August 2024: Emotional Drumming, Deciphering Childish Gambino, see/saw
Howdy!
As August approaches, we’re officially in the “Dog Days,” a phrase I’ve loved for a long time. Some words are just full of sweat and humidity and the urge to squeeze everything you can out of what’s left.
This month, the writing included covers the whole spectrum: a short essay from a new-to-me newsletter, interviews from a punk blog from former Pitchfork staff, a feature on a major culture site about a soundtrack everyone knows, and a stellar record review. There’s a bit of something for everyone this month.
Emotional Drumming
My favorite writing this month comes from Mark Richardson’s (former Pitchfork EIC) newsletter, Beauty Blew a Fuse. His essay, “Jim White and Emotional Drumming: Hearing the voice of God in a well-tuned snare”, exudes a love for the subject and close listening. He starts by sharing how he listens to music that takes time to reveal itself and shares some examples of “emotional drumming,” a phase I was unfamiliar with as an official descriptor until I read then. He uses that foundation to bring us into his love for Jim White.
He’s always in conversation with the song—scraping the snare, pausing in unexpected moments, increasing the volume to show you one thing and playing so quietly you can barely hear him to show you something else.
For me, this is the kind of piece that makes me want to write about music more.
Deciphering Childish Gambino
You may remember me sharing Craig Jenkin’s fantastic breakdown of Cowboy Carter in May’s edition, and he’s back with another impressive examination, this time on Donald Glover’s ever-shifting musical persona.
Childish Gambino is complex because Donald Glover is complex and he never aims to be just one thing. There’s an experimentation at the core of all that he does. Experiments don’t always work. That has led to a lot of mixed reviews for his latest record, Bando Stone and The New World. Jenkins avoids the simplistic “inconsistent” criticism central to most other reviews of the album and digs deeper. He examines nearly an entire career and the full Gambino persona to explain that experimentation rather than brush it away.
Glover was too musically slippery (and occasionally too in thrall to his influences) to leave a signature sound behind; his core gift in music as anywhere else is adaptability.
Playground Punk
This month I was clued into see/saw, “a punk and rock'n'roll newsletter operated by Evan Minsker, freelance journalist and former News Director at Pitchfork.” I’ve added it to my reading list and found even the free subscription level to be rewarding. Lots of great writers contribute and the interviews are high quality. Here’s a couple favorites from July:
Allison Hussey’s interview with Magik Markers captures the fun nature of this trio, asking how they write lyrics to half-hour long songs and getting a “Thank you for even knowing what it was” (which is every interviewers dream).
Nina Corcoran gets to know Edging, a goofy Chicago outfit with a great origin story, in a textbook interview.
You sing with a lot of urgency, which by nature lends that same gravitas to the subjects you're singing about. What are some lines you're especially proud of, or maybe some lyrics that felt necessary to get off your chest or include?
What a great question.
Bonus Round
What? A fourth section? Yes, I have kept it to 3 stories/topics generally, but there are a couple of other pieces of music writing that I think were well done and worth your time.
Last month, we covered great record reviews and how difficult they can be to find. Well, Chris DeVille’s review of Wand’s Vertigo is another you can add to the list. A finely crafted balance of context, critique, and analysis. After reading, you’re going to want to listen to this album.
Lastly, I know you didn’t need help to find Matthew Jacob’s oral history of the Garden State Soundtrack at The Ringer, but it’s so well done and a fascinating story of a specific time that feels unique in music history.
Thank you for reading!
Justin Anderson-Weber
