Todd L. Burns interviewed me about my writing for his excellent Music Journalism Insider newsletter, about which he writes,

The newsletter collects some of the best stuff I hear, read, and watch every week; highlights news about the industry; and features interviews with writers, scholars, and editors about their work. My goal is to share knowledge, celebrate great work, and expand the idea of what music journalism is—and where it happens.

I first pursued music journalism as a career path in the early 1990s, and though I've strayed, I still feel related to it at least tangentially. What follows are Todd's questions and my answers.

Music Journalism Insider Interview:

I don’t know any casual skateboarders. Everyone I know who’s ever done it has either an era of their lives or their entire essence defined by it—the rebellion, the aggression, the expression—inextricably bound up with their being. It’s the way you wear your hair and the way you wear your hat. It’s the kind of shoes you wear and which foot you put forward. It’s the crew you run with and the direction you go. There is something about rolling through the world on a skateboard that changes people forever.

The author at age 11 and the beginning of a very long road.

Ever since I first saw Wes Humpston’s Dogtown cross on the bottom of a friend’s skateboard in the sixth grade, I knew it was going to be a part of my world. I first stepped on a skateboard at the age of 11. There are scant few physical acts and objects that have had a larger impact on who I am and how I am. Through the wood, the wheels, and the graphics, skateboarding culture introduced me to music, art, and attitude. Riding a skateboard fundamentally changed the way I see the world. "Skateboarding is not a hobby,” says Ian MacKaye, “and it is not a sport. Skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you.”

As much as I clearly see the problems with year-end lists, they're one of the things I look forward to in the waning days of the year. Whatever negative feelings you have about them, mine is meant as a celebration: These are the sounds that kept me going this year.

To be honest, I listened to Elder's Omens (Armageddon Label), which I missed last year, more than anything else this year, but the ten records below came close. There are a lot of favorites, old and new. And, as they have been for the past several years, all of the links below lead to the album's Bandcamp page where available. Today is also the last Bandcamp Friday of the year, during which the site waves all of its fees, so these artists will get all of the funds you send their way. No one has been able to tour properly for quite some time, so... Please spend recklessly.

I journal like a lovelorn kid in middle school. And I've been keeping one almost since I was a lovelorn kid in middle school. My senior year of high school, I met a girl. I started writing poems about her on receipts, handbills, and other various scraps of paper. My writing about her was so prolific, I decided to start keeping it all in a notebook. I've been keeping such a notebook ever since. Around the same time, I started keeping a day-to-day journal as an extension of the poems. I've kept some form of both off and on ever since.

For me, journals are like asides that begin and never end, parentheticals or paratexts, running on in the margins of other projects. Though the writing and thinking there ends up in other pieces that are crafted for consumption, the content of the journals themselves is for me only. Mine are full of drawings, diagrams, lists, and quotes from dreams, friends, films, and books.

In late 2000, during an especially impoverished period of my adult life, I was going to the Seattle Public Library almost every day. I was reading bits and pieces of so many books. I remember digging deeper into the work of Walter Benjamin, discovering Paul Virilio, and the row of volumes I had lined up against the wall in an almost unfurnished apartment, their spines and call numbers pointed at the ceiling. Due dates and new arrivals kept the books rotating, and at some point, I started having a difficult time keeping up with where I'd read what. So, I started a research journal. I've kept three different analog journals ever since.

One of the many methods used in futures studies is what is called environmental scanning. "All futurists do environmental scanning,” write Theodore J. Gordon and Jerome C. Glenn, “some are more organized and systematic, all try to distinguish among what is constant, what changes, and what constantly changes.” The process, which includes several distant early warning techniques (e.g., expert panels, literature reviews, internet searches, conference monitoring, etc.), helps inform the pursuits of issues management and strategic planning. According to William Renfro, President of the Issues Management Association, issues management consists of four stages: identifying potential future issues, researching the background and potential impacts of these issues, evaluating issues competing for a corporation or nation’s operations, and developing appropriate strategies for these operations.

A little further afield, science fiction is another place we look to "see" the future. Citing Karl Marx’s reification and Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum, Adam Roberts writes, “Science as simulation is the reason why fictional science, or ‘SF’, is so much more fun to watch than real science…” Spaceships, robots, cyberspace, the metaverse: These all exist in some form in the real world, but the widespread perception of these contrivances come from science-fiction books and movies. "In the context of SF,” Roberts writes, “this reification works most potently on the interconnected levels of representation of technology and the technologies of reproduction.” At varying levels, we look to science fiction to show us the potential directions in which the technology of the future is going.

Derek Woodgate, founder of The Futures Lab, calls this method the “wide-angled lens” approach. Analyzing the work of William Gibson, Woodgate writes, “Here, in the various levels of connectivity, we need to study the patterns and signals suggested by the ‘lens’ and models. More important, we must be able to recognize the patterns and make connections between seemingly unrelated data in a way that will provide us with powerful and effective future leverage points." As much as Gibson denies being a predictor of any stripe, his work is invariably consulted as a map to the future of technology.

The first time I heard a compact disc was in middle school. My best friend’s dad had just replaced his entire collection of LPs with CDs. They sat in stacks beside the apparatus that played them. They were like extra-terrestrial objects, something from the science fiction we were into at the time. They were also off limits. We were not allowed to touch them.

One day my friend’s dad sat me down on the couch in the middle of their den. The angled sunlight of autumn streaked through the limbs and leaves of the trees in their small front yard. Four large brown cabinet speakers, sitting one each in the corners of the room, were all pointing directly at me. He put on “Owner of a Lonely Heart” from Yes’s then-new record, 90125, loud enough for all the neighbors to hear. The opening samples stumbled around the room before the lead guitar took hold. That first horn stab, a sample from "Kool is Back" by Funk, Inc. (which is a cover of “Kool’s Back Again” by Kool and The Gang) leftover from Trevor Horn’s Duck Rock sessions with Malcolm McLaren, sounded like a laser shot from space. I remember being able to feel Chris Squire’s bass thumping through the floor as Trevor Rabin’s guitar swirled and the samples bounced around the room and my skull to dizzying effect. That day the CD earned and maintained its otherworldly reputation in the history of recording formats, supplanting the raggedy cassette and the woefully outmoded vinyl record.

Due to global supply-chain issues, our edited essay collection, Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism, has been pushed back until early next year, but it’s already available for pre-order! If you're interested in owning a copy, you can help the book immensely by preordering it. If you're unsure, here's a bit about how it came together, a look at the cover, the blurbs, the table of contents, and an early review from The Wire magazine. Read on!

Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism

Over the past few years, I gathered up some friends, and we’ve been working on an edited collection, sort of a companion to my book, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019). Time was one of the aspects of both hip-hop and science fiction that I didn’t get to talk about much in that book, so I started asking around. I found many other writers, scholars, theorists, DJs, and emcees, as interested in the intersection of hip-hop and time as I was. As I continued contacting people and collecting essays, I got more and more excited about the book. Now, the mighty Strange Attractor Press is putting it out. Check out the cover by Edwin Pouncey a.k.a. Savage Pencil!

Why does the world now look more like a William Gibson novel than one by Arthur C. Clarke? Gibson’s friend and cyberpunk peer Bruce Sterling explains:

Because he was looking at things that Clarke wasn’t looking at. Clarke was spending all his time with Wernher von Braun, and Gibson was spending all his time listening to Velvet Underground albums and haunting junk stores in Vancouver. And, you know, it’s just a question of you are what you eat. And the guy had a different diet than science fiction writers that preceded him.

In Doug Pray’s 2001 DJ documentary Scratch, which features interviews with many prominent turntablists, one of the questions was, “What made you want to be a DJ?” A large majority of the interviewees named Herbie Hancock’s 1983 hit “Rockit” as the defining impetus for their becoming DJs. This struck me as odd since the main thing that people remember about that song is the video’s disturbing robotic mannequins.

“Rockit” is also a total anomaly in the Herbie Hancock catalog, but it brought scratching to the mainstream of the mid-1980s with its infectious hook, based on the frenetic but rhythmic scratches of GrandMixer DST alongside Hancock’s catchy keyboards and mechanized vocals. It also had a major role in setting off what would become the turntablism movement—the DJ as musician. The documentary—and other media artifacts like it—represent sleeper effects we're not likely to acknowledge in the moment. We don't necessarily choose the few things that most influence us.

We’ve all been at a dinner party where the dynamic seemed to sour as the night progressed. One person is being uncooperative, the conversation turns to uncomfortable subjects, or the personalities assembled just don't quite sync up. What if the dynamic not only went bad but also splintered into multiple realities? James Ward Byrkit’s 2013 film, Coherence, chronicles just such a gathering.

Filmed over five nights in his own house, Coherence documents a dinner party gone astray as a comet flies by setting off all sorts of quantum weirdness. The story is small enough to tell among friends over dinner but big enough to disrupt their beliefs about reality. The film is the product of pulling back. After working on big-budget movies (e.g., Rango, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, etc.), Byrkit wanted to strip the process down to as few pieces as possible. Instead of a traditional screenplay, he spent a year writing a 12-page treatment. With the dialog unscripted, the film unfolds like a game. Each actor was fed notecards with short paragraphs about their character’s moves and motivations. Like a version of Clue written by Erwin Schrödinger, Coherence works because of its limited initial conditions, not in spite of them.

Coherence (2013): A story small enough to tell among friends over dinner but big enough to disrupt their beliefs about reality.

Released in 1979, Douglas Hofstadter's first book, the Pulitzer-Prize winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, is an expansive volume that explores how living things come to be from nonliving things. It's about self-reference and emergence and creation and lots of other things. It's well worth checking out.

For the cover of his heady tome, Hofstadter carved two wood-block objects such that their shadows would cast the book's initials when lit against a flat backdrop. He went the extra step of working in the initials for the subtitle as well.

Earlier this year, I was inspired to emulate Hofstadter's sculpture. I found a way to put the initials for my media-theory book-in-progress, The Medium Picture--TMP--into a similar configuration. This is one of my early sketches.

Substack is wack, so we’re trying a new platform.

For our test run of this new newsletter, I thought I’d round up all of the stuff I’ve published on various websites the last month or so. I’ve managed to get a few poems, short stories, a book excerpt, and even a collage published recently. You may have seen some of this, but chances are you haven’t seen all of it.

Sixteen years ago today, we lost one of the funniest voices and best visionaries humanity has ever given us. The odd-angled comedy of Mitch Hedberg remains unparalleled.

There’s no way to do him justice, but years ago I attempted to pay tribute to the man. This piece originally appeared on Vulture (née ) in 2013.

First up, a new online literature journal called Sledgehammer Lit launched today, and I have a poem up there! It’s called “San Diego,” and it will also be in my collection of poems coming out in July in Close to the Bone’s . .

This week marks the two-year anniversary of the publication of my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future from Repeater Books! In celebration, here are some pictures from the book’s release, the Preface from the text, and some information on a related forthcoming project. Enjoy!

This time around I’m offering a short story.

Maybe you can relate to this: When the lockdown started a year ago, I found it difficult to focus on anything very big. All of my writing projects seemed both intractable and pointless. My attention was reduced to writing poems, flash fiction, and book reviews. Slowly, the pieces I was able to concentrate on grew to something almost normal.

The following is one of the pieces I’ve written in the past year. It’s several short articles about and interviews with a fictional band, compiled to accompany a boxset of their discography. While Bad Flag doesn’t exist, they are very real. Maybe you’ll recognize them.

This story is dedicated to the memory of Sam Jayne.

On December 18, 1996, I started my first online job. I remember the date because one year and one day later, the company closed its doors.

We sold software online. It sounds quaint now, but we were the first company to do it. This was back when the attitude was apocalyptic about using your credit card online. The internet was a dark, dismal place. No one out here was to be trusted. It was also when people expected software to come in a box with shiny discs and glossy instruction manuals. Customers routinely asked when they would receive these. The idea that you could download a program over the phone-lines, then install and run it on your computer without a disc was still foreign to most.

Sometime in 1997 we were purchased by another software retailer. They made their money through mail-order catalog sales and were curious about potential sales online. They bought us as a placeholder just in case this internet thing took off. When we didn’t show the returns they expected in the time they expected, they shut us down.

It sounds as weird now as downloading software did then, but this kind of turnover was normal in the dot-com era. My coworkers seemed to be split between the glib, who’d seen it all before, and the crushed, who’d harbored dreams of online fortune. We were so far ahead of other companies, many of their jobs didn’t exist anywhere else yet. As one of my friends there said, despondent after being unable to find similar work elsewhere, “I love what I do.”

In the first chapter of his 1992 book, Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles (Addison-Wesley), Donald Norman describes going to see a sixth-grade play in a relatively small auditorium. “If there had been only fifty parents present, it would have been crowded,” he writes. “But in addition to the parents, we had the video cameras.” Written some thirty years ago, this anecdote is well before the camera shrunk and merged with the mobile phone. Video cameras were cumbersome, and many didn’t yet run on batteries, hence his long-since gone concerns about space. He continues,

Ah yes, once upon a time there was an age in which people went to enjoy themselves, unencumbered by technology, with the memory of the event retained within their own heads. Today [1992] we use our artifacts to record the event, and the act of recording becomes the event.

I distinctly remember the only issue of Blender Magazine that I ever read had Dave Chappelle on the cover (August 2004). The mid-00s were the magazine format’s last peak, and there were so many of them, newsstands stretching down grocery-store aisles, colorful covers like cereal boxes. I don’t remember what prompted my purchase of this particular issue, but I read the Chappelle piece with intense interest. I’d seen some of Chappelle’s stand-up and seen him in movies here and there. I’d never seen Chappelle’s Show proper, though I’d watched clips from it online. I had friends who were huge fans though, the kind who couldn’t describe a sketch without devolving into uncontrollable laughter.

At the height of my fandom of Richard Kelly’s first movie, Donnie Darko (2001), I attended a midnight screening of the director’s cut at The Egyptian Theatre in Seattle. During the trivia contest that preceded the movie, I was asked to sit out due to my long string of correct answers. The movie struck something in me at a time when I needed to be struck. As Kelly himself put it, “I think you are challenged by things that are slightly beyond your grasp.” It is those things obscured that make a movie like this so engaging, endearing, and enduring.

A few years ago, I was having lunch at a bar in Chicago when an Archers of Loaf song came on over the speakers. Excited, I told my partner what a big fan I am, about the first time I saw them at the Crocodile Café in Seattle, and that I saw them a dozen or so times during their first run in the 1990s, once even traveling up to Vancouver to see them play with Treepeople and Spoon. I told her how, fancying myself an indie-rock mogul, I had plans to put together a compilation of Chapel Hill bands, and they were the first to agree to contribute a song. And how I’d gotten to be pretty good friends with their bass player, Matt Gentling, how he’s also a rock climber, and we’ve stayed in touch over the years.