FEATURE:
Type Writer
PHOTO CREDIT: Godisable Jacob/Pexels
A Brighter Future for Music Journalism That Should Be Built on Inclusiveness and Greater Visibility of Women
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I hope that I can do this subject justice…
PHOTO CREDIT: Min An/Pexels
as I read a fascinating feature on Rolling Stone’s website recently that really compelled me. It was originally published in October. Relating to the way newsrooms, including music journalism, are still mostly reserved for white men. There are more women critics than we have seen for a long time but, mostly, music journalism and criticism is male-heavy. You wonder whether things have improved in the past year or so. Last year, writing for The Quietus, Jude Rogers shared her experiences of a woman in music journalism. The barriers her and so many of her female peers face. Rogers was discussing her fascinating and brilliant book, The Sound of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives. Her hopes are that, moving forward, women of all ages are embraces, included and not written off:
“Some people will never like my style, and that's absolutely 100% fine. What’s not fine is that so many female writers like me experience similar treatment on social media, or experience similar attitudes from editors – although I hope this continued rush of music books by women starts to cut through. Perhaps we'll finally be allowed into those closed-off arenas. Perhaps even the most impenetrable territories will slowly become welcoming.
Until that distant day that I still can't quite countenance, I will dream of Jen’s utopian magazine cover. I’ll let the image of so many of us female writers having fun – lounging around, with smiles on our faces, Smash Hits-style, in boss threads – linger long in my mind.
I also know a new generation of women is following writers like me who are squarely in midlife. If they embrace their enthusiasms with joy, rather than sink themselves simply in seriousness, they will make the future of music writing bright. They’ll be writing all the cover lines, dictating the narratives in their 21st-century equivalents of bold, punchy typefaces. I pray to them being listened to by everyone, properly, at full volume, embracing their similarities and many differences, having a ball”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Jude Rogers/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian David Stevens
I think about some of my favourite journalists like Laura Snapes, Hannah Ewens, Jude Rogers, and Elizabeth Aubrey. Phenomenal publications/websites like The Forty-Five, which are led by women. So much of the most essential and interesting music journalism is coming from women. Charlotte Gunn, a former NME writer who set up The Forty-Five, talked to The Quietus in 2020. She said that, although the site encourages female/non-binary creatives and that, in the industry, there is progress in terms of a new wave of creatives opening up progress and inclusiveness, there is still a boys’ club mentality at the top. That seems to be especially true across Rock criticism. Coming to that Rolling Stone article I mentioned, it is even more difficult for women of color to succeed and get their voices heard. In the U.S. and music journalism there, it is still a widespread landscape of white men. There are pioneering and talented women who have helped create conversation and change:
“PLEASE ALLOW THIS ASIAN AMERICAN music writer to articulate this at the level it deserves: Egregious racism and misogyny have a long history in rock & roll — from those on the industry side who have appropriated Black artists’ work to those at the top of the publications who dictated what has been featured. The gatekeepers have always been a boys’ club — specifically a white boys’ club.
Among the earliest influential U.S. music magazines, Rolling Stone was helmed by Jann Wenner from 1967 to 2018; Barry Kramer launched Creem in 1969 and published it until his death in 1981; and there was Spin, run by Bob Guccione Jr. from 1985 to 1997. So, many of us weren’t surprised when RS founder Wenner said he didn’t include women and Black artists in his recent book, The Masters, because they just don’t “articulate at that level” philosophically like the white male artists he highlighted.
Despite the narrow lens from which decades of music magazines were culled, women and BIPOC voices have been there, often behind the scenes, doing the work.
The historic bias speaks for itself, but there’s still a lack of diversity across newsrooms; a Digiday analysis published this year found several major U.S. publishers are still hiring primarily white people. Worldwide, women represent only 22 percent of the 180 top editors across 240 brands, Reuters Institute found.
Yet, despite the narrow lens from which decades of music magazines were culled, women and BIPOC voices have been there, often behind the scenes, doing the work.
IN THIS PHOTO: Percussionist Ollie Brown relaxing with a copy of Rolling Stone magazine in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Christopher Simon Sykes /Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Even in the early days, women were changing the paradigm. As Jessica Hopper wrote in Vanity Fair, in RS’s first decade, women made inroads on the masthead. In Detroit in 1972, Jaan Uhelszki was one of the women who defined Creem; and in 2022, she resurrected it alongside the co-founder’s son, JJ Kramer. In the Nineties on the East Coast, Kandia Crazy Horse covered Southern rock with a feminist sensibility and an eye toward its African American roots; she edited the 2004 anthology Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock ’n’ Roll; and she’s an artist herself, making what she calls Native Americana music. In the late Nineties on the West Coast, author and Yale professor Daphne Brooks co-launched what would become the template for the definitive music-critic/journalist event of the year: Pop Con; her recent book, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, was published in 2021. Brittany Spanos wrote for RS in 2014 as a freelancer, and rose to senior writer in 2019. In addition to writing groundbreaking covers, beginning with Cardi B in 2017, she’s helped shape our coverage, pushing RS’s focus to include younger and newer artists.
As for me, growing up as a first-generation Filipina American, music was the language through which I most connected with my family, and later, as a defiant teen with conservative parents, music was rebellion, freedom, and community I found at indie record stores and sneaking out to concerts. Despite not seeing people like myself on covers or in stories, let alone penning the articles, I wanted to write about music. I got my chance when I became the first woman editor-in-chief of the magazine Illinois Entertainer. In 2005, when I joined the Chicago Tribune’s music-critic team, I was one of two women and the only one of color (the late, great Chrissie Dickinson, who began before me, primarily covered country). And I helmed a “Women Rock” column for the now-defunct zine UR Chicago. From sexism experienced from interviewees and co-workers to fighting for more than what my friends and I dubbed “the vagina assigna” — because the choice assignments were often gifted to men — it wasn’t an easy or comfortable journey (and it’s still painful to recall). But I had allies and mentors, including men, without whose support I wouldn’t be here. Today, I’m senior news editor at RS.
There are many more women who forged a path and enriched coverage in a predominantly male space — and every day, exciting young women, BIPOC, and underrepresented voices enter the fold. I wish I could include them all here. For now, I’m honored to share the stories and insights of Brooks, Uhelszki, Crazy Horse, and Spanos.
IN THIS PHOTO: Daphne Brookes/PHOTO CREDIT: Joe Mabel
BROOKS: My parents were civil rights educators — they escaped the Jim Crow South in 1950 to the San Francisco Bay Area. Being able to hear music in the house, from my parents’ big-band and bebop music to my older brother’s passion for the Temptations to my sister’s American Bandstand,Soul Train era — [it all] trickled down to me. But then, I’m going to integrated schools, discovering punk rock and New Wave. Nobody wanted to talk to me about that in my house, even though I was so deeply passionate about the Police and the Clash.
I start going to Tower Records — moving from the bins over to the magazine racks, and that’s where I discover Rolling Stone and Hit Parade and Creem, but really Rolling Stone. Those covers were so intriguing to me, and it was about making sense of the music. I knew there was something about the Police sounding a little bit like Bob Marley — I was making those connections, trying to put it all together. So that leads me to rock-music journalism, and it became a side passion that twinned with my passion for African American literature. I really followed it, and I also struggled with it because I didn’t see myself in it, even though I wanted to be in the room.
CRAZY HORSE: I didn’t grow up wanting to be a rock critic. I really wanted to be a record producer when I was a little kid in the Seventies, because I read liner notes and I got fascinated with the process of making a record. I used to go to record stores and talk to the guys who work there — guys, of course. And I didn’t know any other women who were as caught up in music. It was just my isolated thing to do.
In the Nineties, I moved from Ghana to New York City to attend art school. Then I worked at the United Nations. And by the later Nineties, I [applied for] an internship at The Village Voice. I got the internship, and that’s where my career started to take off.
Being a Black female journalist covering rock music, it takes stamina, passion, and patience, because there’s loneliness in it and cultural isolation. I just pushed forth on what I wanted to do.
IN THIS PHOTO: Brittany Spanos
UHELSZKI: When I heard music, I understood. I understood what musicians are saying, how they’re tapped into something we’re not. But I’ve never had an ambition to do rock or to write music.
SPANOS: I was really of a one-track mind with becoming a music journalist from the time I was 12. My first full-time job was at The Village Voice. I started an internship, and then that morphed into assistant for the music editor. While I was there, I was freelancing [at] Rookie magazine, where I was brought in by Jessica Hopper. She connected me with editors at Spin and Vulture, and I eventually began freelancing for Rolling Stone in the summer of 2014.
BROOKS: We all develop thicker skin, right? My thicker skin came in the form of a style of writing. I went through stages of being combative and defensive — I needed to work to not center these voices of domination who don’t see me, but to be able to stylistically engage with them. And to also keep generating a kind of writing that acknowledged the bigness of the world that exists outside of their narrow viewpoints. That’s what a lot of my writing has been about. I had to model this for my students, to find a way to still speak to these people who I felt very entangled in battles with — to speak to them in a way that was not just respectful, but that could acknowledge and dissect the terms of who they were brd upon how they had come into the world as a cisgendered, white male critic. And to be generous in offering these alternative ways of being able to read and reckon with the music that they oftentimes heard through only one particular lens about Blackness and about gender”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Hannah Ewens/PHOTO CREDIT: Emilia Paré
Reading words by Kandia Crazy Horse and Brittany Spanos about their experiences and what they have contributed to music journalism. Breaking through that boys’ club. It is inspiring to see! It made me think about the racial and gender breakdown in music journalism today. Things have improved since the extremely male-heavy days of the '90s and '00s even. I do wonder, in terms of a dynamic, ideal or perception of what a music/Rock journalist looks like, it is still dominated by white men. Class issues/ceilings still exist in the music industry - which does extend to journalism. In terms of inclusiveness and diversity, there does need to be more of a drive next year to ensure that more women – and women of color – are heard and included. Steps have been made. Some inspiring female journalists have definitely opened doors. Even so, there is a racial discrepancy across music journalism. Particularly potent and visible when it comes to Rock journalism. A problematic past is being tackled and corrected. Female journalists looking ahead to a future they created. Even with this great work done, I do hope that next year is one where there is a lot more space and opportunity for women. That sites like The Forty-Five are both noticed and also seen as a sign that there are incredible and diverse voices that are not as present across music journalism as they should be. Maybe not quite as ragingly boys’ club as years past, we are still seeing some of it in 2023. We shouldn’t! It is evident and very obvious that there are tremendous and extremely vital female voices that are still labelled, sidelined and overlooked regarding cover stories, big interviews and being at the forefront. From a racial problem in Rock criticism that still has a little way to go before things are equal, through to the U.K. press, which is still largely white and male. Class-wise, there is a slightly less middle-class-heavy viewpoint, though I do feel there are far fewer working-class writers being hired and spotlighted. Music journalism is not about men. Not about white men. Not about middle-class men. It is at its strongest and most inclusive when women and women of color do not have to face barriers and discrimination. Music journalism should definitely not be something that is reserved for…
PHOTO CREDIT: Min An/Pexels
A particular type.