What Music Journalism Means to Me

In 2016, I made a routine visit to The Broad museum in Los Angeles with my family. We were regulars at The Broad since my father was — and to this day, is — deeply in love with the painting Wake by Mark Tansey. He would take any and every opportunity to stare at it, trying to decipher all the faces hidden in the water and all the symbols of loss scattered throughout the beachfront scene. I, on the other hand, have never been particularly touched by visual art. Is it taboo to admit this in an arts-based zine? Probably. But as a visually disabled person, I have a complicated relationship with visual art. I find beauty in the thought that an image could be created directly from the memories and emotions of another who possessed the skill to portray such internal events through a consumable and transferable form. At the same time, however, by the time my congenital nystagmus allows my eyes to focus on any detail of a painting, the rest is effectively lost. I like to think that it was with people like me in mind that the Broad installed The Visitors by Ragnar Kjartansson to their gallery. The Visitors consists of nine projector screens illustrating musicians performing in separate rooms of a house. The entire project lasts about an hour, as each screen shows alternating musicians playing their parts. Altogether, their sounds create a heavenly tone that, combined with the large-scale visuals, convey the ability of music to connect us even when we are physically separate. Overcome with emotion from the music surrounding me in the exhibit, I began crying. In a lot of ways, I see this experience, and the medium of The Visitors itself, as reflective of what it means to me now to be a music journalist.

In case I have not made it clear already, I love music, enough to cry publicly over it in an art museum at the age of seventeen. As a visually disabled person, sound is how I navigate my world, music is how I navigate myself, and music journalism is how I communicate my feelings, perceptions, and needs to the world around me. To me, music journalism is the ability to share parts of myself with everyone who reads my articles in the hope that a connection will be forged between us, a mutual yet distant understanding, just like that between the musicians in The Visitor playing their instruments in perfect harmony while physically separated from one another.  

My first music journalism piece was for Slumber Magazine, a publication dedicated to supporting women and gender nonbinary identifying musical artists. Rather than album reviews, we are encouraged to write borderline stream of consciousness pieces that capture how the album at hand affects us. This is, unsurprisingly, an exceptionally vulnerable exercise. In my articles, I’ve revealed love and loss, joy and grief, because these were the feelings the music brought out from my mind and body. Similarly, for Unpublished, I have written multiple articles about the friends of mine who passed away decades before they should have. I like to think that through my music journalism, I have kept them alive in the world by sharing how music keeps them alive to me.  

When I first applied for my position at Slumber Mag, and months later when I applied for Unpublished, I did not anticipate calling myself a music journalist. Even calling myself one now feels like I’m placing myself on a high horse; I just think of myself as someone who deeply loves music and wants to share that music with other people in the hopes it might help them the way it helps me. I applied for that first music journalist position because I wanted something to motivate me to expand my musical tastes and to learn to convey to others how music makes me feel. The latter can be quite difficult still. While I have never had difficulty feeling emotion from music, it can be hard to put into words sometimes. There’s always a blind hope that I could just send someone a song and they could understand exactly what it evoked in me, but this is largely impossible. Music journalism has allowed me to bridge this gap and given me the ability to convey how music makes me feel in a widely accessible format.

I think music journalism is too often reduced to quantitative album reviews judging for subjective artistic merit and discounting the amount of emotional energy that can go into creating music. As a guitarist, songwriter, and lyricist myself, I know this process all too well. I believe that what ultimately makes music “good” is its ability to make the listener feel as if they are having a conversation with the artist through a song, as if the listener’s decision to listen to a song is their asking for advice or support on a certain matter and the song is the response of the artist. This is obviously an incredibly subjective measure. Thus, as music journalists, I think the best we can ever do is to simply relate our own musical conversations to others so that they might share in them as well. We are only ever visitors to the minds of our readers as we share ourselves through our responses to music.