that? Is that a thing? And then you look at it and go, well, that's definitely not a thing.

Yeah. Yeah, it's true. I mean, talking about them being, talking about pushing the boundaries of journalism. And what I asked, I guess, existing in a world sort of separate from journalism, I think probably not coincidentally. I don't want to go into any, like, you know, newsbreaking conspiracy theories here. But Mike Floreo ran a piece today about Caesar's sports book preparing to go after Adam Schaefter when his contract is up next summer.

And I believe there was another article about Adrian Woznarowski being pursued by sort of betting outlets at some point in the future, kind of hypothetically, which I'm pretty sure we floated on this podcast a couple of months ago. You can see it coming a mile away. Absolutely. But even, and first of all, great business decision by all, if you do that, great business decision by all parties involved, I mean, it certainly, you know, makes, probably make everybody wealthier.

But if we're already at this point and now we're talking about someone working for Caesar's sports book, well, that's just a totally different thing, even if you're breaking the same kind of stories, right? That feels like, if you're like, I'm the information guy for the casino or I'm the information guy for the sports book. Yeah, that does feel like a very different context, even with the same story. But if that were to happen, I guess we'll see how many stories that, you know, Roger Goodell doesn't like that Adam Schafter breaks, right? I mean, this is a huge, drawn-out hypothetical many months into the future, but, you know, everybody's

got a cost-benefit sort of analysis that they go through when they do their job. And I'm not saying that you would not do a thing because of the reaction you would get. But if you're not, if your employer and your audience is not consuming a certain sort of material, then you will probably start producing a different sort of material, right? Yeah, that's a great question because ESPN has the appetite for all kinds of stories, for whatever we say about ESPN. Yeah, whatever we say about ESPN, right, if there's a critical story about the league or, you know, league business, right,

they're interested in more than transactions. Would a hypothetical, you know, gambling employer be interested in that stuff too? I don't know. I really don't know. Should we look at the case of Sham Sharani of the Athletic? Please. So Sharani was reporting on Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets, another gigantic sports story. Huge story in the NBA.

And Sharani writes, Irving, quote, has not fulfilled New York City's COVID-19 vaccine requirement. And the Nets announced Tuesday that Irving will not play or practice with the team until he is eligible to be a full participant. Close quote. I'll read the rest of the piece. The piece contains lots of him. information about here's the stuff about here's the stuff you should know about COVID, no matter what Kyrie Irving is doing, here is the truth about COVID. Okay, but there was a particular paragraph that came up that was pulled out on Twitter. And Sharani wrote this in that

paragraph, quote, Irving has made more than $160 million over his NBA contracts and has a massive Nike shoe endorsement deal. So those who know Irving understand he is not driven right now by money, nor cares for inheriting more, but rather the stand for. for larger issues in his mind that need his support. He's a seven-time all-star, two-time all-NBA member, and former rookie of the year who now stands to lose over 200 million by deciding to use his platform to stand up for his stance of each and every person being able to decide for themselves

on whether they should take the vaccine without impacts on job statuses. What is that? press release. I mean, I don't even know any other way to put it. That's certainly what the language sounds like. Yes.

I just don't, and again, I just don't know what to do with it. Yeah, Isaac Chautner tweeted, Ed Linked about this, but he pointed out that there was a whole passage that reads exactly like,

I mean, just like, not even laundered press release, right? I mean, there were so many elements of this, that would not have made sense unless they came specifically from a source next to Kyrie who wanted to get this out. I just again, I go back to that point of how important is it for you? One, to do the right thing journalistically.

And two, to make sure the public thinks you are, you are doing the right thing journalistically. To make sure the public thinks, man, this guy is, this guy is doing his job to bring me the new news and that and that's it full stuff like to tell me what the truth is but to play devil's advocate i mean he's yes he's doing what it takes to bring you the news right i mean this is what shams obviously studied you know at the feet of woge and and uh now he's you know direct competition but you know wodge does not get lauded for his journalistic integrity right and if you're and if you were

you know, if that's your only exposure to the business, it's not shocking that you would look at him and say, the currency is access. The currency is being the first to report whatever thing and by whatever means necessary, you know, and it's a sad state of things, but it, I guess part of me is not surprised. You need three examples, David, to write a think piece. So I got one more for you. Well, it's Darren Revella the Action Network. I'm glad that we touched on this. By the way, the Action Network, a great example of what we were talking about before. But let's go ahead. Yeah, not exactly involved in reporting in the way the other two are, but he comes off the top rope on Twitter with this. It was a pro football talk right up with a Schfter story. And he says,

give me a break. Well, it's not exactly the best of journalism practices. We've all done this in the name of accuracy, which a lot of people responded on Twitter. We all have. We have all done this. He later backed off and wrote, Do I think most journalists check with the sources, sometimes even show them pieces of stories? Yes.

Do I think journalists should show sources full unedited pieces and offer them to edit it as they see fit? No. By the way, Schaefter also had a long statement clarifying his behavior. The criticism being levied is fair. With that said, I want to make this perfectly clear in no way did I or would I seat editorial control or handover final say about a story to anyone ever.

The end. What a time, David. What a time. What a time to be alive in podcasting about journalism. All right, David, last week I did our first how to Friday podcast where I get a media person to come on and tell us how they do their job. Well, today we have the second one. how to be a music critic. And the person to explain how is

Kelifa Sene, staff writer at the New Yorker. One of the greats. So in this interview, we get into his formative years. We got into what it's like to write music criticism for the New York Times and write profiles from the New Yorker

and got into his new book, Major Labels. Here's how to be a music critic with Kelifa Senei. All right, Kelifa. Let's start by tracing a few moments from your younger years

that you write about in major labels? The Not So Bad Old Days. What was the first formal work of music criticism that you really engaged with? Well, it's funny. The first one I really remember reading was Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus, which is this amazing, imaginative book.

I mean, in a way I maybe should have read like, quote-unquote, normal music criticism first because his is not the normal way to do it. He writes this book, And the reason I pick it up is it's partly about the sex pistols. And I'd like fall in love with punk rock. I had the zeal of a convert. And so any book with Johnny Rotten on the cover, I was definitely going to check it out.

I was on my way on the train from Connecticut to Boston to meet up with an old friend and go see Fugazi at the channel. It's a legendary like South Boston nightclub, although I didn't know anything about it. Of course, at the time, I just knew Fugazi was playing. And, you know, the idea that you could like put the sex pistols in a book was. was really interesting to me because to be the sex pistols were like my thing, and that was this underground thing. This was 1991, so the sex pistols were long gone, but somehow here I am in Connecticut, the sex pistols feel like this band that I love. And in this book, he takes them seriously, which was kind of interesting, right? He writes about the sex pistols like they're the air to all these

European avant-garde movements, and I didn't know who Gieda Borde was and situationism and all this other stuff. And that was fascinating. By the time I got to the second half of the book, I think I was kind of losing the thread a little bit. And I'm not sure I made it all the way to the end. But that made a real impression on me that you could write about this stuff in an interesting way. I got to say two things. One is that before that, I had always been interested by the idea of criticism, by the idea of people who have opinions about things. It probably tells you something and maybe too much about me if I tell you that my favorite Muppets were Statler and Wald The critics in the press box sitting high above the stage making snarky remarks.

And similarly, when we finally got cable television in the fall of 1989, like, the site of Kurt Loder on MTV was kind of fascinating to me because, you know, there's all this sort of excited, sort of hypey, you know, TV-ish people talking excitedly about these bands. And then this kind of grumpy guy comes on. And you could tell, like, he had opinions and he didn't like all this stuff. He didn't approve of all this stuff. And so that was really interesting to me. But the second thing is that if I had kept just liking punk rock, yeah, I was writing and I did

some things here and there, and I did some fanzines. And I had an internship in 1994 at CMJ. And I published like a couple very short things. I remember publishing a short review of the Mountain Goats. And it was early enough in their career that it was a big deal, I believe, for John Darniel, and who's the Mountain Goats guy, and a big deal for me and a big deal to absolutely no one else. We're probably the only two people on Earth who can remember that. But I probably never would have tried to become a music critic if I had stayed just interested in punk.

Because punk and the punk I was into in the 90s was like super underground. It was like super insular. Like at one point, I was going to Harvard and I joined this like me and some friends. we try to start this like hardcore punk collective in Harvard where we're literally like the first meeting was I think a vegetarian potluck at someone's house and we're sitting around talking about plans for like political activism and idealism and the concerts we want to put on. It turned out not surprisingly that the concerts were the thing that everyone cared about and the other stuff sort of fell away. But you know, that world was a world where we're all coming together and we're

trying to organize a show by Drop Dead, the furious Rhode Island vegetative. hardcore band that puts 13 songs on a seven-inch single, right? Awesome band. Like, if you go back and listen to like unjustifiable homicide or some of those early Drop Dead songs, I think I'm getting the title, right? If you listen to those songs now, like they still sound epic to me. But it wasn't the kind of music that I felt like I had to tell the world about, right? Like it wasn't like, oh, you regular reader of stuff, you need to know about Drop Dead.

It's like, no, you really don't. Like, we're doing our own thing. So when I fell in love or fell back in love with hip hop, which had been kind of what I grew up with like a lot of people around my age. It was the 80s. Me and my friends as a young kid, as a nine, 10 year old, we had run DMC and the Beastie Boys and all those cassettes. I sort of lost touch with hip hop a little bit. I kind of knew what was happening, but I wasn't deep in it. And after being into punk for a while, I sort of delved back into hip hop. And that was the thing that made me want to write about music because it felt like it was happening. In crass terms, it was popular, right? These these groups, these groups, were selling millions of albums. And at the time, this might sound strange to people listening now. At the time in the late 90s, I felt like they weren't getting that much critical respect, which is weird because people pay a lot of attention to hip hop now. But at the time, hip hop wasn't necessarily considered that deserving of critical respect.

And even some of the people that were writing about hip hop didn't actually seem to like hip hop. Certainly the hip hop that was being made and being produced. I remember getting my mind blown by Juvenile, who had this record. 400 degrees. And it's sold, you know, it's the one that had backed that ass up, also known as Back That Thing Up. And, you know, it sold something like four million copies in America, right? It's this blockbuster album. And I thought it was just amazing. Like, he had this producer, Mani Fresh, who's using synthesizers to create beats that sounded like nothing else. They sounded very craftwork inspired, but also inspired, I would later learn by local traditions in New Orleans where they were

from. And juvenile had this amazing, like, kind of rubber cement and gravel voice. and the thick New Orleans slang. And this was music that even people who wrote about hip hop, maybe especially people who wrote about hip hop, didn't like. And so to me, that was the exciting thing. That was the opportunity was to get in like a mainstream publication and say, hey, this thing is happening. It's super popular.

It's by someone that you might not think you have much in common with. And it's amazing. So that's a long-winded way of saying, very long-winded, I apologize, way of saying that the thing that made me want to write about music and gave me that evangelical passion to tell people about music was that there was this hip hop that was so popular and I felt wasn't getting its due and like that was the gospel I wanted to spread. Wasn't being written about enough or wasn't being written about correctly.

Right. Exactly. Both of those things. Yeah. I love that you latched on to Kurt Loder because not only was his affect cool, he just looked cool. Yeah. Siskel and Ebert on TV in that time have the sweater vest thing going on.

You're kind of like, well, that's one vision of what I could be. as a critic, but Kurt Loder, he's got the leather jacket, right? Well, Siskel and Ebert were more accessible, right? I mean, obviously, Ebert more than Siskel, but like, you know, they were kind of like, we're movie fans. We love, like, sitting in the movie and sitting in the theater and eating some popcorn and watching the movie. Like, there was a certain fandom to Siskel and Ebert where Kurt Loder was kind of like, I think it was the fact that he was on MTV. And so, like, the fact that you suspected that he didn't like most of the stuff that they played, and that made him seem like the skunk at the party in an interesting way.

You go to Harvard and you go to work in the punk rock department of the college radio station, WHRB. The storied college radio station, WHRB. The storied college radio station. Now, what do you have to do to get a job in the punk rock department of WHRB? One of the greatest days of my life. I show up in this basement where it was at the time. And they're like, okay, if you want to apply to become a DJ here in the punk rock department, it was called the Record Hospital, was what it was called.

You have to take a test. I was like, well, what now? They're like, yeah, you got to take a test. A test? Yeah, it's got, like, it's got a series of quick fire, like musical identifications. We'll play you a bunch of snippets. Tell us what you hear. And then it's got some essay questions.

I can't remember. There's some different parts of it. And they, like, they sit down and I'll never forget. They play this thing. It's like a twangy, electric guitar lead. And immediately, I'm like, oh, that's this song, C-word tease by this band Pussy galore. I know this record forwards and backwards, and like, this is going to be my home.

Like, this is my place. I'm ready. I'm going to ace this test. I'm all about it. So, yeah, I kind of loved it. I took the test. And then there was a semester long, basically unofficial course that you would take. And every week, you'd gather together, and there'd be some veteran DJ who would give basically a lecture about some form of punk music.

And then there'd be a homework. There'd be a bin of like five or ten records you had to listen to that week. And just write down what you thought about them. And the idea, obviously it was just college kids being obnoxious as college kids tend to be, but the idea was like, it was a different way to think about music. It was like, you come in here, you think you have your musical taste. You think like, yeah, man, it's free form. I'll just play whatever. It's punk rock.

It's cool. And like their idea was no. Punk rock is a thing. And there is such thing as a punk rock orthodoxy. And yeah, you can deviate from it. Yeah, you can tell us you hate the sex pistols, but you have to learn the rules first. And that is the thing that really got me thinking about this idea of musical orthodoxy and the idea that in every musical community, there are shared assumptions and rules.

And partly the community is defined by who wants to argue about those rules, right? Who wants to fight about them? No one likes talking trash about Nashville more than a country singer, right? Oh, this stuff they're doing in Nashville, it's terrible. That's how you know someone's a country singer. That's how you know they're invested in that conversation. And so, you know, and obviously the idea of punk rock rules, it sounds a little bit, it sounds a little bit paradoxical. But as we know, often the traditions, the communities, the genres that think of themselves as defiant are the ones that care most about definition because they care most about who's in and who's out.

And I think that dynamic of inclusion and exclusion is one of the ways that any community is defined. It honestly sounds like a training ground for music critics as much as a training ground for DJs. Yeah, absolutely. We had to write our opinions on little stickers that we would stick on the records, and people would have these long-running arguments about whether this record was good or it was bad. And I think, you know, a music critic is such a weird job. And you're kind of trying to do two things at once, right? You're trying to express your own taste, your own sense of what you like or what you don't like, what's good and what's bad. I don't really believe there's any difference between those two things.

I don't think there's any difference really between liking a song and thinking it's good. I think those are the same thing. I don't trust anyone who's like, well, I don't really like this band, but, you know, they're definitely good. I'm like, well, how could you tell? Like, what does that mean? Who cares about goodness if it's not going to bring you joy or make you happy? So there is that thing, which is very personal, obviously. And then there's this other thing that critics do where they try to interpret the world.

and they try to explain to readers and to listeners like what's going on. And those things are like kind of intention with each other, right? Like the more, the deeper you get into your own taste, the more unmoored you can seem from conventional wisdom, from what's going on. And there are critics who maybe get a little too unmoored. And you read them and they're like, I like this random band and this random singer.

And it just feels like it has nothing to do with the conversation that's going on. At the other extreme, if you just say like, yeah, people like this album, people like that one, there's this one, there's that one, and you never have any opinions or moments when you pull against the consensus, you can just seem boring, right? And I think for anyone in the media, including a music critic, don't seem boring is like the number one commandment. One more moment from your pre-critical life. You leave Harvard for a time to go work in a record store. I believe it's a second-hand record store. What prompted that? Well, it's two record stores at once. So, yeah, I left Harvard for a year. At the time I thought I was

never coming back. I just didn't, honestly, I didn't really care about anything besides music. Like, I just didn't care about stuff that wasn't punk. So I was like, yeah, I can go. I could read these books and write essays and stuff, but what I really care about is music. So I was still doing some college radio stuff. During the week, nine to five, I was working at Newberry comics, which was a local kind of chain of record stores in the Boston area. And my job was literally to put price tags on CDs. And I had to be there on time every morning. And in fact, I think I have one second.

Here we go. There's a visual aid here. Here we go. You can edit this out, but I believe I have... Let's see. Is this going to be worth it? I feel like it will. Where'd it go?

I thought it was somewhere here. I had like... Yeah, I can't find it. I had my report where I got, I got like my six-month review at this warehouse where I was sticking stickers, price tags on CDs. And my manager mentioned that tardiness was an issue. It turns out it's really hard to get somewhere at 9 o'clock every morning as the hundreds of millions of people who have to do that could attest.

So I did that during the week. And on the weekends, I worked as like a buyer and behind the counter at my friend's record store in Harvard Square. And so, yeah, it was just like, being deep in the music world. And at the time, like I said, that was the thing I cared about. And weirdly, that helped me think about music differently, partly because at the, at Newberry Comics Warehouse, there was like one boombox. And different people got, there was like a rotation or you had to wait your turn and then you could play something on the boombox. And this is the

90s. This is a very tribal time and popular music. So it's like, there's the Raver Kid. There's the guy who just likes kind of like glam and like British new wave, right? There's a skinhead. There's a person who's into hip hop. Like, it's all that. And so hearing these different people playing their music and hearing, getting to know these people, having warm but maybe complicated feelings about my coworkers, as most people do, it was fun to hear like, oh, if you look at the world from this perspective, like, this is a record that sounds really good to you. So it was exciting to hear different people's perspectives on music. And also someone, I remember one of those days, pops in this album by this rapper called Dr. Octagon. And it comes out on this British import

label, this British label called Moax. It's got like a sort of like a severed arm on the cover. It's hard to figure out what's going on. And he's doing these raps that sound like nothing I've ever heard, right? They're long, they're crazy. They don't really make sense. He says, Dr. Octagon, paramedic fetus of the East with priests. I'm from the church of the operating room. And I think as soon as I heard that, I was like, I don't know what this is, but I'm super into this. And that kind of ended up being what led me back to hip hop. It kind of helped me hear the weirdness and the audacity of hip hop. And from there, I just got like basically was scrambling to catch up to everything I'd missed and

got into Wu-Tang Clan and Biggie and all this stuff that was happening in hip-hop. And so, yes, taking that year off from college sort of changed the way I thought about music and court of my trajectory, as it were, in ways that I certainly couldn't have expected. And you're playing in various bands during this period? Yeah, I never, you know, some people are like, yeah, I played in bands. Like, we weren't really good. We didn't really have many fans, which I couldn't say that about my bands because that would overestimate our popularity.

I'm not sure we ever had a single fan. Like, I'm not sure there was ever someone who didn't know me personally who came to a concert I was part of voluntarily to see me played music. I don't think that ever happened once in my life. But yeah, I was in a series of bands because that was part of being part of the scene, right? You could strap on a guitar and make my case, it was usually a bass guitar and play some shows. I didn't get that much satisfaction from it because I never felt like I was that good at it. I always felt like if I had been one of those people where in high school my best friend was a brilliant singer-songwriter and like that person had organized a band around herself or himself, I might have been decent enough at

playing bass that I might not have gotten kicked out when the band got popular. But I was never going to be the prime, you know, the artistic driving force behind anything. I didn't really have anything to say, quote unquote. And yes, when I discovered that I could maybe make a living by listening to records and writing about them instead of playing music, I was like, well, this, this is perfect. This is amazing. Before we hit record, we were talking about the difference between people in our profession in journalism or sometimes frustrated versions of whatever it is, right? The music critic is a frustrated musician. The sports writer is a frustrated. I think in both of our cases, it's just actually failed, right? I am a failed athlete, not a frustrated athlete.

Yeah, but even then, like, even, obviously, like, if I strapped on a bass and people were like, wow, your music's amazing. Like, that would have been fun, I guess. But like, for me, I'm not sure there was ever a time when I liked making music as much as I liked listening to it. So I think of myself as an unusually fulfilled listener rather than a frustrated musician that I got. In 2002, I've become like the pop music critic at the New York Times. And it feels a little bit like the, you know, there used to be a story. People would tell about the kid whose dad catches him smoking as a young guy. And the punishment is he has to finish the pack right there and then. And that'll like cure him. And it felt like being a music critic at the Times felt a little

bit like that. They're like, oh, you like music, do you? Well, here's your dream job. And now you have like a male crate full of CDs arriving at your office every day and you're going out to see concerts four or five nights a week. And your friends at first are like, oh, that seems rad. Can I come to the show with you? And then after a few months of this, it's like a Thursday night and you're driving out to Jersey to see some band that like they don't really care about that much. And they're like, yeah, I'll check you maybe the next time. So I got used to, very early on, I got used to going to concerts alone, which, you know, for most people is kind of a strange thing to do. And what I realized very quickly is that, you know, a concert.

is a social activity. Most people are there with their friends, hanging out with their friends. They pay no attention whatsoever to the weird dude with a notepad wandering alone or concentrating intently on the stage or concentrating intently on the DJ, which is even weirder, right, if you're in a club rather than a theater. So yeah, I got to do that for six years and it was fun and it was amazing and it was kind of funny to figure out what that means. Like what does it mean to take to the pages of the New York Times and tell the readers of the Times like, which CDs are good. Like, that's such a, that's such a strange, surreal job to have. And for me, part of the fun, part of the fun was writing about stuff that people might not expect to see

in the Times. You know, when I got there, there wasn't, I believe, a regular album review column. The idea was you'd wait till the artist comes to town, like a jazz artist or like classical music, and then you'd review the concert. So and so was at the Symphony Hall last night. And This band was at Bowery Ballroom last night. Like, here's what's happening. And so we added, we added, like, album reviews. But, you know, being able to review, being able to go to Canal Street and buy mixtapes and, like, review the mixtapes was fun.

Being able to go to, like, a reggae sound clash out in Jamaica, Queens, and review that, like a concert was fun. And, and for me, over and over again, the fun thing was knowing that readers didn't necessarily like the music I was writing about. and many, most of the readers, if you imagine readers of the New York Times, have no intention or interest of ever listening to the music I'm writing about. They're like, that's cool. I'm never going to hear that in my life. So if you're writing about like, you know, behemoth, kind of a death metal band from Poland, like how do you make that interesting to someone who doesn't care or know about death metal and has no intention of ever listening to death metal? And to me, that's when I write about music, that's always been the fun part.

That's been the fun challenge. How do you write something that satisfies the nerds and obsessives and gives them something to think about, but that's also accessible and above all fun to people that don't know anything about that? Because that's the thing about music, right? Like most music is obscure to most people. Just because the world of music is so fragmented and, you know, I could tell, you know, if I'm talking to someone about Polo G and I'm like, yeah, you know, rap star is like a number one hit, they're like, I don't know what a Polo G is.

Even though for weeks this was the most popular record in the country. So everything about music is kind of obscure to most people. And the tricky part, the fun part, the hard part is figuring out how do you come up with a language to talk about that to people? So you figured the majority of the Times audience, they're not music nerds. They're not going to listen to music, but they kind of want to know what this is about. They want to be able to be literate and, you know, sort of I want to know a little bit about this. Well, hopefully they're curious, right? Right? Like, you know, there's exceptions, right? When you go review, when you go review Springsteen, yes, many times readers are actually curious to know what the Springsteen show was like last night.

But other times, you're seeing some minimal techno, you're going out to watch an R&B concert or something. And yes, the fun is hopefully a number of readers. You're taking them out of their comfort zone. And they're like, why should I care about this? And the answer is like, well, like, here's something happening. Here's something interesting that's happening. Here's how this world works. Often it's like you're going into another genre is like going into another world. Here's how the world of R&B works. Here's what the dynamic is in an R&B concert. Here's how a singer addresses men and women in the crowd sort of separately in a way a rock singer usually wouldn't do, right? Like you go to a rock show.

I remember being shocked at R&B and hip-hop shows where the performer was very conscious often that there were these two separate audiences, right? the ladies over here, the fellas over there. Now, ladies, I know you don't want to hear with the fellow. You know, that whole way of talking to audiences separately as men and women is something that you found in those genres that you don't necessarily find in a rock show. So things like that that give you a sense of the sociology of this world and the decisions that people make. Hopefully, my hope always was that that could be fun to listeners just as a way of exploring the world around them. Because to me, the whole point of this is curiosity.

To me, the whole point is like being in America, being in my case an immigrant. I moved here when I was five and being just fascinated by like what's going on, especially what's going on in America. What are they listening to over there? What's happening in that club? How does that work? What are the rules? And so the idea that you're kind of decoding something or figuring something out, that's always

my favorite kind of writing to read is when it feels like the writer is figuring something out. So I always went to a concert, often not knowing what I would find or what to expect, but wanting to figure something out, hoping to get to figure something out. You write in major labels that you once had a confrontation at Coachella with Most Deaf. You had panned his album The New Danger. What happened there? Well, most deaf, I had forgotten, right?

Like, I, you know, at the times, I don't know, was it 150 bylines a year or something? You know, it doesn't sound like a lot to someone who's, like, working up for an online outlet today who's filing five times a day. But, you know, that's a lot. And you kind of forget. Even now, I certainly forget things that I've written. And so I literally had forgotten that I had written a negative review of the Most Deaf album. In other words, like, I knew I didn't like the album, but I'd forgotten I had told the world that.

And, you know, he knew who I was because I had interviewed him a couple years earlier maybe. So he comes up to me. And my first thought is like, oh, hey, there's Most Deaf. And he's like, hey, what's up, man? I think he knew the person I was with also. And then he says, I'm sorry you didn't like the album, man. And I was like, oh, oh, right. Oh, yeah, this is awkward.

Yeah, I did, yep, I did tell the world that, yes, this is okay. And so I didn't know exactly what to expect. And he just like smazzy me. He's like, but I liked it. And I was like, wow, what a nice, what a gracious response. And, you know, in fact, during my time years, I was my years of the New York Times, I was careful or maybe paranoid enough to avoid, generally avoid meeting the people that I wrote about. Because it always seemed weird to me that you'd be all like palsy, friendly with a band backstage,

and then have to write like, this new album is terrible. And they're like, what the hell, man? I thought we were friends. And it's no better if you're like rude to the band when you meet them because you hate their album. Like, that wouldn't make them feel any better. So I always thought of myself, like, it sounds corny to say, like, on the side of the fans, but I always thought of myself as like, that's what I am. I'm a listener. I'm lucky enough that I have these concert tickets or I have a copy of this CD maybe a couple weeks early, but like, I'm just a listener. And as a listener, is this making me happy or not? And so, yes, I didn't end up meeting quite as many musicians as you would think during those six years. And I think, I think that's also shaped how I think about

music. When people talk, you know, there's this, we've kind of shifted the way we think about music now from an era when we thought of ourselves as predators, right? And like as listeners and fans, it's like we're hunting Britney Spears, right? And this is part of the fun. And like, this might be hurtful to her. She might suffer. But like, someone's got to pay the price, right? It was a very, like, that way of thinking, which was very 2000s in my mind, right? It's like, well, this is part of the game. This is what she signed up for. If it destroys her, it destroys her. It destroys her. right? That was the sensibility of like the fan as predator. And we've kind of moved to this model of the fan as protector, right? Like we're going to save Britney Spears. We're going to help Britney Spears.

In fact, and when we listen to these musicians, we're going to hear about their journeys and we're going to cheer them on. And we're going to hope it's not too difficult for them to be a pop star. We're going to hope that like this industry isn't too hard, that they haven't faced too many setbacks, that they've been treated fairly. And, you know, there's defenses for both of those things. But to me, what I really most care about is listeners. And what I care about when I think about a genre is how is it serving listeners? And that's why I care about those different communities in the first place, right? Because I care about country music because there's a big audience of people who think of themselves as country fans. And so to me, that's the big question or the interesting

thing to grapple with that I try to grapple with in the book and that I grapple with as a listener. is like, well, what do these people want and why? And often I found when I was writing about music, I kind of love pop charts. I love metrics. I love that kind of measurement. And I was so often surprised by what would do well on the pop charts, what ends up being popular. And people say, well, like, oh, it's all rigged by the labels. It's like, well, yeah, the labels are constantly trying to put together these conspiracies and there's constantly trying to hype some new artist. But most of the time, and I always find this kind of heartwarming, most of the time they fail. Most of the time it doesn't pan out, and the musician they promise you is going to be the next big thing isn't.

And when someone does become popular, half the time the label is kind of shocked. They weren't expecting that Nelly record to go supernova. They weren't expecting to sell millions of copies of juvenile. Half the time the label executives don't even love the stuff that turns out to be the most popular. And so, you know, to me, the fun thing about music and the thing that keeps it fresh and entertaining is, I can never quite predict what people are going to like. And often people like something, and it's hard for me to hear it at first, and then with repeated listens, maybe it's Stockholm syndrome, or maybe it's just me learning something more about it. I'm like, hey,

this is pretty good. I think I get why people, why this is really resonating. But again and again, I kind of find myself surprised. Go back to that shift you talked about for a second, from Predator to Defender. What does that do for music criticism? Well, it's interesting. Music criticism, you could say that people being paid a full-time salary to write about music in, you know, in publications. Like, that's one form of music criticism. And that's often considered the dominant form. But anyone who listens to music is also a music critic in a sense, right? Anyone who listens to music has some opinions about what they like and what they don't like. Ironically, often those opinions are more judgmental, or you might say more snobbish than the

opinions of actual full-time professional music critics. One of the things I've realized early on in writing about music is snobbery is actually really hard to define. There's no way to have any judgment about music or maybe about anything else and not run the risk of being called a snob, right? A snob is kind of just someone who likes some stuff and dislikes some other stuff. And if a snob is someone who thinks their taste makes them better than other people, I think that's all of us on some level.

Sure. Yeah, this, but yes, so this model of thinking of ourselves as protectors, defenders of pop of musicians, obviously it's enabled by social media. It's the fact that it's possible to have communication in a way that wouldn't have previously been possible. Like the person you write about might see your tweet, right? They might see your Instagram comment. And if it's negative, they might respond to your negative Instagram comment and create a whole new news cycle over like haters on Instagram who don't understand this or that.

So, you know, I think it's not a coincidence that this model, this model is happening at the same time. I write about it in the book that you're seeing less negative criticism. The era of like of Greil Marcus reviewing Bob Dylan in the first line is what is this shit? Like, you don't really see that and you definitely don't see that from beloved artists. Occasionally you see that for artists who, you know, where the convention. wisdom has turned and they fall in a foul of the way people think artists are supposed to act or make music and you'll see some negative criticism. But generally, when a new album comes out and eagerly a weighted new album, all the critics are like, it's pretty good. And, you know, I think that has

something to do. It has something to do with this ethos of like, of us being sympathetic to musicians and us knowing it's hard to make music. And it's always hard to criticize someone to their face, right? And in a way, in the social media era, that's what you're doing. Like, it's hard to pretend that, like, they're not going to see it. I remember reading once about the lead singer of a popular band who was a British band, as will become obvious, who was, quote unquote, gutted by a review that I had written. And, like, even for someone like me who's pretty thick-skinned, like, that doesn't feel great. I don't want to bum someone out.

Like, you kind of have to put that out of your mind if you're writing a negative review. And it's hard to put that out of your mind when we're all kind of together interacting in the social media world. Even people like me who are not on social media, like our words will be on social media possibly. So I think that's part of it. I think, you know, if you want to like dig into like media economics for a moment, I think it probably has something to do with the business model of a lot of publications where the idea, the old idea was the idea of the staff critic. And you're like your job is the full-time professional critic. and you're supposed to review everything that comes across your desk, and you'll say what you think is good, what you think is bad,

the way like a restaurant critic does. You know, the economic move to freelancers and piecework, there were good economic reasons for that shift, but part of what that meant is that if you're a critic, if you're a freelance music writer, you're always angling for assignments, and you're always saying, like, I want to review this, I want to review that.

And as an editor, maybe it makes sense to assign the review, to someone who already knows something about the subject, someone who's already into that. Instead of doing what a staff critic might have done in the old days, what I often had to do when I was at the New York Times, was like, review something I just, like, wasn't that familiar with. And, like, spent two weeks, like, listening to the albums and trying to catch up and then, like, rendering a judgment,

maybe a good one or a bad one. So because the art of music, professional music criticism often involves editors choosing from a wide array of freelance writers, writers, I think often they choose the writer that's already into the thing. So it's not that writers are lying, but you get chosen to review the thing that you like, and that's how you, and in fact, if it's a negative review, fans have internalized this logic of freelance journalism. So if it's a negative review, fans are like, well, why did you pick that writer to review that album? That writer is not a lifelong metalhead. That writer doesn't really know about R&B. That writer's

not sympathetic to what this artist is doing. You should have picked a reviewer that matches up better with the music. So I think that's also an economic shift in the media world that has created this thing in the music world of fewer negative reviews. But that said, like, there's no way to get rid of negative reviews. Even if they don't happen in publications, they happen everywhere, anywhere people are gathering to talk about music. So as long as people care about music, we'll have negative stuff to say about it. The question is, where are we having those conversations? And I think that is something that right now is in flux. So you mentioned being handed a record, you don't know anything about or a genre, you don't know anything about and having to review it.

You listen to almost no country music growing up. Yeah, it wasn't part of my background. My folks were both from Africa. And, you know, I had, you know, I'd heard like this Willie Nelson song. I knew who Johnny Cash was. But, yeah, it was not the music I grew up with. So what does it like to discover a genre and write criticism of it at the same time? Well, I mean, one of the interesting and in a weird way liberating things about

being a music critic at the New York Times was realizing, like, you're never going to be the expert. Like, you might think you're, like, pretty into something. You might think, like, oh, I go pretty deep on Memphis hip-hop, like, I have a favorite play a fly album, like, I know this stuff, but there's people that their whole life is Memphis hip-hop. And compared to their base of knowledge, what you write about Project Pat or Yogadi is going to seem like the work of an outsider, because that's kind of what you are. So in a weird way, that's liberating because you realize like, oh, I can be a critic, but I'll never be like the ultimate expert on anything.

I'll always be trying to learn. I'll never reach the level of knowledge that people who live in this have. And the question is just like, I need to listen to it enough that I feel like I understand the context. I feel like I understand where it's coming from. And I have a sense of my own taste, right? And in that way, like doing that for country music, isn't that. different from doing it for black metal or doing it for some sub subgenre, right? Like maybe you know

techno and you know house, but now people are making these tech house records and they're somewhere in between and they have their own lineage that you need to learn about. So to me, writing about any musician, it's always a bottomless pool, right? There's always more information than you can actually digest. And the question is, can you digest enough that you feel comfortable and you feel like you've figured it out? And what I realized about myself was like, if I have enough time and I do enough reading and I do enough listening in the world of popular music, like I can listen to something and have an opinion about it. It might not be an opinion everyone loves, but it's an opinion that's going to reflect my own reaction. Hopefully it's an interesting and true reaction to this music.

So to me, yeah, that was part of the fun. And, you know, I think I always, as someone who was never much of a musician, I always tried to make sure I was never giving advice in my reviews, right? this song would be better if this, like this album could really use this kind of thing, and they should have done this in this chorus. But I would also zoom out, and I feel that way about genres too. I always tried to avoid giving advice to genres.

Country music would be better if it valued this, if it were more that. And partly that's because I always feel like I don't really know where a genre is going to go. I don't really know what country is going to sound like in 20 years or R&B or whatever. what I expect and what I hope is that the evolution of it will surprise me. So when I was writing about country music, country music is a little bit like hip hop in that people never seem satisfied

with its current incarnation. I think that's even more true about hip hop than country, but people always are like, well, in the old days, or these people are reacting against the mainstream and mainstream country and mainstream hip-hop. Those are phrases that are often said with a sneer. And I never shared that feeling. I love mainstream country music. I love mainstream hip-hop. And to the extent that it's not the way I'd expect it to be or not the way other people would expect it to be, to the extent in which it enshrines different values or values different things in its performers and in its songs, that's fascinating to me. It doesn't mean I have to like every song that's on country radio. But it does mean, like I said, I do try to avoid giving advice to the

genre. Country music needs to develop in this way. Country music. music needs to get back to this, needs to include more of that. I try to just listen more to what's actually there and figure out if I enjoy it. Yeah, it's such a good stance, I think, for a critic to come from, which is the well-informed outsider, the well-informed curious outsider. I've studied, right? I've done my homework. I'm not just coming in completely cold, but I am coming in from a place where, no, I'm not an expert, right? I'm not, I don't know as much as you. And it's all relative, right? Yeah, yeah. Like compared to a nor me compared to a, I say I listen, I listen to, you know, less music now than maybe like a

full-time music critic, but a lot more music than like your average middle-aged dad. And like, compared to someone, like compared to many people, I'm an expert in death metal. Compared to like actual death metal fans, like I'm just a dabbler, right? And so, and so depending on how far you zoom in and zoom out, there's always a way if you're a music critic to zoom out enough to make yourself seem or feel like an expert and to zoom in enough to make yourself seem like a novice. And that's always true. I think you can write great criticism. There's no rules or right or wrong way to do it. There's great criticism that feels like it's being written within the genre. There's great criticism that feels like it's being written for people who are deep in the genre,

right? This was, if you go back, one of the many fun things I did while I was writing this book was I went back and read a bunch of old issues of The Source magazine. And that sense of there being a community within hip hop. And especially in those early years, people are talking to each other within music. They had a tag in their review section early on that said, like, all the people who review music here are involved somehow in making hip hop in their own lives, right? This idea, right, this claim of authenticity, this claim like, we are insiders. We're going to give you the inside scoop.

Ironically, the source like me is also a product of WHRB radio at Harvard. It was started at the Harvard radio station. John Caramanica, the music critic at the New York Times now, comes out of WHRB too. He was running the hip-hop department while I was running the punk rock department. Alex Ross, my colleague at the New Yorker, wrote the rest is noise. He comes out of WHRB. So, yes, there's many paths out of that particular radio station. But yes, there can be something really powerful about writing within a close-knit community.

But yes, when you're trying to write for a general audience, a lot of times the fun challenge that music gives you is to be a translator and to explain it to someone, write this in a way that your friend's parents would be able to read it and they would get it. You know, again, they don't have to become like huge fans of techno, like it's fine, but maybe they can just like understand how this culture, that this culture exists and why it exists and maybe a little bit about the appeal of this music that might seem unappealing. And that's one of the really fun things that I get to do that I got to do in The Times and that I get to do in this book is try to explain the appeal of music that people might not.

think would be appealing. You become a New Yorker staff writer in 2008. And then you do start hanging out with musicians more. Jay Z in 2001, Brad Paisley, 2010. How did you find that? How did you find that experience? I mean, it was interesting because, you know, the New Yorker as a magazine is really built around the art of the profile.

One of the funny things about going to work there is it's just you see the profiles that have been written at the New Yorker and you're like, okay, that's the standard. and you're going to get the same resources that those writers got. And if your profile isn't as good as the all-time great New Yorker profiles, must be something you did. Like, there's no excuses. And so, yes, there is something very kind of like intimidating in a good way about that, where the bar is set really high and you're given all this from the staff to the editors,

you're given all the advantages someone could have and often great access and then go do it. One difference is that when I was at the New York Times, it was a one. one-way process. Like, people couldn't stop me from reviewing their album. Like, in the old days, they might refuse to sell a promo and I'd have to go down to Canal Street and buy a bootleg promo. I knew which record stores around the city. This is in the pre-digital days, which record stores in the city would stock albums on like the Friday before the Tuesday when they came out. And sometimes later in that process, later in those 2000s years, things would leak online. You know, if they wouldn't give you a comp ticket to the concert, you could just buy a ticket

and charge it back to the paper. If necessary, you could probably scalp your way in. So it was really, they couldn't stop you from writing about them. You just figured out what you wanted to write about and you'd go do it. You know, writing a profile is a collaboration. So there's this whole pitch process where you're talking to the publicist and you're kind of trying to explain like, here's what I want to do and here's what it would entail. Are you cool with this?

And there's a social part to it too because if you're writing a profile, the process is almost like filming a documentary. You've got to spend some time with this person and you've got to manage that relationship and you've got to, you know, maybe there comes a time to ask difficult questions, but you also want them to feel comfortable and you want to kind of let them talk. But sometimes it's helpful for you to talk to make that happen. And sometimes it's better to just shut up. Sometimes you find someone who's really gregarious, you know, profiling Kid Rock was a very different experience than profiling George Strait. You know, kid rock is just like, yo, let's go. Let's party. This is amazing. I love being. kid rock. We're at the Republican National Convention. We're going to the Lions game. He's parking his SUV on the sidewalk and just strolling in. He's like, I love being Kid Rock. You know, George Strait basically stopped doing interviews like sometime around the late 80s. He had a horrific tragedy where his daughter died. And around that time, he stopped basically doing interviews. And so he doesn't really talk to the press. He's a very kind of like taciturn guy. I'm fascinated by him.

I'm a big fan of his music. And as like, kind of kind of. of the ultimate country music hitmaker and this kind of traditional reserved guy. It's a, it's a fascinating model of manhood and pop stardom or country stardom in his case. And so, yes, with George Strait, that's more about like just trying to be, maybe trying to figure out ways to be around him and to draw him out a little bit. So that's the big difference for me. You know, there's some structural stuff with how you structure a profile, but it's also that that dance of it being a collaboration. And that said, like, I've never wanted to profile someone that I don't on some level think is interesting. And it doesn't mean that I

quote unquote love them, whatever that means. But whether it's politics or music or or anything else, I have to feel like they're doing something interesting. And usually that means I have to feel like they're not an idiot. And there is something, because you're asking the reader to spend thousands of words in the company of this person. And like, that has to be an interesting experience for the reader. They have to know, you know, there's some cases where, like, obviously, if you're profiling the president, like, it wouldn't really matter if you liked him or not, because it's always interesting to be hanging around with the president. But many of the people I profile are, I think it's fair to say, not the president. And so...

Kid Rock. Thankfully, it's not the president. Not the president, though there's still time. And so many of them, you're also, like, making a case in the course of the profile of, like, this person's interesting and here's why. This is why this, I'm going to explain to you over thousands of words, in addition to interviewing them, recounting their life story, et cetera, et cetera. I'm going to be essentially making a case for why this person is interesting, for why I am writing this profile. Yeah, why is it worth learning about this person? And usually, usually there's something broader, right?

Usually there'll be some broader argument about here's how the world of comedy works right now, or here's what's going on in the world of coffee, or here's the changes that are happening in the evangelical church. Like often in the New York are the idea is to bring in some bigger, broader argument about shifts in the culture and you're kind of like you're pegging that to a person and the person somehow represents that. But yes, you know, the fun thing about the New Yorker is that it's, it's not homework. It can't feel like homework. It has to be fun because you're asking people to read articles about really weird stuff. Like that's the New Yorker tradition. It's like,

here's 10,000 words about beans, right? It's like, here's some thing that you really don't think you care about. And I'm going to show you why, like, maybe actually you do care or maybe it actually is interesting. So in order to do that, the prose has to be fun and the person has to be interesting. And people have to find themselves, especially if they're reading on paper, just like before they even know it, they're like 3,000 words into this thing on this topic that they had previously had no interest in, right? Like, that's the thing where if you're doing it right, that's what makes the New Yorker work. So major labels, you write it in seven mini-sections, essentially. Rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance pop. That's it. That's seven. Do you memorize those, Brian? No, I didn't. I haven't written down

right here in front. I even had the book right here. As a critic, what was interesting writing about genre in particular? Well, I, you know, I've been in and around music enough that I felt like I had a story to tell or a bunch of stories to tell. And I kind of had a, I had a straightforward motivation and a mischievous motivation. The straightforward motivation was I felt like a lot of times music advances as this series of conversations. And musicians and listeners are thinking about each other and thinking about like, oh, having common points of reference or points of rebellion, right? So one way to tell the story of music is you think about, you think about country singers

rebelling against the Nashville elite while chasing the country music audience. And they're doing that in different ways. And somehow, sometimes that means Waylon Jennings and sometimes it means Reba McIntyre. sometimes it means Garth Brooks or Shanaya Twain or the Dixie Chicks and then definitely not the Dixie Chicks. So telling that story of these communities, right, a genre is basically just a community of listeners and musicians, seemed like a way I could tell the story of what happened. And my contention is that one of the things that happened in music over the last 50 years, which is to say in the time since the Beatles broke up, right, since all this 60s stuff that we know about or think we do,

one of the things that happened is that music got so obscure, got so complicated. It feels like no one can, like, you talk to like a regular, normal person about music and they're like, I don't know, man, I can't, there's all this stuff happening. I can't figure it out. There's all these genres. I don't really have the time to investigate the difference between House and Techno, like why, what do those terms even mean? So I thought there was an opportunity to tell some of those stories as a way of explaining how these communities came to be and why these communities are important. And that kind of leads to the mischievous motivation was, I felt like genres get a bad rap, man. I feel like people are always like, oh, this artist transcends genres. Mixing and mat singe. They're not limited by their genre. They're free and they're geniuses. And okay, great. Like, that's true for some people.

And that is one way of making music. But at the same time, like, I think genres are awesome because communities are awesome, right? Communities are how we generate meaning, how we find social connection. and like Luther Vandros never had a number one pop hit. Luther Vandros was quote unquote just an R&B singer. Like that's no knock on those Luther records. Those Luther records are incredible. And so I kind of wanted to speak up for genres and for performers who don't always transcend those barriers

and think a little bit about why it is that genres are so popular and so powerful. My former colleague Ben Ratliff at the New York Times, just a brilliant critic and one of the most careful listeners I've ever met. And he writes about how genres are like kind of a record company plot. Like it's kind of like this thing the music industry does as a way to more efficiently sell us music is to divide things up into genres. And like, I think that's true. But I also think that most music industry plots tend to fail. And genre is a music industry plot that turned out to be convenient to record labels and radio stations and record stores. But it really worked. Like, people want to be country musicians.

Casey Musgraves wants to be nominated for a Grammy in the country category, and she and her team are, like, kind of mad that the Grammys this year put her in the pop category. And to me, the question is like, oh, that's interesting. Like, what is it that makes country music worth fighting over? Justin Bieber had a similar reaction. He wanted to be classified his most recent album as R&B and not pop. Like, oh, like, why is that important? And why is it important for someone to fight over what hip hop means or what hip hop should be?

And the answer, again, has to do with community. It has to do with people like being part of a community, even though most musicians, like most of us, often have times where we chafe against the limits and the boundaries of community. And it's really annoying to have all these people have expectations about who you're supposed to be. And so at various times, musicians and listeners also want to push against those boundaries and get out of those communities. And as I say, that's one way how you know that you're in a community

is that you feel like you want to get out of it. The time we have left, I wanted to go through one of these genres and explore some of these subgenres. I love the punk section because it's so personal. Love the R&B section. But let's do country. Let's do it.

As a Texan, I grew up, you know, turning off the friends radios when they were listening to Brooks and Dunn in the 90s. Have you gone back and rediscovered Brooks and Dunn? You know, so you would mention them, you mentioned only an American here. I was like, I need to hear that song one more time. And once was plenty. But it did kind of, I did turn it up. I'll be honest when I put it on. Yeah, they, they, and it's funny, you mentioned

Texas, right? Like, that's a good example of country subgenres, right? Because in Texas, they talk about Texas country and like, that's its own thing separate from Nashville country, right? Absolutely. So you write, and you write about this in country. In country music, it's basically like politicians, you say, running against the incumbents. Yes. Whoever is the reigning kings and queens of country, I'm coming in and I'm doing something different than that. Even if you are the reigning king, right?

Even if you've been a senator for 20 years, you're like, well, these people in the Beltway swamp, right? That's how politicians talk. And there is some of that in D.C. I don't know how they do things in Nashville. It's like, dude, you've been on the charts for 15 years. Like, what are you talking about? But, you know, that is that sense of pushing against the country.

I think it's partly because the country community is so communal. Like, it's so tight-knit, right? You saw that, you saw that when the Dixie Chicks got thrown off of country radio. You saw that earlier this year where, like, Morgan Wallen gets thrown off of country radio for a very different reason. He gets thrown off of country radio because a video emerges of him using the N-word during, like, a bleary night out with friends. And, you know, this was an interesting example because the country executives were, like,

this is a bad look for our genre. Like, we don't really want to be associated with this. But the fans certainly never abandoned him. And as a result, he starts creeping back onto country radio, partly because that album, dangerous, the double album that he released earlier this year, is a great album. And he's one of the biggest and best stars in the genre. And I think it's a good example of how these musical debates, how they can shape the music that people listen to, so that the question of like, is Morgan Wallen country? Like, people are going to decide that. And he's become, because of this, he's become a very polar.

polarizing figure, right? In certain parts of the culture, someone like Morgan Wallen seems like the enemy, right? Maybe for some good reasons. And in other parts of the culture, he's like our guy. So in that sense, he's really polarizing and can seem like an example of country music at its most closed-minded, if you wanted to make that argument. But if you listen to his music, he's doing stuff that's engaging the singer-songwriter tradition. There's lots of electric guitars. He's borrowing from hip-hop, both in his delivery, which is very syncopated in certain tracks. and the way he's using like 808 kicks and programmed drums from electronic pop and from hip hop. So his music is really hybrid, even as his persona, is really not.

And that's partly because I talked to him. This was before he got thrown off of country radio. And he was telling me about how he didn't really grow up listening to country music that much. He grew up listening to like radio rock, to like nickel back and Sither and whatever. But the culture that he grew up in was country. He grew up in a small town called Sneedville in Tennessee. And so the way he explained it to me was like, when I decided to like start writing some songs, like I just started singing and it came out country.

Right? So there's this idea that country is this thing, is this identity you can be born into that transcends music. And in some ways, that's a little bit exclusive because it means like if you didn't grow up in Sneedville, you're never going to have that country identity that Morgan Wallen has. But on the other hand, it means that someone like him has a lot of freedom, just like like to make a strange comparison, just like Dolly Parton before him, right? Like, Dolly Parton was so country that even when she's doing nine to five, which is basically a disco record, she's still perceived as super country. And that's true for Morgan Wallen, too.

And that's one of the ways that a genre can be inclusive and exclusive at the same time. All right. I understand how outlaw country was a response to so-called mainstream country. I understand how George Strait was a response at the time when he comes in. How is Garth Brooks, who becomes the most mainstream thing in the history of mainstream, a response to the reigning style of country music. But think about what Garth Brooks is doing, right? He's writing, he's doing a music video about domestic violence. He's doing these concerts so that these big arena rock spectacles with electric guitar solos. I don't think anyone now would think that a screaming electric guitar solo is somehow out of place at a country music concert. But like, that's partly thanks to musicians like

Garth Brooks. And so when Garth Brooks comes along, he has this sense that, oh, somehow what's happening, you know, whether that's, you know, the sort of like vocal harmonies of Alabama or something, what's happening on country radio somehow doesn't reflect people's real lives. And he's going to do that. In a lot of ways, the music he made was different from what other people were doing, even as it was so popular and had enough gravity that it created its own thing, right? Garth Brooks arrives around the same time sound scan arrives, which changes the way that album sales are measured. And so people suddenly realized like, whoa, country music is super, super popular.

And it hadn't shown up under our old metrics where stores were just reporting what people bought. But once you had like UPC code and people scanning and a more scientific measuring system, the popularity of country music was visible for all to see. He helped cement the idea of country music as suburban music, which is to say it's normal American music, as opposed to country also has this other more like rebel identity, where country identity is going to be a reaction to mainstream America. We see what you guys do in the cities, but out here in the country, we do things a little bit different, right? That's another version

of country. The Garth Brooks version of country is more like, this is just normal music for normal folks. And executives at the time talked about how, you know, this is the 90s, right? Rock and roll is playing grunge. It's playing gangster rap. And there are these boomer listeners who don't really want to hear that, they want to hear something that sounds a little more Springsteenie. And people who miss that, like, slightly more old-fashioned rock and roll sound are going to give you that. Garth Brooks is going to give you that. It's why the Eagles were kind of retrospectively welcomed into the country music canon, even though in the 1970s, when they're putting out one of the best-selling albums ever made, they weren't really getting played on country radio. All right. One of my favorite

parts of the book is all the sub-genres you explore within the major genres. Will you tell the un-initiated what sippy cup country means? Sippy cup country was a derisive term based on a song by a Lone Star, I believe, called Mr. Mom. And it was a song about a guy appreciating his family and how nice it was to have this happy home. And at one cup, sorry, at one moment, excuse me, he mentions, like, seeing his, like, young son or daughter drinking from a sippy cup.

And the idea was like, oh, country music. and this became a derisive term, right? The idea is like, country music has gotten wimpy. It used to be about, like, cool dudes doing cool stuff, right? And now it's just about these, like, suburban dads, you know, cruning to their families. And of course, like, there's some truth to that, but there's also truth that, like, if country is the genre, a whole lot of people live in the suburbs and have families in the suburbs. And if country music is the one genre where people can sing about that and sing and celebrate that,

instead of pretending to like, oh, I hate it, I got to get out of here, or pretending that they're actually living a wilder life than they really are, then that gives it some power. Like, I talked to Brad Paisley about this, and he was like, yeah, I try not to be too, like, suburban families great, but he recognizes that part of what country does and part of the reason people love it is that you can tell a story in country music that you can't necessarily tell in hip-hop or in some other genres, a story about loving your kids,

which is, after all, a fairly fundamental human experience. And I Love My Family is a very sturdy country music plot line. And it makes sense. This is something that is at the center of many, maybe most people's lives. And so the idea, this is one way that country music is sometimes conservative with a small C, which is to say it can be often about celebrating all the things that are going right, whether that's like in America or just in your family, right? Things are pretty good.

I love my wife. You know, it's easy to mock that sensibility, but you can write a really powerful song based on that, which is something that other genres have kind of discarded. I'll end here, Kelif I'm reading the blurbs on the back of major labels, and this one stood out. I'm quoting here, it's funny, it's personal, and as a piece of writing, the book borders on poetry. That blurb was written by David Letterman. Yeah, I guess he's hired up. I gave him 75 bucks, and he was like, whatever you want, man. How do you solicit a blurb from David Lederman?

Letterman. I'd actually gotten to know him a little bit over the years. And so he was, he was kind enough to check out the book. And he's, you know, I had had a very surreal experience earlier in my career that he probably doesn't even remember where I wrote a review of Bet Midler and said that her show, I think I called it like an amazing celebration of phoniness or something. I just, she did this thing. She's doing the mermaid thing and she's in a wheelchair and her mermaid outfit. It was surreal. It was fascinating. And so she goes on Letterman and Letterman's like, oh, congratulations on the great New York Times review. And, and Mitt Midler, Bet Midler's like, was it a great review? I didn't think he liked me that much. And so

Bet Midler and David Letterman are having this conversation about whether or not I like Bet Midler, which was, at the time, that was the most surreal thing that it ever happened to me related to David Letterman. Now it's the second most surreal thing after him writing a very kind blurb to my book. He requested the $75 in a money order. I didn't know people still used money orders, so I've got to get that too. He's reminded me. Discover card or travel check accepted as well. Thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks, man. This has been fun. All right, thanks again to Kalefasene.

My partner is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. David and I are back Monday, and I want to talk to him about Nick Christoph, the New York Times columnist, possibly running for Governor of Oregon. That's kind of an interesting thing.

I thought New York Times columnist just eventually got HBO producing deals. Plus, of course, more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a great weekend.