"These songs exist in our lives and that’s worth interrogating."
A conversation about poptimism and music journalism craft with Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands From NKOTB to BTS author, Maria Sherman.
At the beginning of December, I hopped on Zoom with veteran music journalist, Jezebel senior staff writer, and author of Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands From NKOTB to BTS, Maria Sherman, to talk about pop music criticism and her craft tools for music journalism. I have so much fondness for Maria as a music lover and a colleague. Barely months after I moved to LA, Maria hosted a panel on music journalism at the art space Junior High where she, Molly Lambert, and I got to talk about our work and The Work, in general, so we have a shared interest in building and maintaining community, in making sure that this industry is more accessible. She is also responsible for booking one of my favorite Priests concerts of all time :)
There is a little bit of a bummer tone about The State Of Music Journalism but I want to mention that although many legacy music publications are in a strange state, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other spaces to write about music. My favorite things to write last year were for a fashion magazine. Platforms like Tone Glow and The Gumbo are doing amazing things independently and Passion of the Weiss continues to endure. There is space to do this work, I just believe it’s more valuable than the media powers that be understand.
This conversation is what inspired me to design the introductory music criticism course that I launched earlier this week because I’m certain there are people out there with knowledge banks and perspectives that we, as readers, need with strong voices inside of them waiting to be developed. I’m excited to share this conversation with you and I’m hopeful that there is a future for music criticism with a diversity of voices, perspectives, and subjects.
Larger Than Life has the aesthetic feel of the classic teeny-bopper magazine but reads like enthusiastic, interrogative music criticism. This could have been very book-table-at-Urban-Outfitters, which I don’t mean in a pejorative way, or very stuffy and intellectually rigorous. You made it fun, smart, accessible, irreverent, joyful, and critical. Tell me a little bit about your process in putting it together.
When I write about boy bands, I feel lighter, it feels more buoyant but it can still be very analytical. I knew that's what this book needed to be, it needed to have that lightness but it also needed to be critical. I knew before writing a boy band book that there had already been some conversation about boy bands and masculinity and pop performance in academic circles. And I know that there were like countless boy band books — I think of the big poster books at Claire's and other teen stores, or even Barnes and Noble, they'll have those big glossy books that are like 500 pages but only have like 200 words in them and half of it is a listicle with information you can easily Google or read on Wikipedia or whatever. Those felt like the two extremes. I thought, I want to do a boy band book that boy band fans will appreciate but also maybe forces them to sort of interrogate some of the exploitative factors, the very real things about the boy band story, and has pieces that they can see themselves reflected in, like the casual misogyny aimed at boy band fans, especially outspoken ones. I wanted it to be smart, but I wanted to maintain what makes boy bands so great and so fun. It’s a you-don't-have-to-think-about-it-too-hard-but-what-if-we-did? approach.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how men music journalists don’t get the same fan label as women do when it comes to writing expertly about specific artists, especially big pop artists. When I was writing The Minajerie for Myspace, I got a lot of flack for getting to write what people were calling a Nicki Minaj fangirl column when I was actually interrogating her work and the commentary about her work. How do we get out of this binary of men are experts, not-men are fans?
It’s definitely a gendered reality that I face and you face and probably all non-men face, where people try to explain my expertise to me when talking about the book because they see me as The Fangirl. I very much am a fangirl but so is everybody if you like certain types of music in any sort of serious or committed way. And I think that just lends itself to more expertise.
Maybe this is really limited but this is sort of how I’ve viewed it in the last couple of years: You have people who are super fanatical about who they’re covering and know the work backward and forward but maybe don't have the sort of writing experience to articulate that and the work sort of reads like fandom appreciation as opposed to something critical. Or you have critics who are curious about pop music but don't really know that world very well and the writing is almost too far removed for it to be holistic. I like to think of myself as in the middle. You have to strike that balance. And I do think fans can make some of the best critics as long as they don't suffer from myopia and they're not refusing to see the very real bad, dark, problematic, whatever sides of the music that they're covering or when the music is shitty, you know?
What advice would you give to someone whose expertise comes from fandom but who is interested in writing more rigorous criticism or even just writing outside of the fan space?
They should definitely listen to a lot of different stuff so they're not limiting themselves to the thing that they love most in the world because you can be hired to write about that stuff but that's not a whole career. Read everything about the artist you’re most fanatical and if you find yourself becoming really protective or dismissive of legitimate criticism, then unpack what that is because it's not just that the critic has it out for your favorite artists; truly it’s almost never that, unless on very, very rare occasions. I think once they start to identify the line between valid criticism or feeling personally offended by it, then they can start to see viewing their artists with a little bit more of a critical eye. It doesn't come naturally for some people.
I do also think music journalism is not taken that seriously by a lot of people in media. Media, in general, is suffering for many reasons, but I do think, in particular, music journalism could use some new life. What do you think about the state of music journalism right now?
I'm usually pretty optimistic to a fault, to where I can be naive — no wonder I like boy bands — but this year, it's just felt really devastating. All of culture journalism has suffered a lot this year, but music in particular. And I've always known that people tend to read more about film or TV, it seems like those are more popular art mediums to read criticism about. Music journalism doesn't really have anything like a recap. I mean, it's all a traffic game and it seems like a lot of places are beginning to mimic one another. And that bums me out because it's like, if I'm reading what feels like the same Taylor Swift evermore review on of the five remaining big music publications, why should I be reading it five times?
I do think if someone has money and wants to do something new, this could be revolutionized. Everything seems to be copycatting itself. That’s why it’s always so fun to read you when you were at FACT because it was also something I had no fucking clue and so far away from my comfort zone, that’s the stuff that I like to read. The only time I’m reading now for discovery is on Bandcamp. Music journalism seems to have become so personality-less and because everyone is suffering and struggling to survive, people are leaning into the impulses I hate the most which is just talking big about some indie record that I find to be really boring, shitting on a pop release, like a Shawn Mendez or something, and then labeling Taylor Swift as indie so you can validate it within frameworks that feel familiar and comfortable. It’s rough out there, man. I would love to see music journalists come together like the Deadspin people did or the Splinter people did and launch their own publication. What are your thoughts?
I think about the Defector model, too. I remember when Emilie Friedlander tweeted wondering if any music journalists were working on something like that, I thought, Oh, that’s a really good idea and then immediately felt defeated — that team can do that because they have an audience already and people want to read their work. Our projects like that have to be smaller. I will say, something really positive I’ve noticed is that there are more Black women publishing writing about rap in mainstream publications than I’ve seen in a very long time, if ever, and that is really exciting. But, as a whole, I am afraid sometimes that it’s going to keep disappearing. It’s going to be flattened into exactly what you said: the same sort of fake poptimism type of thing. I have so many misgivings about that term but I don’t regret the piece I wrote about it for The Village Voice. You were actually a person I was thinking of when I wrote it because of the way you write across genres. But that term empowered a lot of people who don’t care about music discovery, who are more interested in writing about marquee artists, whether to establish some kind of anti-pop dominance with indie artists or to write about big pop names so they can write about celebrities. And like you said, it’s personality-less now, voices are flattened into something that will get them likes on Twitter. That’s just my experience with pitches I’ve rejected or things I’ve observed on social media.
Poptimism is a word that I struggle with a lot. I think people use it to mean all pop music is valuable, that something is valuable just for the fact that it’s popular. I struggle with that because I do think that’s true about all music in general. I’m not gonna write a thinkpiece about Five Finger Death Punch because you know what it is, you know what it is from the band’s name, there’s not really anything else to unpack there. I think poptimism is only useful when someone needs an explanation for why a critical book on boy bands should exist, for instance, but that also feels really lazy. We’re creating some binary where rock and pop are the only genres that exist? It feels really lazy to me.
My very hopeful definition of poptimism was that it is a form of criticism that recognizes that pop music is not wholesale bad. That there are things that can be pulled up as timeless. It was always worth it to talk about Beyoncé seriously. But if that is true, then there’s no reason to write pop music pans in publications that don’t cater to pop audiences. It only needs to come in when talking about the music is worth our time. We shouldn’t be creating a volume of work shitting on pop music because poptimism mandates we talk about pop music now. It should be sincere. That might be a hard thing to ask.
You’re giving me a lot to think about because I agree but what if there’s something worth panning and would add to a larger cultural conversation? But it does sometimes seem like it’s about doing it for the traffic and sometimes you do just have to do it for the traffic. I still struggle with it. But the main reason why I was taking boy bands seriously and why I’ve always wanted to is that it’s not just that people were shitting on the interests of young women — although a lot of it is that — but so many of these songs are so ubiquitous in pop culture. Something like Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” that’s at the grocery store, I hear it at karaoke, it gets played at wedding receptions, it’s a thing that has a life of its own. These songs exist in our lives and that’s worth interrogating.
The Toolkit
At the end of every Read You, Wrote You interview, I ask the writer what tools they use in their writing practice. This is what’s in Maria Sherman’s toolkit for…
Blogging:
If I’m writing something I have to have a firm foundation of an idea or else it’s not gonna go anywhere. I have to have a stance. If I don’t have one immediately, I can stare and look at the screen for two hours. It took me nine months of working at Jezebel to figure that out, that I can’t force ideas, they have to come naturally. You have to be confident in that stance and grit your teeth if you’re a person who reads comments. That’s most of it, just developing tough skin. And you have to be prepared to lean into a voice.
Writing criticism:
For music in particular, I love to read everything about the artist that I can get my hands on. I know some people don’t like to do that because it can color their thinking but I enjoy it because then I know I’m not writing about the music in a way it’s been written about before, if I can help it. It helps to read stuff because you’re probably going to disagree with a lot of it and that helps color my analysis. If you have time and a JSTOR login, you can also read academic writing about your subject. Some of that writing is the best but it’s not as juicy to read as it would be at music publication. I’m an obsessive researcher.
Writing features:
I read all of the profiles and interviews that my subject has done. I’m big into talking to people around the subject, if there’s time and resources to do so. In college I loved reading profiles where the reporter didn’t actually talk to the artist — of course, everyone knows Frank Sinatra Has a Cold — and using that to inform my profiles. I think it gives more of a holistic image. I also liked to read what other writers have said about profiling and avoiding the trappings of it. When you’re starting out, it’s so easy when you’re talking to an artist over a meal to begin describing the fucking food and obviously that’s a cliché. That was something I, thankfully, didn’t learn on the job but learned from reading people who said don’t do that.
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