I quit writing this newsletter only a half-year after I began for the best of reasons: My friends and I started a news and arts website, Racket, that you all should subscribe to. As with any startup, our quartet of owners/writers/editors has an essentially bottomless amount of work to do, so any spare time I had to write was better spent on Racket-related projects—or, you know, maybe even not working.
But there are still a decent number of you signed up here, and it seemed a shame to let that connection languish completely. So I decided to gather up an archive of my published work that I consider worth salvaging, and dose it out weekly. Stick around—I think you’ll get a kick out of it.
This seemed like a good time to look backward for a few reasons. First, my career as a music critic began 25 years ago, with an album review in City Pages, and I do love an anniversary. I’d published a couple small things elsewhere before that, but this was the first time I kept at it regularly.
More pressingly, as many writers have learned the hard way, the corporations who own the publications we build for them are unforgivably irresponsible custodians of our work. In fall 2020, the Star Tribune shut down City Pages, and by the end of the year they’d pulled our archives offline as well. Here’s all that’s left of a quarter-century of my work, on the open web at least. Who knows what site will scrub my writing next?
This newsletter will not be a totally painless process for me. Reading your old stuff is a lot like looking at old photos. Sometimes you definitely notice traces of the person you would someday become; sometimes you’re like “oof, that haircut, what was I thinking?” My tastes have changed less than my tone—I’d stand by most of my evaluations, even if I wouldn’t always phrase them quite the same.
Not that I regret much of what I wrote—if you can’t be occasionally glib and dismissive when you’re young, when can you? Nearly every piece I’ll publish here will have something that still makes me chuckle or nod, and I’m proud I was ahead of the curve in taking pop, mainstream country, and other then-disparaged genres seriously, holding their products to the same standards I did more critically esteemed rock-ish works.
Hope you come along for the ride. The next time you hear from me, it will be 1998…