I attended a wonderful presentation by Dr. Daphne A. Brooks, author of Liner Notes for the Revolution. The book explores the influence of Black women in music – a contribution that’s overlooked all too often. It’s a deep dive throughout history, touching on Aretha and Beyoncé, Bessie Smith and Zora Neale Hurston. Dr. Brooks articulates so clearly the power of music, and how its cultural impact is negotiated. In the presentation, Dr. Brooks expanded on this concept: her work is about discovering how to assign a framework for “how music matters,” especially in communities on the fringes.

What I also enjoyed about the presentation was Dr. Brooks’s discussion about her own relationship to music. She described how music criticism came to her from an early age. It was a way of making sense of, in her words, the “foreign” music of rock n’ roll. (Evidently it wasn’t really played at her house.) Growing up in the Bay Area was a natural environment to foster this burgeoning skill: a lot of influential rock music criticism came out of UC Berkeley, Dr. Brooks’s alma mater.

Obviously, this entire presentation was exactly relevant to my interests. It got me thinking about my own life as a music critic and what that title even means. Being a music critic isn’t just album reviews or gushing about the latest single (ahem), though, to be sure, that’s often a big part of it. I think at its core music criticism is a lot like the labor of love that meant Dr. Brooks spent 12 years (!) writing Liner Notes. You’re making sense of the sound and your relationship to it. Then you widen the scope to put both those things in context: perhaps historical, perhaps cultural, or perhaps personal. For example, I often ask myself the following questions: Have I heard this song before? Does it sound like other songs I’ve heard? When did I hear them? What memories did they evoke? (The latter two questions have been especially key for my Throwback Thursday series.)

It is a joy to hear other women talk about music, especially from such an academic standpoint. I haven’t heard that perspective nearly as often. Definitely food for thought and inspiration for my own criticism going forward.

A few years back, I met someone with whom I had an almost immediate connection. We had fairly similar tastes in music, and what was more, they were one of the few people who understood, as I do, that music can be a mechanism for accessing memories. Our friendship quickly developed as we started trading song recommendations back and forth.

It was amazing to me because I had never had something like this before. I called this person my “music friend,” because that was really the foundation of the whole thing. I had thought that I would never find a friendship like this, so it was especially devastating when the connection went sour.

Time and distance, of course, work their own wonders. I look back on that experience now and marvel that I allowed a single person to encroach on my relationship to music – something that’s so intrinsic to who I am that, moments after introducing myself to someone new, I’ll often say “…and I’m obsessed with music.”

I haven’t yet found another person who “gets” music on that same level as my former friend did, but these days I’m more and more okay with that. It could be a sign of maturity, and I’m sure there’s some truth to that aspect, but I think that more to the point, I’m allowing music itself to be my anchor, rather than a person. As I said, it’s a part of me. And no fizzled friendship can ever take that away.

Happy Monday! It’s a quick one today but I wanted to jot something down. In Meet Me in the Bathroom, an excellent oral history exploration of early-’00s indie, bands like !!!, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the Strokes talk about what got them started. What stood out to me was the recurring observation of how 9/11 changed the landscape of music. It forced America to look inwards and reevaluate its priorities.

In a grim way, it created a new opportunity for musicians. Old standards were ripped apart or forgotten. In the first few months after what happened, clubs were shut down so people had to get together in their apartments; these informal jam sessions led to bands being formed. The sound got rougher, too: “Heads Will Roll” has a screechy distortion that both masks and somehow enhances Karen O’s powerhouse vocals. Last Nite is an experimentation in the tight, clear electronic sound that would become prevalent in later ’00s bands. When clubs reopened, DJs remixed it all into the next generation of house music.

I’m reading another book right now that touches on a similar topic regarding the symbiotic relationship between culture and music. Music takes what’s happening around us and compresses it into lyrical and/or danceable form. It evolves as we do and bloggers like me are just along for the ride.