Seduced By Song: Proposal For a Book On Music, The Self, Etc
I'm writing a memoir about my journey as a trans woman and music critic, exploring the power of song.
1 - Having never really sat down and studied the Sontag story, she sat down to write.
She has never written a book before, but she’s written a lot of reviews and listened to a lot of music. In fact, that was how she spent her life pre-transition. Sitting, listening, reviewing.
She never got permission to review music. She just started one day. And she still is at it today. That must count for something, right?
2 - My book will be titled Seduced by Song. It will be a mix of memoir, manifesto and criticism, showing how I grew from an awkward teen into a professional music critic. But more than that, it will show how I accepted myself as a trans woman. It will be the music that made me, that unmade me, that split the atom, that kept me awake at night. It will be the music of a lifetime.
3 - A list of supplies:
Over-the-ear headphones. A must so I can hear the music in high fidelity and drown out the sounds of my neighbours.
A portable hard drive. So I can compile the lists and albums, index them accordingly, sort them by bitrate and file size, rip the discs to files, convert the files to lossy format, download the music from websites.
Time. The hardest resource of all, because everything feels like it moves so fast and runs through my fingers when I try to hold onto something.
Black coffee. Nothing hits like that first cup in the morning.
4 - My turntable sits on a milk crate beside my TV. My DVD player sits under the TV. The music comes out of speakers there sometimes. Sometimes it comes from my laptop on the other side of the room. In the space between is where I want to be: there the music floats and lingers, where it lasts as long as it needs to.
“When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again.” - Eric Dolphy
5 - In a series of essays on musicians and songs that I fixated on at various points of my life, I will take readers inside my development and growth. I will think about the posters of Frank Zappa and Miles Davis from my teenage bedroom and think about the framed picture of Steve Lacy in my living room.
6 - It is again about the distance in between: how I got from classic rock to experimental jazz. How I got from teenager to adult. From cis male to trans woman.
I sometimes think that all books are about the distance in between.
7 - The concept of fandom. The importance of criticism and media literacy. How a queer and trans person can relate to, and push back on, artists who may be either controversial or supportive.
In 1981 Frank Zappa sang “Do you know what you are? / You are what you is.” Sometimes I want to separate the art from the artist. Miles Davis spoke casually about hitting his wife. Zappa dismissed feminists with gross language from his stage. Elvis Costello called Ray Charles a racial slur.
But sometimes the artist is the art. In 2022 Mel Stone sang “I’d bottom for you if you asked me to / but I’m dancing alone in the living room.” When she sings of broken relationships and heartbreak I can feel it. When she sings about wanting a love that will change her I want that too. Her song “Baciami” makes me cry. I listened to that song in a bathtub at the post-surgery clinic in Montreal, I listened to it on the subway in New York City, I listened to it in the car on the way to work.
The distance again. What is the distance between the cities, between the emotions, between the selves. Is that distance who I am?
8 - Below is a proposed table of contents and a sample chapter (Our Strange Relationship) is available upon request.
A) Seduced By Song
An essay about growing up in a house filled with music, yet none of it was something I could claim as my own. But even as I dove deeper into my dad’s record collection, I began to notice not just a love for music but also the ways my body was changing into something I was growing alienated from. Finding David Bowie, a musician who transcended gender labels in the 1970s, helped me cope with these feelings.
B) Secret Rock Critic Origin Story
It all started with me buying a record with earnings from my first job, and absolutely
hating it even though Rolling Stone gave it five stars. I realized I could do better and started to write my own reviews which led to a gig at a college newspaper and a blog
C) Transgender Dysphoria Poptimism
On being filled with self-doubt and struggling with emotions of dysphoria and losing myself in pop music by Taylor Swift, Carly Rae Jepson, and Grimes
D) Dig Me Out, Dig Me In: How I Found Myself Through Riot Grrl
A look back at how stumbling on a copy of Sleater-Kinney’s record Dig Me Out helped me to not only get my shit together, but provided a way forward for me to come out and accept myself
E) Can’t Get There From Here: Music as a Profession and Connection
On how a career in music writing led to other opportunities, connections with other writers, but more importantly to more and more music, an ouroboros that continues to swallow its own tail as promos arrive in my mailbox
F) The Shrinking Room: The Importance of Music Criticism In A Shrinking Media Environment
A manifesto on why it’s important to have music criticism in an ecosystem that seems to not want it (the way Exclaim has shrank coverage, Pitchfork has been folded into GQ, and local papers have been dropping local culture writers.
G) Our Strange Relationship: On Problematic Faves
Reckoning with how I can be a fan of musicians and writers who are problematic and wouldn’t have liked a trans person like myself
9 - A short biography: Roz Milner is a freelance writer and critic with over a decade’s experience writing about the arts. Her work has appeared at Exclaim Magazine, Lambda Literary, Broken Pencil, PRISM International, the Toronto Star, and elsewhere. I think my range of experience and work speaks for itself, and makes me the right person to tell this story. She is the gap, the distance, the line between the pinpoints on the map.
10 - Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.