A funny thing happened on the way to the Czech Republic, which is where I sit at 1:30am with moths banging against the fixtures and a jetlag buzz keeping my brain from sleep. Namely, two years. About that much time has lapsed since I was faithful to my blog.
A lot conspired to keep me from writing. First, I was finishing the coursework for grad school. I'm not going to lie, it was hard for me. I had to deal with some intense criticisms of my early grad school work and reshape my habits, writing strategies, and analytical skills to become more a social science-oriened creature than I had been. I'm happy to say that I got there, but it was not without some painful moments. I can now safely wear pins that say "Ask me about the habitus" and "What comes after the reflexive turn?" and not fear a serious conversation about it. You know what? I really love to read, think and write about the world that is of and by music.
Then, there was the spectacular implosion of the industry in which I used to be a professional in the years preceeding and during the early part of grad school, aka music journalism, or rather journalism in general. I am not so hopeless as to think it's over, but the last two years of industry lay offs, publication closings, massive staff turnovers, and editorial policy changes gave me enough heartache to step back from participating in the field. I mean, I had to do my schoolwork, and freelancing was getting to be so dire I didn't have the heart to continue. Through my work with Best Music Writing I was able to see that many others were not merely miring through but succeeding with new styles, new outlets, and new subjects on which to write. I just wasn't ready to be one of those people myself.
In short, I feel like the last two years have been a great big INTAKE period, whereas the last decade I was obsessed with putting things into the world. But this spring I really started to get antsy. I felt like maybe I was no longer capable of creating.
Two great things happened to me this summer that have put my creative and intellectual worries in the past and renewed dedication for great work in the future. First, I finished all my requirements and became ABD - all but dissertation. I spent the summer prepping for my fieldwork and am now in the Czech Republic. I'll be here for about nine months to a year and will be doing a study of the politics of popular music circulation in the years between 1968 to the present. I landed at the Ruzyn? airport two days ago and as I walked through the main hall I couldn't help but burst into a huge smile. This is a project I began to think about in 2000. I've worked nearly a decade to study the culture, politics, history, language, music, and various ways of seeing it all...and now it is happening. And I'm ready to do it.
In the month prior to my leaving I was also lucky enough to be writing a piece about the legacy of Ellen Willis, the first popular music critic for the New Yorker, on other music journalists and cultural critics. The piece is for a book of Ellen's music writing that will come out in September 2010 on U. of Minnesota Press. During the research process I spoke maybe a dozen of her biggest fans, women and men who have also contributed greatly to the field in the past two decades. Their passion was infectious, and reading Ellen's collected writing (most of which has never been republished) reminded me of why I got into criticism in the first place – to make sense of the world through listening, dancing, and feeling music, and to put that in clear, articulate language that provokes an audience to engage with me, with music, and with the world around them. (Oh! You have to read Ellen's Creedence piece! Just wait!).
The work helped me sew together the past into the present, and as I drove home to Ohio and heard scenecore bozo 3OH!3's "Don't Trust Me" I was reminded why the world still needs great feminist pop music criticism. I felt myself turning back, and forward...
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This blog entry reminds me of the apologetic notes that used to appear on the first page of personal zines back in the mid-1990s. "Sorry this took so long..." It's been 14 years since I first published a zine, and I am happy to report that I still feel as inspired by the sounds around me, the people the make them, and the communities that support them. Now I have so many more tools with which to speak, but the drive is still the same.
In the coming weeks and months I will fill this blog up with reports of the world around me as it is unfolding and as I see it, both in the Czech Republic and in the sort of transnational global "pop" world. I am going to redo my outdted links to reflect my current life, and if you read this and think I should be reading you please feel free to email me about your own writing or musical project. And I'm going to stay short and sweet each day to give a little glimpse of what it is that fills my head. Thanks for reading.
All best,
Daphne
